Evangelicals Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo and Brian McLaren, along with Catholics like Doug Kmeic, Chris Korzen and Alexis Kelley, have been making the argument that voting for Obama is all right for those who oppose abortion because the Democratic Party Platform would reduce the number of abortions and save lives. They argue that many abortions are economically motivated and so universal health care, a higher minimum wage and other such economic benefits to the poor would cause many women to choose to raise their child rather than aborting it.
Robert Stackpole of Redeemer Pacific College in B.C. has a stunningly simple but effective argument against this position. He points out that universal health care is surely the single biggest economic benefit to poor people that the Democratic Party is proposing and Canada already has had it for decades. So the abortion rate should be lower in Canada than in the US, right? Well, actually, as Stackpole points out, the abortion rate in Canada is actually higher than in the US. He says:
"The fact is that Canada’s abortion rate has been consistently higher than that of the United States. For example, in 2005 in Canada there were 28.3 induced abortions for every 100 live births (according to StasCan), while in the USA in 2004 there were 23.8 abortions for every 100 live births (according to CDC Abortion Surveillance). "
The whole article is well worth reading. Read it here: http://www.catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=29664&page=3
Canada is very much like what Obama wants the US to become in many ways and yet our abortion rate in Canada is higher than the US. This should refute the argument that voting Democrat will reduce abortions. One wonders if the fact that the government pays for abortion encourages women to get abortions. That seems plausible. But Obama wants to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would do many things including forcing the government to pay for all abortions.
It looks like the Democratic Party is not serious about abortion reduction, but is merely using abortion as an excuse to pursue the economic policies it wants to pursue on other grounds. And the whole abortion reduction through economic policies argument just does not hold up. Why then is it still being tossed around? I think that some Evangelicals and Catholics who want to vote against the Republicans to punish them or who want to vote Democrat for other reasons, would desperately like to believe that Democratic policies would reduce abortion because that would be a much-needed relief for their consciences.
Well, if you think that Obama and the Democratic Party will reduce abortion, then I have a email from Nigeria that you might be interested in that says you can earn 10% of 8 million dollars by helping the widow of a high government official with a simple banking transaction. Obama, Nigerian emails and abortion reduction - you can take all that to the bank!
Monday, September 29, 2008
Sunday, September 28, 2008
The Markets, Capitalism and Conservatism
This brief but very important post by Rusty Reno describes why real conservatives are not surprised that unregulated markets create chaos. A key quote is:
"By my reckoning, the great, unifying feature of modern ideology has been the belief that some mechanism or method or formula will miraculously deliver ideal results without fail. This has been the dream of modernity: to replace judgment with calculation, wisdom with technical knowledge. . . American conservatism is always tempted by libertarian and free market ideologies. But true conservatism is not ideological at all. It wishes to preserve the religious and moral and cultural resources that train us to make wise judgments."
Exactly. Read it all here:
http://www.firstthings.com/blog/2008/09/28/markets-are-never-always-the-right-solution/
"By my reckoning, the great, unifying feature of modern ideology has been the belief that some mechanism or method or formula will miraculously deliver ideal results without fail. This has been the dream of modernity: to replace judgment with calculation, wisdom with technical knowledge. . . American conservatism is always tempted by libertarian and free market ideologies. But true conservatism is not ideological at all. It wishes to preserve the religious and moral and cultural resources that train us to make wise judgments."
Exactly. Read it all here:
http://www.firstthings.com/blog/2008/09/28/markets-are-never-always-the-right-solution/
What Does It Mean to Be a Conservative?
I have to admit that one reason I like this label more and more is that mainstream, modern, Western liberals despise it! If the people who think that the sexual revolution is “progress” hate it so much, then there must be something to it.
A conservative loves family, the land, hard work, stability, community, self-sacrifice, nature and tradition. A conservative prefers family and local community self-reliance, rather than dependence on centralized government. A conservative may have to live in the city, but knows that there is something stiflingly artificial about city life, whereas liberals find small town life stiflingly artificial and city life liberating. Why? It makes sense that those who live by the creed of Individualism would be drawn to the anonymity of urban life. Wendell Berry is a conservative. The Amish are conservatives. His Mennonite background makes Yoder conservative in many ways as well. Most farmers are conservatives and much of the industrial working class finds conservatism congenial.
Conservatives are suspicious of all large concentrations of power including multinational corporations with interlocking board of directors, the modern bureaucratic nation state and their particularly reprehensible progeny, the military-industrial complex. The division of powers is a principle that has made the West great; from the Dark Ages to the 19th century political and religious power never was concentrated in one set of hands, although there were many close calls. In all the world empires that preceded Western civilization, religious political and economic power was all vested in one set of hands – the King or Emperor. This was true in the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian and Greco-Roman empires and the exception was Israel, a major contributor to Western culture. Because of the division of political from religious power, there has always been a push and pull between the Emperor and the Pope in the West. In modernity, a diversified capitalism, constitutional monarchies and republics with built in division of powers have been the ways in which power has been dispersed among many centers.
But coming out of the Enlightenment have been two great secular religions that aim to replace Christianity and to reverse this historical trend. Socialism makes the State all powerful and makes the Party the custodian of all power. Monopolistic capitalism has a tendency toward concentrating all power in a few hands as large corporations become so powerful that even governments lose the ability to challenge them. A conservative opposes the one as strongly as the other.
It is a fluke of contemporary history that has led to a situation in which people naturally assume that all conservatives are naïve about capitalism, support capitalism over socialism and think that the market is so godlike as not to require democratic supervision. Neoconservatives may be pro-capitalist, but genuine conservatives realize that allowing all political power to fall into the hands of an economic oligarchy is just as bad as allowing all economic power to fall into the hands of a political oligarchy. Both ways the result is the undue concentration of power in too few hands and the outcome is tyranny. Conservatives think that government should do all it can do to encourage as many small business as possible and to defend the family farm against agribusiness. Small scale capitalism that allows for actual competition and diversity of ownership is good. Monopolies and multi-national corporations are not the same thing on larger scale but something else entirely.
Real conservatism does not merely cling to whatever traditions happen to exist or supporting the ruling elite of a given society. In fact, conservatives today oppose the ruling elites of Western culture for the most part and oppose contemporary traditions that are the result of the modern subversion of older Western traditions. Real conservatism is rooted in Christian Faith and particularly in two doctrines that St. Augustine articulated with profound truth 1600 years ago.
The first is Augustine’s teaching that we live in the saeculum, the time between the first and second comings of Jesus Christ and the second is his teaching that we humans are fallen creatures dominated by our lusts. On these two doctrines rests true conservatism.
With the general decline of belief in God, immortality and the soul in the West since the Enlightenment, there has been a trend toward re-defining salvation in immanent terms and ignoring (if not denying) transcendence. Salvation must be achieved in history or it is irrelevant according to modernity. Sin is re-defined as subsisting in unjust social systems rather than within the hearts of individuals. This then leads to the embracing of utopian projects of perfecting man by perfecting social structures and the results in modernity have been a string of total disasters from the French Revolution to Western Imperialism to Nazi Germany to the Gulag to the Cultural Revolution. Conservatives wonder how anyone can be anything but a conservative after the 20th century.
Augustine speaks for the Church in teaching that man cannot achieve salvation here in this life and that the problem is within us as individuals, not in social structures and systems. Of course the structures are imperfect too, but that is because everything built by human hands is imperfect. By distinguishing between the city of God and the city of man and by locating the city of God in an eschatological future that will only be realized after the return of Christ and the Last Judgment, he instructs us in the humility necessary to avoid the kind of hubris that has become destructive in modernity. The Church is real and visible, but imperfect. It signifies the city of God but the heavenly city has yet to be realized on earth and will not be fully realized by human striving apart from Divine intervention. This makes us suspicious of all utopianism and inclines us toward a kind of "Hippocratic Oath for politics" in which our first concern is to do no harm. We conserve whatever measure of peace, stability and justice we already have as a matter of first priority. Then we work incrementally and humbly at specific problems one at a time, rather than embracing grandiose utopian schemes.
Not all conservatives are Christians, but all conservatives accept these two Christian doctrines and order their lives accordingly.
A conservative loves family, the land, hard work, stability, community, self-sacrifice, nature and tradition. A conservative prefers family and local community self-reliance, rather than dependence on centralized government. A conservative may have to live in the city, but knows that there is something stiflingly artificial about city life, whereas liberals find small town life stiflingly artificial and city life liberating. Why? It makes sense that those who live by the creed of Individualism would be drawn to the anonymity of urban life. Wendell Berry is a conservative. The Amish are conservatives. His Mennonite background makes Yoder conservative in many ways as well. Most farmers are conservatives and much of the industrial working class finds conservatism congenial.
Conservatives are suspicious of all large concentrations of power including multinational corporations with interlocking board of directors, the modern bureaucratic nation state and their particularly reprehensible progeny, the military-industrial complex. The division of powers is a principle that has made the West great; from the Dark Ages to the 19th century political and religious power never was concentrated in one set of hands, although there were many close calls. In all the world empires that preceded Western civilization, religious political and economic power was all vested in one set of hands – the King or Emperor. This was true in the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian and Greco-Roman empires and the exception was Israel, a major contributor to Western culture. Because of the division of political from religious power, there has always been a push and pull between the Emperor and the Pope in the West. In modernity, a diversified capitalism, constitutional monarchies and republics with built in division of powers have been the ways in which power has been dispersed among many centers.
But coming out of the Enlightenment have been two great secular religions that aim to replace Christianity and to reverse this historical trend. Socialism makes the State all powerful and makes the Party the custodian of all power. Monopolistic capitalism has a tendency toward concentrating all power in a few hands as large corporations become so powerful that even governments lose the ability to challenge them. A conservative opposes the one as strongly as the other.
It is a fluke of contemporary history that has led to a situation in which people naturally assume that all conservatives are naïve about capitalism, support capitalism over socialism and think that the market is so godlike as not to require democratic supervision. Neoconservatives may be pro-capitalist, but genuine conservatives realize that allowing all political power to fall into the hands of an economic oligarchy is just as bad as allowing all economic power to fall into the hands of a political oligarchy. Both ways the result is the undue concentration of power in too few hands and the outcome is tyranny. Conservatives think that government should do all it can do to encourage as many small business as possible and to defend the family farm against agribusiness. Small scale capitalism that allows for actual competition and diversity of ownership is good. Monopolies and multi-national corporations are not the same thing on larger scale but something else entirely.
Real conservatism does not merely cling to whatever traditions happen to exist or supporting the ruling elite of a given society. In fact, conservatives today oppose the ruling elites of Western culture for the most part and oppose contemporary traditions that are the result of the modern subversion of older Western traditions. Real conservatism is rooted in Christian Faith and particularly in two doctrines that St. Augustine articulated with profound truth 1600 years ago.
The first is Augustine’s teaching that we live in the saeculum, the time between the first and second comings of Jesus Christ and the second is his teaching that we humans are fallen creatures dominated by our lusts. On these two doctrines rests true conservatism.
With the general decline of belief in God, immortality and the soul in the West since the Enlightenment, there has been a trend toward re-defining salvation in immanent terms and ignoring (if not denying) transcendence. Salvation must be achieved in history or it is irrelevant according to modernity. Sin is re-defined as subsisting in unjust social systems rather than within the hearts of individuals. This then leads to the embracing of utopian projects of perfecting man by perfecting social structures and the results in modernity have been a string of total disasters from the French Revolution to Western Imperialism to Nazi Germany to the Gulag to the Cultural Revolution. Conservatives wonder how anyone can be anything but a conservative after the 20th century.
Augustine speaks for the Church in teaching that man cannot achieve salvation here in this life and that the problem is within us as individuals, not in social structures and systems. Of course the structures are imperfect too, but that is because everything built by human hands is imperfect. By distinguishing between the city of God and the city of man and by locating the city of God in an eschatological future that will only be realized after the return of Christ and the Last Judgment, he instructs us in the humility necessary to avoid the kind of hubris that has become destructive in modernity. The Church is real and visible, but imperfect. It signifies the city of God but the heavenly city has yet to be realized on earth and will not be fully realized by human striving apart from Divine intervention. This makes us suspicious of all utopianism and inclines us toward a kind of "Hippocratic Oath for politics" in which our first concern is to do no harm. We conserve whatever measure of peace, stability and justice we already have as a matter of first priority. Then we work incrementally and humbly at specific problems one at a time, rather than embracing grandiose utopian schemes.
Not all conservatives are Christians, but all conservatives accept these two Christian doctrines and order their lives accordingly.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
The Democratic Party and Catholic Social Doctrine
Catholics like Doug Kmiec, Chris Korzen and Alexis Kelley, as well as Evangelicals like Jim Wallis and Brian McLaren have claimed that, even though the Democratic Party is on the wrong side of the abortion issue, it deserves support because its platform as a whole better reflects Catholic social doctrine as a whole. I dispute the premise in this argument. I think Kmiec and the others are wrong about the Democratic Party being much closer to Catholic social thought than the Republicans in general for several reasons.
1. First, the right to life is fundamental to all the other rights. You can’t be in favor of children having a right to an education or health care if the children are killed before birth. In order for health care and educational rights to mean anything, there has to be respect for the right to life and a society not committed to the basic right to life is not going to respect other rights for very long.
2. Second, the Republican Party has more respect for the principle of subsidiarity than the Democratic Party and subsidiarity is a major pillar of Catholic social teaching. Subsidiarity is the principle that decision-making authority should be at the lowest possible level that it can be without being ineffective. So power in society should be dispersed to local communities, workers and families rather than being concentrated in beaurocracies or central government. The Democratic Party answer to everything is big government and centralized power.
3. Third, the Democratic Party advocates the use of state power to re-define marriage and the family rather than recognizing the family as an institution that historically and logically precedes the state and is not subject to the state. In other words, both human rights and family rights exist independently of the state’s say so. The state overreaches and becomes tyrannical when it tries to place itself above the family. Tyranny is not consistent with Catholic social doctrine.
4. Fourth, the Democratic Party does not stand against the culture of death in the areas of infanticide, assisted suicide, euthanasia, etc. Speaker after speaker at the recent Democratic National Convention railed against the refusal of George Bush to allow scientists to create, experiment on and destroy human beings at the early stages of life. Aside from embryonic stem cell research, on which they are against Catholic social teaching, the Democratic party platform does not even address these issues. This is incredible in light of the fact that assisted suicide is already legal in Oregon and on the ballot in Washington. At best, they are indifferent. It is not just abortion, but a range of sanctity of life issues.
5. Fifth, the Democratic Party does not have a coherent philosophy for the protection and support of handicapped people and thier families. They support eugenic abortion in which handicapped babies are killed just because they are handicapped, which sends a chilling message about how much Democrats value handicapped people.
6. Sixth, Kmeic presumes that increasing the size and scope of the welfare state through high taxation and high entitlement programs supports the family, rather than undermining it. This is at least highly debatable – unlike the moral clarity that exists on the taking of innocent life for the convenience of the more powerful. There are some areas in which the Democratic Party is better like labour issues and health care. But I must stress that these are, unlike issues surrounding marriage and the sanctity of life, matters of prudential judgment on which honest people will disagree. They are not of the same order at all; this is what the bishops have been saying and they are exactly right.
So it is not just abortion that is involved here; it is a range of issues relating to the culture of death plus other principles that make the Democratic Party unfriendly to Catholic Social Doctrine. The Democratic Party used to be a big tent party that included Catholics and many working-class Evangelicals within it until it was taken over by the 1960's radicals. Now the cultural left dominates the party and it is impossible to be economically left without swalllowing the whole cultural left agenda. Will this ever change?
I think there is one scenario under which it might change. If the Democrats lose election after election until they come to the realization that they cannot win without the social conservative vote, then and only then will they change their party platform and limit the power of the cultural left. Then the Democratic Party will become a big tent again and many Evangelicals and Catholics will find it congenial.
But clearly this has not happened yet; the so-called "outreach" to Evangelicals and Catholics this year is all style and no substance. The thought was that they would not really need the Evangelical and Catholic vote, since the Republicans were so unpopular. The attempt to moderate the party platform on abortion failed miserably and Obama has not made abortion reduction a priority in the campaign. The only hope is that Evangelicals and Catholics will be so mad at Bush that they will vote Democratic to punish their own party. But that would only slow down the process of forcing the Democratic Party to extricate itself from its culture war extremism and open up to the center. So it makes no sense for Evangelicals and Catholics to vote Democrat this year if the long term goal is to change the Democratic Party.
Update:
Here is an excellent short article by George Marlin expanding what I have said here in this post:
http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=576&Itemid=2
1. First, the right to life is fundamental to all the other rights. You can’t be in favor of children having a right to an education or health care if the children are killed before birth. In order for health care and educational rights to mean anything, there has to be respect for the right to life and a society not committed to the basic right to life is not going to respect other rights for very long.
2. Second, the Republican Party has more respect for the principle of subsidiarity than the Democratic Party and subsidiarity is a major pillar of Catholic social teaching. Subsidiarity is the principle that decision-making authority should be at the lowest possible level that it can be without being ineffective. So power in society should be dispersed to local communities, workers and families rather than being concentrated in beaurocracies or central government. The Democratic Party answer to everything is big government and centralized power.
3. Third, the Democratic Party advocates the use of state power to re-define marriage and the family rather than recognizing the family as an institution that historically and logically precedes the state and is not subject to the state. In other words, both human rights and family rights exist independently of the state’s say so. The state overreaches and becomes tyrannical when it tries to place itself above the family. Tyranny is not consistent with Catholic social doctrine.
4. Fourth, the Democratic Party does not stand against the culture of death in the areas of infanticide, assisted suicide, euthanasia, etc. Speaker after speaker at the recent Democratic National Convention railed against the refusal of George Bush to allow scientists to create, experiment on and destroy human beings at the early stages of life. Aside from embryonic stem cell research, on which they are against Catholic social teaching, the Democratic party platform does not even address these issues. This is incredible in light of the fact that assisted suicide is already legal in Oregon and on the ballot in Washington. At best, they are indifferent. It is not just abortion, but a range of sanctity of life issues.
5. Fifth, the Democratic Party does not have a coherent philosophy for the protection and support of handicapped people and thier families. They support eugenic abortion in which handicapped babies are killed just because they are handicapped, which sends a chilling message about how much Democrats value handicapped people.
6. Sixth, Kmeic presumes that increasing the size and scope of the welfare state through high taxation and high entitlement programs supports the family, rather than undermining it. This is at least highly debatable – unlike the moral clarity that exists on the taking of innocent life for the convenience of the more powerful. There are some areas in which the Democratic Party is better like labour issues and health care. But I must stress that these are, unlike issues surrounding marriage and the sanctity of life, matters of prudential judgment on which honest people will disagree. They are not of the same order at all; this is what the bishops have been saying and they are exactly right.
So it is not just abortion that is involved here; it is a range of issues relating to the culture of death plus other principles that make the Democratic Party unfriendly to Catholic Social Doctrine. The Democratic Party used to be a big tent party that included Catholics and many working-class Evangelicals within it until it was taken over by the 1960's radicals. Now the cultural left dominates the party and it is impossible to be economically left without swalllowing the whole cultural left agenda. Will this ever change?
I think there is one scenario under which it might change. If the Democrats lose election after election until they come to the realization that they cannot win without the social conservative vote, then and only then will they change their party platform and limit the power of the cultural left. Then the Democratic Party will become a big tent again and many Evangelicals and Catholics will find it congenial.
But clearly this has not happened yet; the so-called "outreach" to Evangelicals and Catholics this year is all style and no substance. The thought was that they would not really need the Evangelical and Catholic vote, since the Republicans were so unpopular. The attempt to moderate the party platform on abortion failed miserably and Obama has not made abortion reduction a priority in the campaign. The only hope is that Evangelicals and Catholics will be so mad at Bush that they will vote Democratic to punish their own party. But that would only slow down the process of forcing the Democratic Party to extricate itself from its culture war extremism and open up to the center. So it makes no sense for Evangelicals and Catholics to vote Democrat this year if the long term goal is to change the Democratic Party.
Update:
Here is an excellent short article by George Marlin expanding what I have said here in this post:
http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=576&Itemid=2
Friday, September 26, 2008
Can a Disciple of Jesus Be a Theoretical Pacifist?
Note: This was the last post on my old blog, The Politics of the Cross, before I took it down. I'm re-posting it here because it fits with the thrust of this new/old blog.
Halden has argued that I am wrong to say that the right to life cannot be reduced to being merely one issue among many. I'm concerned about the arguments he uses to reach this conclusion - much more so than the conclusion itself.
http://inhabitatiodei.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/moral-equivalence-war-and-abortion/#comments
Like the Catholic bishops who have responded to Pelosi's and Biden's misleading statements, I agree that to vote for a pro-abortion politican when a choice exists to vote for a pro-life one, is to cooperate in a grave moral evil and to cut oneself off from the church. This is because, while many other issues involve prudential judgments, abortion is always the taking of an innocent human life and is therefore always intrinsically evil.
To commit a grave moral evil knowingly is to sin in a "high-handed" manner, as the book of Leviticus puts it, and is distinguished from sinning by omission or without being conscious of what one is doing. (This is related to the difference between venial and mortal sin.) Both kinds of sin (high-handed and unintentional) incur guilt, but the sacrificial system makes clear that they have different moral standing in God's eyes and are therefore treated differently in terms of the kind of sacrifice (and the kind of restitution) required. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is embeded in the Torah and the punishments for them are different. Capital punishment and war are also distinguished from murder in the Torah. Now you can say that the Torah is fulfilled in Jesus, but as Paul argued to his Jewish critics, this is not the same as saying that the Torah is simply abolished. To follow and obey Jesus is not to lose the ability to make moral distinctions between different kinds of sin; in fact the Torah continues to instruct Christians in such matters.
Halden thinks all killing is morally equivalent and that the kinds of distinctions between, say manslaughter and first degree murder, do not exist. So the Polish soldier fighting the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazi death camp guard killing Jewish men, women and children for being Jewish, the state executing a mass murderer, a policeman shooting a gunman who has been killing students in a high school and a doctor injecting poison into the veins of a mother so the son can inherit her estate are all morally equivalent. He denies that there is any difference between killing the innocent and killing the guilty, so far as incurring guilt is concerned (though he admits we have a different emotional reaction to them).
He seeks to ground this is the doctrine of atonement and says that because God gave His life for sinners, that proves there is no real distinction between the innocent and the guilty. But if that were true, I fail to see why God should have to become incarnate and die on the cross to redeem the world. If there actually is no distinction betwen the innocent and the guilty, why not just declare everyone saved and skip the cross? It seems to me that to deny any moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty is to deny the whole concept of lost and guilty sinners needing redemption because they have broken God's law and are deserving of nothing but death.
In the course of thinking about a lecture I'm to give next Spring "A Critique of the Liberal Reading of Yoder" I have been wrestling with what it means to subscribe to "pacifism." Perhaps, to sharpen the question, we should speak of "theoretical pacifism" as opposed to "practical pacifism." It is well known that Karl Barth, in CD III/4 on the ethics of war, claimed that he could not affirm pacifism per se but must leave room for the Grenzfall, the borderline exception in which it might be possible to hear the command of God to go to war. However, he called himself a "practical pacifist," and condemned most war including all nuclear war. I define "practical pacifism" as Barth's position, as over against "theoretical pacifism," which says no to all killing with an absolute certainty that permits pacifism to become a principle that can be used to shape and critique everything else.
Yoder was disappointed in Barth's reluctance to go all the way to pacifism and called the Grenzfall a remnant of natural theology that is inconsistent with Barth's overall theology. Yoder wanted Barth to go further toward what I'm calling "theoretical pacifism," although it is far from clear to me that he wanted what I have just defined as "theoretical pacifism." Certainly people like J. Denny Weaver adamantly claim that he did, but I think that there is considerable ambiguity in Yoder's position.
Yoder recognized that, for Barth, the Grenzfall is not an escape hatch introduced when things get tight, but rather, a "solid principle," and "a rule that there must be an exception to every rule" and even "a theological necessity." And Yoder did affirm that he could accept one possible interpretation of the Grenzfall. He wrote:"Still another way of understanding the 'extreme case' would be to say that human knowledge is finite and that all human statements are open to correction because there might still be further facts to be discovered or further truths to be revealed. Therefore any statement which we make, and this would apply to doctrine as well as ethics, is made 'subject to further notice.' This is certainly a very defensible argument." (Karl Barth and the Problem of War, 52)
As Yoder points out, the Grenzfall does not guarantee that we will ever find an exception to the command to nonviolence any more than we can guarantee that we will not. It can simply function as a reminder and a marker of the limits of human knowledge. So far as we know right now, we will never encounter a situation in which the norm of nonviolence should be abandoned. But we leave open the possibility. (This also allows us to see such exceptions having been made in cases in the Old Testament, such as in the extermination of the Canaanites.) For Yoder, accepting the Grenzfall did not necessarily mean abandoning practical pacifism. Yoder clearly was more comfortable not using the concept. But Yoder was not able to convince Barth to drop the concept; they disagreed on the relevance of the Grenzfall for Christian ethics. Barth would not call himself a "pacifist" (his term) meaning a "theoretical pacifist" (my term), even though he would go so far as to call himself a "practical pacifist" and say that pacifism has almost infinitely strong arguments on its side. My interpretation of this dispute is that Barth remained an Augustinian for what I consider to be very good reasons, whereas Yoder never really came to grips with Augustine. For Yoder, the Grenzfall really functioned in Barth's theology as a remnant of natural theology. For Barth, it functioned as a barrier between church dogmatics and systematic theology.
I think that Yoder could have accepted Barth's interpretation of the Grenzfall and that it would have strengthened, not weakened, his pacifism. But to argue that he could have is not to forget that he didn't do so. So I see Yoder as ambigious at this point. I don't think Yoder was a "theoretical pacifist," but I think that there is enough ambiguity in his work to argue both ways. My main point is not to argue that Yoder can't be interpreted as a "theoretical pacifist," but to argue that he need not be interpreted that way and that we should not either interpret Yoder that way or take that view ourselves.
Barth rejected all systematic theology because he held that the human mind cannot capture the truth about God in a human intellectual system. Since the mystery of God in Jesus Christ cannot be fully grasped by the human mind, we must approach this mystery from different angles using the various dogmas and each one will give us a unique and partial yet true insight into God. Each volume of the CD starts again from the beginning to speak of God from yet another angle. In this approach, Barth was Augustinian. Augstine once said: "If you can comprehend it, it isn't God."
I think that Barth was right and Yoder was wrong on this issue of the usefulness of the Grenzfall as a concept in Christian ethics. Why? For two main reasons:
1. God being a God of love does not preclude the fact that God is also a God of judgment. This is a moral universe and good will be rewarded and evil will be punished. If it were not for the resurrection, judgment, reward and punishment, then there would be no answer to the problem of evil. We know that we will judge angels. (I Cor. 6:3) We don't know what this means, but it is a reminder that the saints have some sort of role in the eschatological judgment by which evil will be dealt with and the New Heavens and New Earth come into being. Since there is often a triumph of injustice in this life, we better hope that there is a Day of Judgment and a settling of accounts by a perfectly just and righteous Judge. God used Israel to judge pagan nations in Canaan in the Old Testament and we are told that we will judge angels in the New Testament. We would not expect to receive a command to engage in judgment and punishment in this age, but would be going too far to eliminate totally the possiblility in theory.
2. If "theoretical pacifism"becomes a principle (an "ism") then it can easily turn into an organizing principle for a systematic theology. This happens in certain liberal readings of Yoder, as for example in Denny Weaver's The Nonviolent Atonement. Non-violence or pacifism becomes the central organizing principle and is used to re-interpret Christology, the doctrine of the atonement, the doctrine of final judgment, the doctrine of sin and, finally, the doctrine of God. (This is similar to the way the doctrine of double predestination comes to distort post-Reformation Reformed theology. A rationally clear principle is taken as the center piece and via deductive logic all the other loci are re-interpreted in such a way as to produce a logical system.) Ironically, in the case of Weaver, this is done all the while loudly protesting against the systematic theology of Christendom as inherently totalizing and violent! When Anabaptist theology becomes liberal, it becomes rationalistic even while purportedly rejecting systematic theology.
Conclusion
The assertion that there is moral equivalence between killing in war, capital punishment, the killing of a criminal by a policeman who is protecting innocent people, abortion and ethanasia is a sign that something has gone wrong in theology. When all forms of taking human life are said to be morally equivalent, it is a sign that nonviolence has turned into a rational principle that trumps everything else. Degrees of innocence and guilt are irrelevant because there is actually only one real moral principle left: nonviolence. You either are nonviolent or you aren't - end of discussion.
The principle of nonviolence then becomes a criteria by which all other doctrines are judged and refined. Sin, judgment, Christology, atonement and eschatology are all understood in a novel manner.The final outcome is that God comes to be defined as nonviolence. This reduces God to a rationally comprehensible principle that, once it is known by us can be used as a magic key to unlock every door. The end result is the worship of an idol created by us in our image according to an interpretation of Jesus that is not the result of exegeting the Scriptures as a whole, but rather is the result of importing a rational principle that makes sense to us into the biblical accounts of Jesus and then used as a hermeneutical key to bring the Bible as a whole into line with this principle.
I conclude therefore that, so far as I can see, a disciple of Jesus can be a "practical pacifist" but not a "theoretical pacifist" because practical pacifism involves following a Lord on a path of discipleship in such a way that we cannot know the future, but have to trust him to lead and guide us when we get there, whereas theoretical pacifism involves coming to know a rational principle that make discipleship possible without the Lord because we already know the answer to all the questions ahead of time.
Halden has argued that I am wrong to say that the right to life cannot be reduced to being merely one issue among many. I'm concerned about the arguments he uses to reach this conclusion - much more so than the conclusion itself.
http://inhabitatiodei.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/moral-equivalence-war-and-abortion/#comments
Like the Catholic bishops who have responded to Pelosi's and Biden's misleading statements, I agree that to vote for a pro-abortion politican when a choice exists to vote for a pro-life one, is to cooperate in a grave moral evil and to cut oneself off from the church. This is because, while many other issues involve prudential judgments, abortion is always the taking of an innocent human life and is therefore always intrinsically evil.
To commit a grave moral evil knowingly is to sin in a "high-handed" manner, as the book of Leviticus puts it, and is distinguished from sinning by omission or without being conscious of what one is doing. (This is related to the difference between venial and mortal sin.) Both kinds of sin (high-handed and unintentional) incur guilt, but the sacrificial system makes clear that they have different moral standing in God's eyes and are therefore treated differently in terms of the kind of sacrifice (and the kind of restitution) required. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is embeded in the Torah and the punishments for them are different. Capital punishment and war are also distinguished from murder in the Torah. Now you can say that the Torah is fulfilled in Jesus, but as Paul argued to his Jewish critics, this is not the same as saying that the Torah is simply abolished. To follow and obey Jesus is not to lose the ability to make moral distinctions between different kinds of sin; in fact the Torah continues to instruct Christians in such matters.
Halden thinks all killing is morally equivalent and that the kinds of distinctions between, say manslaughter and first degree murder, do not exist. So the Polish soldier fighting the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazi death camp guard killing Jewish men, women and children for being Jewish, the state executing a mass murderer, a policeman shooting a gunman who has been killing students in a high school and a doctor injecting poison into the veins of a mother so the son can inherit her estate are all morally equivalent. He denies that there is any difference between killing the innocent and killing the guilty, so far as incurring guilt is concerned (though he admits we have a different emotional reaction to them).
He seeks to ground this is the doctrine of atonement and says that because God gave His life for sinners, that proves there is no real distinction between the innocent and the guilty. But if that were true, I fail to see why God should have to become incarnate and die on the cross to redeem the world. If there actually is no distinction betwen the innocent and the guilty, why not just declare everyone saved and skip the cross? It seems to me that to deny any moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty is to deny the whole concept of lost and guilty sinners needing redemption because they have broken God's law and are deserving of nothing but death.
In the course of thinking about a lecture I'm to give next Spring "A Critique of the Liberal Reading of Yoder" I have been wrestling with what it means to subscribe to "pacifism." Perhaps, to sharpen the question, we should speak of "theoretical pacifism" as opposed to "practical pacifism." It is well known that Karl Barth, in CD III/4 on the ethics of war, claimed that he could not affirm pacifism per se but must leave room for the Grenzfall, the borderline exception in which it might be possible to hear the command of God to go to war. However, he called himself a "practical pacifist," and condemned most war including all nuclear war. I define "practical pacifism" as Barth's position, as over against "theoretical pacifism," which says no to all killing with an absolute certainty that permits pacifism to become a principle that can be used to shape and critique everything else.
Yoder was disappointed in Barth's reluctance to go all the way to pacifism and called the Grenzfall a remnant of natural theology that is inconsistent with Barth's overall theology. Yoder wanted Barth to go further toward what I'm calling "theoretical pacifism," although it is far from clear to me that he wanted what I have just defined as "theoretical pacifism." Certainly people like J. Denny Weaver adamantly claim that he did, but I think that there is considerable ambiguity in Yoder's position.
Yoder recognized that, for Barth, the Grenzfall is not an escape hatch introduced when things get tight, but rather, a "solid principle," and "a rule that there must be an exception to every rule" and even "a theological necessity." And Yoder did affirm that he could accept one possible interpretation of the Grenzfall. He wrote:"Still another way of understanding the 'extreme case' would be to say that human knowledge is finite and that all human statements are open to correction because there might still be further facts to be discovered or further truths to be revealed. Therefore any statement which we make, and this would apply to doctrine as well as ethics, is made 'subject to further notice.' This is certainly a very defensible argument." (Karl Barth and the Problem of War, 52)
As Yoder points out, the Grenzfall does not guarantee that we will ever find an exception to the command to nonviolence any more than we can guarantee that we will not. It can simply function as a reminder and a marker of the limits of human knowledge. So far as we know right now, we will never encounter a situation in which the norm of nonviolence should be abandoned. But we leave open the possibility. (This also allows us to see such exceptions having been made in cases in the Old Testament, such as in the extermination of the Canaanites.) For Yoder, accepting the Grenzfall did not necessarily mean abandoning practical pacifism. Yoder clearly was more comfortable not using the concept. But Yoder was not able to convince Barth to drop the concept; they disagreed on the relevance of the Grenzfall for Christian ethics. Barth would not call himself a "pacifist" (his term) meaning a "theoretical pacifist" (my term), even though he would go so far as to call himself a "practical pacifist" and say that pacifism has almost infinitely strong arguments on its side. My interpretation of this dispute is that Barth remained an Augustinian for what I consider to be very good reasons, whereas Yoder never really came to grips with Augustine. For Yoder, the Grenzfall really functioned in Barth's theology as a remnant of natural theology. For Barth, it functioned as a barrier between church dogmatics and systematic theology.
I think that Yoder could have accepted Barth's interpretation of the Grenzfall and that it would have strengthened, not weakened, his pacifism. But to argue that he could have is not to forget that he didn't do so. So I see Yoder as ambigious at this point. I don't think Yoder was a "theoretical pacifist," but I think that there is enough ambiguity in his work to argue both ways. My main point is not to argue that Yoder can't be interpreted as a "theoretical pacifist," but to argue that he need not be interpreted that way and that we should not either interpret Yoder that way or take that view ourselves.
Barth rejected all systematic theology because he held that the human mind cannot capture the truth about God in a human intellectual system. Since the mystery of God in Jesus Christ cannot be fully grasped by the human mind, we must approach this mystery from different angles using the various dogmas and each one will give us a unique and partial yet true insight into God. Each volume of the CD starts again from the beginning to speak of God from yet another angle. In this approach, Barth was Augustinian. Augstine once said: "If you can comprehend it, it isn't God."
I think that Barth was right and Yoder was wrong on this issue of the usefulness of the Grenzfall as a concept in Christian ethics. Why? For two main reasons:
1. God being a God of love does not preclude the fact that God is also a God of judgment. This is a moral universe and good will be rewarded and evil will be punished. If it were not for the resurrection, judgment, reward and punishment, then there would be no answer to the problem of evil. We know that we will judge angels. (I Cor. 6:3) We don't know what this means, but it is a reminder that the saints have some sort of role in the eschatological judgment by which evil will be dealt with and the New Heavens and New Earth come into being. Since there is often a triumph of injustice in this life, we better hope that there is a Day of Judgment and a settling of accounts by a perfectly just and righteous Judge. God used Israel to judge pagan nations in Canaan in the Old Testament and we are told that we will judge angels in the New Testament. We would not expect to receive a command to engage in judgment and punishment in this age, but would be going too far to eliminate totally the possiblility in theory.
2. If "theoretical pacifism"becomes a principle (an "ism") then it can easily turn into an organizing principle for a systematic theology. This happens in certain liberal readings of Yoder, as for example in Denny Weaver's The Nonviolent Atonement. Non-violence or pacifism becomes the central organizing principle and is used to re-interpret Christology, the doctrine of the atonement, the doctrine of final judgment, the doctrine of sin and, finally, the doctrine of God. (This is similar to the way the doctrine of double predestination comes to distort post-Reformation Reformed theology. A rationally clear principle is taken as the center piece and via deductive logic all the other loci are re-interpreted in such a way as to produce a logical system.) Ironically, in the case of Weaver, this is done all the while loudly protesting against the systematic theology of Christendom as inherently totalizing and violent! When Anabaptist theology becomes liberal, it becomes rationalistic even while purportedly rejecting systematic theology.
Conclusion
The assertion that there is moral equivalence between killing in war, capital punishment, the killing of a criminal by a policeman who is protecting innocent people, abortion and ethanasia is a sign that something has gone wrong in theology. When all forms of taking human life are said to be morally equivalent, it is a sign that nonviolence has turned into a rational principle that trumps everything else. Degrees of innocence and guilt are irrelevant because there is actually only one real moral principle left: nonviolence. You either are nonviolent or you aren't - end of discussion.
The principle of nonviolence then becomes a criteria by which all other doctrines are judged and refined. Sin, judgment, Christology, atonement and eschatology are all understood in a novel manner.The final outcome is that God comes to be defined as nonviolence. This reduces God to a rationally comprehensible principle that, once it is known by us can be used as a magic key to unlock every door. The end result is the worship of an idol created by us in our image according to an interpretation of Jesus that is not the result of exegeting the Scriptures as a whole, but rather is the result of importing a rational principle that makes sense to us into the biblical accounts of Jesus and then used as a hermeneutical key to bring the Bible as a whole into line with this principle.
I conclude therefore that, so far as I can see, a disciple of Jesus can be a "practical pacifist" but not a "theoretical pacifist" because practical pacifism involves following a Lord on a path of discipleship in such a way that we cannot know the future, but have to trust him to lead and guide us when we get there, whereas theoretical pacifism involves coming to know a rational principle that make discipleship possible without the Lord because we already know the answer to all the questions ahead of time.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
The Cross as Judgment
In the two quotes on the heading of this blog, we see St. Augustine expressing the common faith of the early church in the doctrine of Divine judgment. The end of the second article of the Apostles' Creed says: "He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead."
In the first quote, St. Augustine sees the cross as a judgment seat from which Christ begins (and foreshadows) his work of dividing the sheep and the goats to his right and and to his left respectively. In the second, St. Augustine speaks of the future bodily second coming of Christ when he will judge all men in human form. In the same passage just prior to this quote, St. Augustine notes that, even though the Father will judge, He will judge by the coming of the Son and quotes John 5:22, which says that the Father "Judges no one, but has committed all judgment to the Son."
In modern, liberal interpretations of the cross I note that quite often the element of judgment is muted or elided. The current debate within Evangelical circles arising from the attempts of some to dismiss the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement as sub-Christian is a sign that liberal theology is becoming more congenial to some Evangelicals than it used to be. I do not think that the atonement can be reduced to nothing but the penal substitutionary theory, as if the Christus Victor and exemplarist theories were unimportant to a full-orbed understanding of the meaning of Christ's death. I do, in fact, see something true in all the major theories of the atonement. But I do not think that one can simply throw out the idea of Christ bearing our sins as our atoning sacrifice and the wrath of God falling on Him instead of on us and still do justice to the New Testament as a whole. Christ is the "Judge Judged in Our Place" as Barth famously put it. (CD IV/1, 211).
When I wrote The Politics of the Cross: the Theology and Social Ethics of John Howard Yoder, I did not interpret Yoder as denying the fact of God's judgment of sin either on the cross or in the future, although many others do interpret Yoder in such a way as to make God completely passive in simply bearing sin Himself, but not judging sin actively, and in suffering the wrath of the powers but not being wrathful against "the godlessness and wickedness of men." (Rom. 1:18) The suffering love God endured in the person of the God-Man on the cross is sometimes seen as the sum and substance of God's redemptive action in history and as the model for us to adopt as nonviolent followers of Jesus.
But I cannot accept a definition of Christian love as essentially, or exclusively, passive suffering; I think it is necessary to see God's love as active judgment as well as passive suffering. In the cross we are confronted with a mystery of Divine love and Divine wrath coming together in such a way that God bears the sins of the world in Himself, that is, in the person of the God-Man. Modern liberal theology takes the tension out of this mystery and resolves the meaning of the cross into a rationally comprehensible principle of nonviolence. Many theologians in the Anabaptist tradition see this liberal emphasis as a logical expression of their theological tradition. I do not.
As a Baptist, I have one foot in the Anabaptist tradition and the other in the Puritan wing of the Anglican Church out of which the English Baptists came. So perhaps it is not up to me to say what the logical culmination of the continental Anabaptist tradition is or is not. But let me say this quite clearly: if the logical development of the Anabaptist tradition is the bland theology of inclusion and acceptance as currently taught in liberal Protestantism, then I cannot recognize that tradition as my own. And if I am wrong about the proper interpretation of John Howard Yoder's thought (as I may well be, after all,) then I cannot recognize the Anabaptist/Liberal Yoder as a good teacher or myself as his follower.
This is why I have posted these quotes from St. Augustine on the header of this blog. I believe in a christologically-determined politics, a politics of the cross, but I do not believe that such a politics is mere passivity and the avoidance of violence through the adoption of a posture of withdrawal from the world. I don't believe Yoder reduced Chrisitian social witness to mere passivity and the avoidance of violence either; though that is a debate that is on-going. But the kind of christological politics (or politics of the cross) that I think is faithful to the complete biblical revelation of Jesus Christ and the tradition of the Church catholic is a politics that recognizes that in the cross God was in Christ both saving and judging the world simultaneously. And the mission of the Church involves bearing a witness to both of these aspects of the cross. Preaching Jesus is not the same thing as preaching Ghandi.
In the first quote, St. Augustine sees the cross as a judgment seat from which Christ begins (and foreshadows) his work of dividing the sheep and the goats to his right and and to his left respectively. In the second, St. Augustine speaks of the future bodily second coming of Christ when he will judge all men in human form. In the same passage just prior to this quote, St. Augustine notes that, even though the Father will judge, He will judge by the coming of the Son and quotes John 5:22, which says that the Father "Judges no one, but has committed all judgment to the Son."
In modern, liberal interpretations of the cross I note that quite often the element of judgment is muted or elided. The current debate within Evangelical circles arising from the attempts of some to dismiss the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement as sub-Christian is a sign that liberal theology is becoming more congenial to some Evangelicals than it used to be. I do not think that the atonement can be reduced to nothing but the penal substitutionary theory, as if the Christus Victor and exemplarist theories were unimportant to a full-orbed understanding of the meaning of Christ's death. I do, in fact, see something true in all the major theories of the atonement. But I do not think that one can simply throw out the idea of Christ bearing our sins as our atoning sacrifice and the wrath of God falling on Him instead of on us and still do justice to the New Testament as a whole. Christ is the "Judge Judged in Our Place" as Barth famously put it. (CD IV/1, 211).
When I wrote The Politics of the Cross: the Theology and Social Ethics of John Howard Yoder, I did not interpret Yoder as denying the fact of God's judgment of sin either on the cross or in the future, although many others do interpret Yoder in such a way as to make God completely passive in simply bearing sin Himself, but not judging sin actively, and in suffering the wrath of the powers but not being wrathful against "the godlessness and wickedness of men." (Rom. 1:18) The suffering love God endured in the person of the God-Man on the cross is sometimes seen as the sum and substance of God's redemptive action in history and as the model for us to adopt as nonviolent followers of Jesus.
But I cannot accept a definition of Christian love as essentially, or exclusively, passive suffering; I think it is necessary to see God's love as active judgment as well as passive suffering. In the cross we are confronted with a mystery of Divine love and Divine wrath coming together in such a way that God bears the sins of the world in Himself, that is, in the person of the God-Man. Modern liberal theology takes the tension out of this mystery and resolves the meaning of the cross into a rationally comprehensible principle of nonviolence. Many theologians in the Anabaptist tradition see this liberal emphasis as a logical expression of their theological tradition. I do not.
As a Baptist, I have one foot in the Anabaptist tradition and the other in the Puritan wing of the Anglican Church out of which the English Baptists came. So perhaps it is not up to me to say what the logical culmination of the continental Anabaptist tradition is or is not. But let me say this quite clearly: if the logical development of the Anabaptist tradition is the bland theology of inclusion and acceptance as currently taught in liberal Protestantism, then I cannot recognize that tradition as my own. And if I am wrong about the proper interpretation of John Howard Yoder's thought (as I may well be, after all,) then I cannot recognize the Anabaptist/Liberal Yoder as a good teacher or myself as his follower.
This is why I have posted these quotes from St. Augustine on the header of this blog. I believe in a christologically-determined politics, a politics of the cross, but I do not believe that such a politics is mere passivity and the avoidance of violence through the adoption of a posture of withdrawal from the world. I don't believe Yoder reduced Chrisitian social witness to mere passivity and the avoidance of violence either; though that is a debate that is on-going. But the kind of christological politics (or politics of the cross) that I think is faithful to the complete biblical revelation of Jesus Christ and the tradition of the Church catholic is a politics that recognizes that in the cross God was in Christ both saving and judging the world simultaneously. And the mission of the Church involves bearing a witness to both of these aspects of the cross. Preaching Jesus is not the same thing as preaching Ghandi.
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