Why Obama's Foreign Policy is Such a Mess

Iran is on the brink of getting nuclear weapons and its declared goal is to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Islamists are seizing power throughout the Middle East. Turkey has turned away from the West to rediscover its inner Islamofascism. Israel is increasingly isolated. China owns more and more of the debt of the US as the US drowns in ever-increasing deficits. Obama announces a withdrawal date from Afghanistan, which encourages the Taliban to hold on. Pakistan is in chaos as usual. North Korea is restless. Nobody fears the US, especially the radical Islamists, who have sized Obama up and concluded that he is a paper tiger. The UK descends into relativism and anti-Christian cultural Marxism while the US gives its former main ally the back of its hand. Obama bows to dictators and then acts in such a way as to make sure we know it wasn't just symbolic. The French are more decisive in Libya than the US. - the French, for heaven's sake!

What an unbelievable mess: Barack Obama makes George Bush look like George Washington!

George Weigel has a wonderful post at National Review Online explaining the worldview of the currently dominant wing of the Democratic Party. It is entitled: "How Democrats View the World." He writes:

"Those ideas have a precise and definable origin: They first emerged when the New Left challenged the Truman/Acheson/Kennedy/(Scoop) Jackson Democratic consensus during the Vietnam War. In softer forms, they then became the new orthodoxy among Democratic foreign-policy mandarins like Cyrus Vance and Warren Christopher. Despite the fiascos to which these ideas led during the Carter and Clinton administrations (cf. the Iran hostage crisis and the American inability to prevent genocide in the Balkans), and despite the efforts of some in the old Democratic Leadership Council to change the intellectual template of Democratic foreign-policy thinking, these bad ideas have shown a remarkable resilience. They remain operative at all levels of the Obama foreign-policy team; they explain a great deal of what otherwise seems inexplicably stupid over the past several weeks; and they must be challenged by any 2012 Republican presidential candidate serious about American leadership in the world."

He then lists eight ideas:

1. Conflict is not the normal political phenomenon that it was assumed to be for millennia. Conflict is an aberration, and if there is conflict between nations or blocks of nations, or within nations, it must be because of some palpable injustice, the remedying of which will assuage the conflict in question and restore the natural order, which is peace.

2. Peace is not a matter of a rightly ordered and law-governed political community; rather, “peace” is a state of mind that can be willed into being.

3. The notion that the United States should actively seek to shape world politics is pernicious, not for the old isolationist reason that it’s bad for us, but because we tend to be bad for the world. Thus the United States should withdraw from the leadership role it has played in world affairs since 1941, scale down its military commitments, eventually end its work as global sheriff . . .

4. The use of armed force is almost always a bad idea and reflects, not the intractability of certain situations to other forms of conflict-resolution, but a failure of imagination and will on the part of U.S. policymakers. Moreover, if a combination of pressures compels the occasional use of force, the prime strategic imperative is to devise an exit strategy that will end the use of force at the earliest possible moment.

5. The present state system should be replaced by some form of international governance, in which multilateral and international bodies play the leading role.

6. The primary responsibility of U.S. policymakers is to advance the construction of a multilaterally organized and run international order, not to defend and advance the interests of the United States.

7. With the Cold War (which was in no small part Harry Truman’s fault) now over, there is no power, group of powers, or ideology that poses any grave threat to the United States.

8. We are not the indispensable nation. There is nothing morally or politically distinctive, much less special, about the American democratic experiment in ordered liberty. So there is no distinctively American approach to world politics, and the United States ought not seek any distinctive role in 21st-century world affairs.

He expand on each one briefly. Read it all here.

It is obvious that the intellectual father of these ideas is not Augustine, but the modern anti-Augustine: J. J. Rousseau. It is also obvious that these ideas are incompatible with a Christian worldview, in which evil is real, original sin is universal and peace is an elusive goal in this present age. The roots of these ideas are Utopianism and Pelagianism.

No wonder Obama's foreign policy is such a disaster. It is not because he is inexperienced or because the world is particularly bad right now, it is because his beliefs are wrong and his worldview does not correspond to reality. Bad ideas lead to death, destruction, tyranny, injustice and war.

Pessimism, Paranoia and Other Blessings

Continuing with my recent theme of what it means to be conservative, I want to speak about the tragic nature of life from a conservative perspective.

It is dangerous to think of life as a comedy because it leads to all sorts of Utopian schemes that typically result in bloodshed and destruction. So the "happy pagans," who glibly brush aside the Pauline/Augustinian teaching on original sin, and the wild-eyed fanatics, who are determined to "build the kingdom" here and now, are extremely dangerous. Those modern believers in technology and education and in the power of the State to solve all problem and meet all human needs, who go under the label of "Progressives," are also the unwitting architects of death and destruction. Life is not a comedy; it is a tragedy.

Oddly enough, however, those who appreciate and accept the tragic character of life are less dangerous than the believers in human potential, science and progress. Those who know that life is tragic are less likely to be swayed by Utopian schemes and grand plans to reform everything at one blow. Expecting less, they accomplish more. The conservative, who thinks from within a tragic perspective, expects things to get worse and change occurs because the pull of original sin is always downward. This gives the conservative a greater appreciation for tradition, common-sense and the opinions of ordinary people from shrewd peasants to hard-working member of the middle class.

A Christian conservative, however, knows that life is a tragedy wrapped up in a comedy. Life in this world is tragic. There will be no big breakthrough - no change in fallen human nature. But when the life to come is taken into account and one allows for God, the immortal soul and the day of judgment, then life in that grand perspective is ultimately a comedy in which God has the last laugh and all the redeemed laugh with Him.

Christianity sees life in the world as a "long defeat" (Tolkien) because this is the world dominated by death. Death comes to all because all sin and death makes a mockery of all our schemes, plans and projects. Even if we could make everything perfect - if we had health, family, security, wealth, and all good things - we would still not find real happiness because we would enjoy all our blessings knowing that they cannot last forever. Augustine concludes from this fact that true happiness can only be found outside this world and that, therefore, we must live by faith.

Although not all conservatives are Christians, it is nevertheless the case that Christians make the best conservatives because without the Christian Hope only exceptionally strong individuals can face the tragic nature of life without giving into the temptation to despair. But the Christian knows that this world is not our final home and that, although things are bound to get worse in this world, this world does not get the final word.

Pessimism is warranted by the reality of sin and paranoia is not without foundation for the Evil Powers (Sin, Death, Hell, the Devil) really are out to get us. But we can face reality without flinching as long as we remember that Jesus has risen from the dead and promised us eternal life with Him. So the pessimism and paranoia that arise from a conservative worldview are actually blessings that prevent us from accepting this world as either a malleable mass to which we can give the form of perfection or as the final defeat for those who seek goodness, truth and beauty. Pessimism and paranoia reflect a tragic view of this world that drive us to seek a "better country" in the land where Jesus is Lord. For this reason, even pessimism and paranoia become blessings.

The Relationship of the Legal to the Ontological: Matthew Lee Anderson on Universalism

NOTE:
This post has been altered since I put it up. By "altered" I mean I corrected an embarrassing mistake on my part. I misread Matthew Lee Anderson's sentence as if it meant the exact opposite of what he meant and a reader kindly called my attention to it. I have changed the paragraph below after the quote from Matthew: "The Great Divorce isn’t necessarily incompatible with a doctrine of hell that is grounded in penal substitution." I read it as a single negative instead of a double negative as if the "in" in "incompatible" were not there. Sorry Matthew. It isn't Matthew who has trouble reconciling penal substitution with Lewis' Augustinian view of hell, it is a broad swath of Evangelicalism in general. My point is valid except that it does not apply to Matthew.
____________

Matthew Lee Anderson is a very good thinker and in his post on Rob Bell's book, Love Wins, he has a paragraph (actually two paragraphs) that jumped out at me as especially insightful and, at the same time, especially revealing. He has both stated and illustrated what seems to me to be the single most important and also most profound problem in contemporary Evangelical theology. Here are the two paragraphs:

• One of Protestant theology’s central tasks in the 21st century is to articulate the relationship between the legal and the ontological. Focusing on the former to the exclusion of the latter–which Protestants wary of Lewis’ doctrine of hell are always in danger of doing–will lead to an attenuated understanding of the ways in which our doctrines of heaven and hell play out in our lives.The Great Divorce isn’t necessarily incompatible with a doctrine of hell that is grounded in penal substitution. And Protestants interested in the latter would do well to work out the ontology.
• Because fundamentally, Bell–er, Lewis, Dante, Augustine–are all right that God will give us what we want. Of course, none of us want the good nearly as much as we might claim.

Let me comment on this passage sentence by sentence. I really think there is a great deal of substance here.

"One of Protestant theology’s central tasks in the 21st century is to articulate the relationship between the legal and the ontological." This is exactly right, although one wants to add that this has been true through out the history of Christian theology. In the middle of the last century the Biblical Theology Movement fell apart because of a misguided attempt to differentiate between the "Hebrew Mind" and the "Greek Mind" and this distinction soon degenerated into a reprise of Harnack's Hellenization thesis with the implicit justification of the Liberal Protestant reduction of theology to ethics and the immanentizing of the eschaton. The 20th century rejection of metaphysics took many forms - from the "functional Christology" my NT professor, Richard Longenecker, was always refuting, to the Nietzschean, postmodern program of deconstruction, to the attempt by Liberation Theology to ride the horse of history until it dropped of exhaustion.

"Focusing on the former to the exclusion of the latter–which Protestants wary of Lewis’ doctrine of hell are always in danger of doing–will lead to an attenuated understanding of the ways in which our doctrines of heaven and hell play out in our lives." Protestants have lived for a century in reaction against the de-ontologizing of the Christian Faith by Liberals and there is nothing wrong with being a right-wing reactionary that a little historical perspective can't fix. The problem is our lacking of historical awareness; we have not done historical theology seriously enough. So we end up unconsciously assuming the anti-metaphysical (or better anti-sacramental) stance of late modernity without realizing what we are doing. We are suspicious of Lewis because we are used to liberals trying to deny sin, guilt, justification and salvation as forgiveness of sin. But because we start from a modern, non-sacramental metaphysical position, we cannot integrate the legal and the ontological, which makes us suspicious of any account of salvation that is not first and foremost juridical.

"The Great Divorce isn’t necessarily incompatible with a doctrine of hell that is grounded in penal substitution." The reason Anderson has to say this is because many Evangelicals think of the doctrine of hell solely in terms of moral punishment for sin and not in terms of ontological deprivation. We should not be suspicious that an Augustinian account of eternal punishment will vitiate a strong doctrine of penal substitution because the ontological and the moral are not separate, unrelated silos. Rather, they are affected by one another. [The preceding paragraph is different from the original post. See the note at the top.]

"And Protestants interested in the latter would do well to work out the ontology." I heartily agree with this statement. But when the ontology is worked out, the final result will not be the rejection of penal substitution or even the demotion of penal substitution to a marginal position in the overall doctrine of the atonement; rather, I think its ontological significance will be recovered. Within a sacramental ontology, I think, there is a need for an account of how goodness and justice meet each other in the nature of God and in the creation that reflects His glory. Hans Boersma's recent book, Heavenly Participation: the Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, is a step in the right direction. I hope the book I am currently writing will make a modest contribution to the same goal. Very little work has been done on the question of re-thinking the doctrine of the atonement in the light of a recovered sacramental ontology. One thinks of T. F. Torrance as the exception that proves the rule, but his theology has not been engaged with sufficient vigor by Evangelicals yet.

"Because fundamentally, Bell–er, Lewis, Dante, Augustine–are all right that God will give us what we want. Of course, none of us want the good nearly as much as we might claim." Exactly. The problem of disordered desires requires not merely a re-ordering of desires, which is after all an ontological problem, it also requires forgiveness for sins done in the past and until the desires of our sinful hearts are completely healed and made perfect it requires on-going forgiveness. So the legal and the ontological work together and may even have some secret, inward connection. Is it possible that we become good by being loved? Is it possible that our weak desires are enflamed by the the seductive, attractive eros of God for His fallen creatures? Is irresistible grace at least partly the means of sanctification, not just justification? Is not forgiveness transformative?

Here all I can do is throw out a few cryptic remarks and hints. But I think Matthew Lee Anderson is talking about the important issues, as usual.

Christendom is Not the Problem: Secularism Is

As a follow-up to my previous post, I want to point out that the eschatological tension that pervades Augustine's thought can be relaxed in two ways, not just one. Readers of my book, Rethinking Christ and Culture, will note that I left the impression that Christendom itself is the problem and that Christendom equals Triumphalism. But Christendom is not the problem, secularism is.

By Secularism, I mean the attempt to disregard, deny or eradicate the future Kingdom of God including the Second Coming, the Day of Judgment and the triumph of Jesus Christ in such a way as to make it all just a symbol of something that actually happens in history. The problem is that this results in pulling the Kingdom back into the present plane of history and cuts the nerve of the eschatological tension between the present Lordship of Christ over the world which is not yet acknowledged by everyone and that future time when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Secularism is not a belief in the validity of the secular. Augustine invented the concept of the secular - that which is neither the sacred or the profane - the sphere of life in which Christians rub shoulders with non-Christians in common endeavors. The secular is the space in which religion and morality is not excluded yet not dominant. The secular allows for dissent and difference of opinion and is inherently anti-totalitarian. But appreciating the secular is not the same as secularism.

Secularism is a term that only entered the English language in the 19th century. It is basically the denial of the transcendent, of God and of an objective moral order. To be secular is to be materialistic and human-centered. Secularism is the expansion of the concept of the secular to encompass the totality of life. Secularism is an attack on Christianity and all religion and morality that is grounded in reality rather than in the will of the individual.

Secularism is as bad as Triumphalism because it both relaxes the eschatological tension and also facilitates the unification of the Church and the State. The difference is that this time the State absorbs the function of the Church into itself. The State makes itself into a god which provides for the people, engineers society according to its own choices and values and makes itself into a source of meaning. The Church is first disestablished, then privatized and finally rendered invisible and impotent. All religious influence must be eradicated from society because such influence constitutes a threat to the power of the State.

The belief in a future Kingdom of God (and by future I mean after the Return of Christ and not continuous with the present age) serves as a check on all totalitarian aspirations, whether they emanate from organized religion or from politics. The direct implication of the maintenance of the belief in the Second Coming, Day of Judgment and Kingdom of God is the relativizing of all politics - both ecclesiastical and civil - and the doctrine of the Two. The doctrine of the Two is the Medieval idea that power should not be concentrated in one set of hands but should be divided between Church and State. The Medieval doctrine of the Two draws on the division of powers in the prophet, the priest and the king in ancient Israel and lays the foundation for the modern concept of the division of powers - the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government - and the the idea of a limited government that does not need to control every action and thought of the people because of the influence of Christianity in creating within the population that self-discipline which is the necessary condition for liberty.

What I am saying is that contemporary Secularism is just as dangerous - in fact, at present it is more dangerous to liberty - than is Triumphalism. Triumphalism is not a clear and present danger in the contemporary West, but Secularism is. There are two roads to totalitarianism: a clerical dominated theocracy like Iran and the "dictatorship of relativism" that arises when secularist ideologies like Marxism become dominant. The alternative to both kinds of totalitarianism is a free Church in a free State: Christendom.

Christendom is not the Problem: Triumphalism Is

In my book, Rethinking Christ and Culture, I fell into the trap of practically (not in theory, but for all intents and purposes) equating Christendom with Triumphalism.

Triumphalism is a perversion of Christendom; it is bad politics arising from heretical doctrine.

Triumphalism means the assimilation of the State into the Church in such a way that the authority of the State is wielded by Church officials to the discrediting of the Church and the detriment of society. Triumphalism arises from the fatal relaxation of the eschatological tension between this age and the next age, the age of the Kingdom of God. Triumphalism carried far enough leads to totalitarianism.

The eschatology of the early Augustine, as is shown by Robert Markus in his magisterial Saeculum: History and Society in St. Augustine, was influenced by the Eusebianism of the age of the Theodosian settlement, which fostered Triumphalism. The dominant eschatology saw the current age as "Christian Times," an era in which biblical prophecy was being fulfilled before the very eyes of the astonished world. The conversion of Rome was seen as the beginning of the coming in history of the Kingdom of God.

As Markus shows, Augustine gradually worked himself free of this eschatology in the process of writing biblical commentaries, especially on Genesis, between roughly 395 and 410 AD. Thus, he was prepared to respond to the crisis following the sack of Rome in 410 when many pagan Roman refugees flooded into North Africa blaming the conversion of Rome to Christ for the disaster.

The eschatology of the mature Augustine emphasized that we live "between the times," that is, between the first and second comings of Christ in a kind of suspension of "salvation history." This is the period of the Church evangelizing the world in fulfillment of the Great Commission, but the Kingdom which appeared in the person of the King, Jesus Christ, remains future in terms of its fulfillment. We live in the Kingdom already, yet the Kingdom has not yet fully come. So we journey through this world as pilgrims, citizens of the city of God yet still in search of that city. One day the city of God will come to earth but this will only occur after the return of Christ.

There is thus an eschatological tension in Augustine's thought between the present age and the future age, the age of the inaugurated kingdom and the kingdom come in its fullness, between the already and the not yet. Our situation is that we live after the coming of Christ and during the reign of Christ, yet not every knee bows and not every tongue confesses at this point in history. So we pray as our Lord taught us: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

Triumphalism pulls the future kingdom back into the present and supposes falsely that the rule of God is already manifest on earth through the Church. This leads the Church to suppose falsely that it has the authority to abolish the doctrine of the separation of powers between Church and State (between Priest and King) and reunite them in one sacralized entity called the State Church, which is really Leviathan.

Triumphalism is the perennial temptation of Christendom. It has reared its ugly head numerous times in the history of the West, but it represents a deviation, a perversion, a heretical degradation of the true heritage of Christendom, which deserves to be known best not for the Triumphalistic deviation, but for the doctrine of the Two that is the true fruit of Augustinian thought.

Next: Christendom is not the Problem, Secularism Is

Remembering St. Augustine on the Anniversary of His Death

St. Augustine died on August 28, 430 AD in Hippo, North Africa. Fr. Z has an interesting post here on where the bones of the great North African doctor of the Church reside today and how they got from Hippo to there.

Thank God for this man of great spiritual insight and wisdom. I hope to get to Pavia in northern Italy one of these days to see the church where the earthly remains of one of the greatest theologians of the Church reside.

Trinitarian Theology as a Spiritual Discipline

French Dominican theologian Gilles Emery, O.P. argues that the Trinitarian theology of both St. Augustine and St. Thomas is presented as a spiritual exercise in which the practitioner of theology is a pilgrim seeking wisdom and, ultimately, union with God. In other words, all Trinitarian theology from the early Fathers to St. Thomas, including those parts which are often derided as "rationalistic" or "abstract" is actually spiritual theology, not mere speculation. A short presentation of his argument is found in his essay: "Trinitarian Theology as Spiritual Exercise in Augustine and Aquinas" in Aquinas the Augustinian, edited by Dauphinais, David and Levering (Catholic University of America Press, 2007).

The classical tradition of Christian theology that is rooted in the creedal orthodoxy of the first five centuries and which flowers in the Augustinian-Thomistic tradition has come under fire in the modern period for many reasons. One of those reasons has to do with the modern obsession with individual autonomy, which begins systematically with Descartes although it is foreshadowed in Renaissance humanism. This autonomy is not merely the self-assertion of the individual over against the state, tradition or law, but has is roots in a metaphysical decision to claim that the true view of the universe must begin with the individual reason and situation of the individual thinker rather than with an understanding of our situation as one of God and man in relationship. Emery's interpretation of the thought of St. Thomas as continuing a type of theology that typified the early Fathers and flowered in the writings of St. Augustine helps us see why the starting point of modern philosophy (and the theology - mainly liberal Protestant - which has adopted its anthropocentrism) is inadequate for understanding reality.

In this post, I want to describe how Emery interprets St. Augustine and in a subsequent post I will discuss his argument for reading St. Thomas as continuing the same kind of theology.

Emery points out that, the purpose of St. Augustine's De Trinitate, can be expressed as (1) to show that whether one searches for the substance of God through God's creature or through the Scriptures, the same nature of God can be discovered, (2) to show the conformity of Catholic faith to Holy Scripture and (3) to show that the end result of believing in order to understand is, in fact, an enhanced understanding of faith. For St. Augustine, faith is the beginning point of intellectual or scientific inquiry because it is only from the standpoint of faith that insight into ultimate reality can be attained. The purpose of Christian theology is to demonstrate that greater understanding does in fact arise from such a starting point.

It is in this last result that theology contributes to the evangelistic and apologetic task of the Church by increasing knowledge of the universe and man and not merely of God. Emery points out that the so-called "psychological" analogy is misnamed because the modern sense of the term does not connote what was central in St. Augustine's intentions: namely the ontological truth of the analogy of the soul to God. He says: "in turning toward God, whose image it is, the soul attains what it is, its proper nature." (7) We might think here also of the arguments of David Bentley Hart and T. F. Torrance about how it was Christianity which made the rise of modern physical science possible. Christianity "works" and this should commend it to all unbiased minds.

Emery shows that the analogy between the image of God in the human soul and God is not a one-way analogy, but rather a back and forth process of eliminating errors, exploring dead ends and finding one's way forward gradually and only by much effort. Emery writes:

So one discovers that the interminable detours, repititions, and digressions of the De Trinitate are on purpose and are part of Augustine's deliberate intention: to exercise the spirit of his reader, to lead it to the ascension toward God the Trinity by sharpening the tip of his soul (acies mentis). This objective is recalled each time Augustine glances retrospectively at the preceding books. It is formulated very clearly, for instance, at the beginning of book XV: 'We wanted to train the reader [exercere lectorem] in the things that were made, so that he might know Him by whom they were made.' In this Christian setting, the spiritual exercise takes on a specific aspect. It is performed on the foundation of revelation, through divine grace, in the adherance of faith to the Triune God.

Here we see arguments against "natural theology" decisively refuted. For one thing, the knowledge of God is not limited to what nature can say. Rather, nature must be read in the light of revelation and can only point to what is beyond its scope. For another thing, the back and forth of the soul suggest the interplay of the grace of the Holy Spirit interacting with the human mind leading the sinner to greater and deeper knowledge of God step by step. Human capability is insufficient both in the beginning point and at each step along the way. Finally, there is no hint of the human mind grasping or comprehending God; in actual fact, much of the point of the exercise is that the mind needs to become aware of its possibilities and its limitations.

Theology done in this way is prayerful, humble and intellectually rigorous. It is a path of purification and a way of wisdom. We distort it when we project our modern lust for power and domination (which has so distorted and debased scientific inquiry in modernity) backwards in time on to thinkers whose purpose in intellectual analysis was much different than our own. Instead of being motivated by a desire to control, manipulate and use, it was motivated by a desire to see and submit to the ontological reality we inhabit.

What is my beef with social justice? Part II

In Part I I defined “conservative theology,” “social justice” and “statism.” In this post, I want to examine the classical Augustinian-Thomist theology and compare it to the modern social justice project. I want to show modernity is an abandonment of the anthropology & eschatology of St. Augustine & that this rejection of Augustinianism is the root of the spiral downward into Statism.

First, let us consider the eschatology of St. Augustine. He was converted in 386 AD in the midst of the Eusebian enthusiasm over “Christian times,” the period of the consolidation of the Christianized Roman empire. The conversion of Rome was seen by many, including the early Augustine, as a continuation of salvation history and as the dawning of the kingdom of God on earth. The Fall of Rome was therefore as much a shock to Christians as it was to the pagans and St. Augustine wrote his City of God Against the Pagans as much to express a biblical philosophy of history (an eschatology) as he did to refute pagan charges that Rome fell because she abandoned her old pagan gods.

St. Augustine became an amillennialist and rejected the whole idea of an earthly kingdom coming in this age prior to the second coming of Christ. He re-conceived the idea of “Christian times” as the period between the Ascension and the Second Coming and he taught that although Christ is already reigning from heaven over all those in the City of God, not every knee has yet bowed and not every tongue has yet confessed that he is Lord. So the City of Man dominates the earth in this age and there is an eschatological tension in which the Church and State both have a role to play but neither can be simply equated with or reduced to a department of the other.

Second, in his anthropology St. Augustine developed a biblically orthodox position in dialogue with the Pelagians on the one side and the Manicheans on the other. He affirms original sin and he rejects all perfectionism. But he insists on the goodness of creation without in any way failing also to insist on its fallennes. The incorrigibility of its sinfulness in this age, prior to the Second Coming of Christ, is his way of doing justice to the fact of original sin (Gen. 3) and the eschatological hope of full redemption in the Return of Christ is his way of doing justice to the goodness of creation (Gen. 1-2).

Modernity is characterized by a false eschatology that does not preserve the tension between this age and the age to come and both therefore lead to totalitarianism/statism. The kingdom of God broke into history in the person of Jesus Christ (Mk. 1:15) But the kingdom will only come in its fullness after Christ’s return (I Cor. 15:20-28) Loose talk about us “building the kingdom” can mislead us into thinking of the kingdom as a human political project achievable within history. When combined with modern, liberal progressivism, the result is the sacralization of the modern, Enlightenment project much as Eusebius sacralized the Roman Empire. This is what I see happening in the social justice project.

Liberal progressivism is infused with Pelagianism and this optimistic view of human nature, which is found in both Liberalism and Marxism, is characteristic of modernity but in stark tension with Augustinianism.

The theology of St. Augustine (and the Augustinian-Thomist tradition in general) has made possible the following positive contributions of Western culture to the world. All of these things are pre-modern.

1. Individual liberty
2. Religious freedom
3. Free enterprise
4. Personal responsibility
5. The rule of law
6. Natural law
7. Limited government
8. The division of powers

Secularism is modernity’s Distortion of Augustine. The term “Secularism” came into use in the 19^th century and it says that this age, the material world and this life is all that exists and should therefore be our exclusive focus. Thus, secularism makes the same mistake as Christendom by collapsing the eschatological tension between the “already” and the “not yet.” Secularism places the State in the place occupied by the Church in Christendom and the State takes the place of God. Modernity is thus a Christian heresy in which a false eschatology and a false anthropology combine to form a false Church domination culture in the form of Statism. The logical end result is something like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. This project is well-advanced in Europe, which is a continent in terminal decline. Canada is not far behind, but the cultural battle against Statism still rages fiercely in the United States.

Summary: Augustine versus Modernity

Augustine:

1. Original sin means no utopianism

2. The State is neutral & dangerous

3. The Secular is potentially common ground for Christians & others

4. Our real hope is the 2^nd Coming of Christ & the Kingdom of God

Modernity:

1. The perfectibility of man means progress

2. The State is the hope of the world

3. Secularism says there is nothing but the material world & religion is private superstition

4. Our only hope is the synthesis of freedom & equality in the modern state

Conclusion: What to Do?

1. The Evangelical Left is assimilating itself to the modern project of Statism by its fixation on social justice. This will lead to the loss of its ability to prophetically critique the modern project

2. The de-humanizing of man in the “Brave New World” of modernity must be critiqued and only a conservative politics rooted in Augustinian theol. can do it.

3. There is no point being fixated on Christendom today; what needs to be challenged is the mod. State that seeks to usurp the place of God & close down the neutral space between Church & State in which Christians have influenced culture for the public good.

4. Evangelicals need to develop an Augustinian theology of culture that is not assimilated to the modern left-wing statism in which the Evangelical Left has become entangled.

This is just a hasty sketch of an answer to this question. I have tried to convey my thinking to date as concisely as possible and no doubt this sketch will raise as many questions as it answers.

Today's Lecture at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

I gave a lecture today entitled "Augustine and the Secular in Christendom and Modernity" at the Scripture and Ministry Lecture Series sponsored by the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Reflection at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. The lecture was live blogged and you can see the notes here.

Wayne Johnson, Doug Sweeney, Geoff Fulkerson and Owen Strachan have been extremely gracious hosts and have made my stay a real pleasure. It has been interesting to see the work of the Henry Center first hand and I'm particularly impressed by the work they are doing to bring together the church and academy and encourage theological reflection by working pastors.

I surprised a lot of people there by taking a much more conservative line than they expected on the basis of my last book. But readers of this blog wouldn't have been surprised by most of what I had to say. I do find St. Augustine extremely helpful to current debates and the reaction I received reinforced my sense that his thought can help us cr'itique modernity in a much deeper and profound way than we often do. We did have some debate about whether my basically Marxist definition of social justice was the only one or the right one. A few people said "I like the phrase "social justice" but I don't mean that by it." There was some good dialogue and some serious thinking going on. Sounds like what the academy should be like to me.

And yes, I did say that I almost titled the talk "How I Lost My Faith . . . in Social Justice." At far as I know, no heart attacks occurred during that part of the presentation.

Peter Liethart on Yoder on Augustine

Peter Liethart has been reading Yoder's War, Peace and Revolution, which has recently been published for the first time by Brazos Press. (It was originally written in the early 60's as lectures for a class on the history of war and peace that used Roland Bainton's book as the text.)

Anyway, here is Liethart's take on Yoder's understanding of Augustine:

"Yoder is a sometimes bizarre combination of profound insight and infuriating oversimplification verging on ignorance. He claims, for instance, that Augustine offers “a consensus kind of moral thought,” a moral thought based on “what everybody thinks.”

He goes on: Augustine “does not radically ask, do you get that from the Bible? Can you get that from revelation? It does not ask, can you get that from Plato? It just asks, does that make sense to all of us? Is it part of our cultural agreement?”

This doesn’t count as a fair summary of Augustine by any standards. But it gets worse:
“Augustine’s thought merges New Testament reconciliation language with classical peace language and Roman order language, as if they were all the same thing. Rome, nature, and providence are all seen as essentially the same. Religion celebrates the unity of everything and the way things are.”

This is baffling. ”Merging” the NT language of peace with “Roman order” is precisely what Augustine is not doing. His whole point is to distinguish the tranquilitas ordinis of the temporal city with the genuine shalom of the kingdom. Yoder objects to Augustine’s eschatology on other grounds, but that doesn’t count as a “merger” of Rome with Christian peace.

To suggest that Augustine “celebrates” the way things are is equally baffling. Augustine does have a word to say about the deep distortions of desire and order caused by sin. And he hardly thinks that Rome as such is something to be celebrated. Milbank is right to say that Augustine is involved in a profound deconstruction of Roman virtue."

Ouch, that hurt - the truth, I mean. The truth hurts, Peter. Let's just agree that among Yoder's many accomplishments we won't list "scholar of Augustine" among them.

Why Rome Was Never a True Republic

In Chapter 21 of Book XIX of The City of God, St. Augustine writes:

". . . if we are to accept the definition laid down by Scipio in Cicero's De Republica, there never was a Roman republic; for he briefly defines a republic as the weal of the people. And if this definition be true, there never was a Roman republic for the people's weal was never attained among the Romans. For the people, according to his definition, is an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgment of right and by a community of interests. And what he means by a common acknowledgment of right he explains at large, showing that a republic cannot be administered without justice. Where, therefore, there is no true justice there can be no right. . . justice is tha tvirtue which gives every one his due. Where, then, is the justice of man, when he deserts the true God and yields himself to impure demons?"

A few paragraphs later, he writes:

"He must be an uncommonly stupid, or a shamelessly contentious person, who has read through the foregoing books to this point, and cna yet question whether the Romans served widked and impure demons. But, not to speak of their character, it is written in the law of the true God, 'He that sacrificeth unto any god save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed.' [Ex. 22:20] He, therefore, who uttered so menacing a commandment decreed that no worship should be given either to good or bad gods."

Rome was not a true republic because it was not a political authority ordered to the welfare of its people. It was not ordered to the welfare of its people because it had no common acknowledgment of the right. And without a common acknowledgement of the right it lacked justice. It lacked justice because of idolatry - it worshipped ursurping demons instead of the True God. Therefore, it was under the judgment of God. And it fell. The point is: Why should anyone be surprised?

Why Neoconservatism Will Never Overcome Liberalism

Finally, someone else understands what is wrong with neoconservatism and why it cannot effectively challenge liberalism. Over at "What's Wrong With the World" Zippy Catholic makes the argument that the reason conservatives have been beaten so soundly by liberals is that (neo)conservatives actually are merely right-wing liberals. http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2008/10/boiled_frogs_redux.html

He quotes Michael Bauman as saying:

"[The political Left] own[s] the schools and colleges; they own the Senate, the House, and soon the White House and Courts; they own entertainment; they own the news media; they own the laboratories; they own everything -- even lots of the churches. They ran the board on us, and it's not an accident."

He agrees with Bauman and asks why it is that conservatives are losing the culture wars so spectacularly. He writes:

"'Conservatism' is in our time not conservatism but right-liberalism: political liberalism with a few 'conservative' unprincipled exceptions. The exceptions are unprincipled in the sense that they are not founded in our liberalism, and we for the most part don't recognize their incompatibility with our own liberalism. For a while that meant that 'conservatism' was classical liberalism; now it means, for the most part, culturally 'big tent' neoconservatism. In general it means 'whatever liberalism was about 30 or 50 years ago'."

Conservatism in the US, the UK and Canada is not grounded in a single, coherent worldview. It is a mixture of three principle elements (my analysis): (1) libertarians (who are extreme liberals like Ron Paul), (2) American Imperialists (the neo-con hawks like Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Bolton etc.) and the (3) neoconservatives or social conservatives (Weigel, Novak, Dobson, Colson etc.) The basic worldviews of these three groups are not compatible with one another and none of them represent the conservative Augustinianism of Roman Catholic social doctrine. This is just a tactical alliance based on a common set of specific positions, (which explains why the social conservatives are often accused of being naive and of being used by group 2 - an accusation which is superficially plausible but untrue).

Zippy Catholic goes on to say:

". . . the hard Left has a whole core worldview which anchors it and which it will not give up for anything. The Right has nothing of the kind: the political Right is basically a classical liberalism/neoconservatism which is nominally against abortion and a few other enumerated issues."

I agree. We will never get the entire conservative coalition to agree on basic worldview issues, which are really a matter of religious faith at bottom, so what to do? I think the important thing is for Christians who are conservatives to get clear on what our basic political philosophy is and how it is rooted in our worldview. Since the politically involved conservative Christians consist mainly of two groups: conservative Catholics and Evangelical Protestants, the need of the hour is for both groups to learn Catholic social doctrine. Catholics don't know it well enough and Evangelicals are simply unaware of it. But only with this kind of basic philosophy will we be able to stand firm and make progress.

Some might despair over the fact that this approach does not even envision bringing the whole conservative movement under one coherent philosohpy. But we should remember that the same is true on the other side. The Democratic Party, which is currently so successful, is also a coalition of various groups and the hard-core, secular Left is not by itself able to gain a democratic majority. So it has to form tactical alliances with, for example, liberal Catholics, who are regarded by the real Left as "useful idiots" for voting getting purposes.

The difference between overturning Roe or not, getting a human life ammendment or not, protecting marriage or not, preventing cloning or not, stopping euthanasia or not, etc. is going to come down to which side has the most dedicated, knowledgeable and committed core. Conservative, Augustinian Christians can be that core for conservatism and this is the way we can be salt and light in a dark world. But we have to know what we are about and we have to overcome the sin of despair.

The Augustinian Turn: Will Evangelicals Make It?

Caleb Stegall has a brief, but highly fascinating article in Touchstone on Evangelicals.
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=21-07-013-v

He says that 2008 may be remembered as the year that "the Evangelical political consensus - which had cohered so strongly around family values, industrial capitalism, and American exceptionalism - fell apart." He goes on to describe Evangelicals as believers in what Herbert Butterfield famously called "the Whig view of history" in which there is a progressive march through time to a glorious future.

This Whig interpretation of history can be seen in both left wing and right wing Protestantism: in George Bush just as much as in the Clintons and in Mike Huckabee as much as in Barack Obama. Jim Wallis is convinced that utopia is possible through the welfare state and for Michael Novak it can only come through capitalism.

Both liberalism and its daughter, neo-conservatism, are products of modernity. They both owe much to assumptions that lie at the roots of the two great Enlightenment secular religions: socialism and capitalism. And both are deferential to the great invention of the early modern period: the modern State. Neither the left or right have a specifically Christian political philosophy: they both function with a lame version of "What would Jesus do?" thinking.

Stegall notes, however, that an older (pre-modern) Christian tradition founded by St. Augustine is an alternative to what he calls the "restless Evangelicals." They are restless because they are sick of the corruption in the Republican Party, the failure of the leadership to appreciate them and the failure to derail homosexual "marriage" and abortion. Is there something more? Stegall recommends Augustinianism.

I believe that Stegall is right to say that Evangelicals are restless and he is right to commend Augustinianism. But I see the stakes as higher and the situation as more urgent than he does. If Evangelicalism does not make its way home to a more catholic faith it is doomed to go the way of Protestant liberalism. Already, we see Wallis and co. leading Evangelicals into moral compormise as they exchange a capitalist mess of potage for a socialist one.

And as Carl Bratten points out in an article entitled "The Gospel for a Neopagan Culture" the gnostic spirituality of late modern North America finds fertile soil in the pietist tradition. He writes:

"Evangelical pietism that has lost the catholic elements of the great tradition provides a fertile soil for such ahistorical spiritual religion. There are signs that American evangelicalism with its pietist background is breaking up under the impact of the "culture wars,' with one wing seeking to reattach itself to catholic and orthodox traditions, which we welcome, and the other wing allying itself opportunistically with the culture-conforming progressives in American religion." (Either/Or: The Gospel or Neopaganism, ed. C. Bratten and R. Jenson, Eerdmans, 1995, p. 20)

The political problem identified by Stegall is intimately related to the spiritual problem identified by Bratten. Gnosticism and liberalism go hand in hand and both are inimical to catholic orthodoxy.

Stegall describes Augustinian political thought as being built on the idea that what a man (or community) loves is determinative of the kind of man (or community) he will be. Modernity seeks a rationally-designed political system that is so perfect that no one need be good. This is seen in the neo-conservative idea that the greed of individuals results (miraculously!) in the welfare of all. It is also seen in the naive faith placed in the all-encompassing state and its rational planners by liberals. But Augustine will have none of that. He knows that who we worship determines what our community will be like. If we worship "Choice" we will have blood-stained hands as our will to power is exercised against the weak and helpless children who are inconvenient to our plans. Only the worship of the true God leads to shalom.

Augustinians do not see history marching toward glorious things and progressing inevitably toward the good society. Augustinians view life as eucatastophe - a joyful catastrophe. History is a long defeat with a twist at the end that saves the day. This is what it means to believe in the return of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. This life is important, not because it is an end in itself, but because it is the preparation for eternity and the place where our souls are formed for the telos of our lives - to see God and enjoy Him forever.

This is a spirituality with political implications and a politics that is spiritual. It is historic Christian orthodoxy and Evangelicals will either embrace it or they will pass out of the Church and into post-Christian Western paganism along with the rest of the Protestant Gnostics.

J. R. R. Tolkein: Augustinian Conservative

I've been reading an interesting book by Joseph Pearce called Tolkien: Man and Myth: A Literary Life (HarperCollins, 1998). He does an excellent job of discussing Tolkien's Christian faith and how it is reflected in his fiction and his essays. He shows in detail and convincingly how the myth Tolkien created is not incompatible with the Christian myth.

However, Pearce never actually comes out and says, perhaps because he does not see, that that Tolkien actually created a myth for England comparable to the Norse myths for Northern Europe. The reason the Silmarillion and LOTR are compatible with the Bible is the same reason that the overall myth is compatible with English history and, indeed, participates in many of the same mythic archetypes as are found in English literature and history. The hobbits, Pearce shows, are explicitly intended by Tolkien to be Englishmen prior to the industrial revolution.

This book inspired me to take down my copy of Tolkien's Letters from the shelf and begin to go through them. Some of the most interesting quotes in Pearce's book are from the letters. Two in particular demonstrate a unique combination of elements of a world view that are unmistakeably Augustinian.

First, in a letter written in 1956 Tolkien writes: "Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat' - though it contains (and in a legend my contain more clearly and movingly) some samples of glimpses of final victory." (Letter 195, p. 255 of the Carpenter edition, quoted by Pearce on p. 148). A while back, I read The Children of Hurin after it had come out as a separate work and I was nearly overwhelmed by the sadness of the story and the lack of what might be called "resolution" or "final happiness," though hope was not entirely absent. This quote seemed to me to express the sentiment of this story both concisely and precisely.

Second, in a delightful chapter entitled "Tolkien as Hobbit: The Englishman Behind the Myth" Pearce leads off with a quote from another letter: "I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands: I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats, I am fond of mushrooms (our of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much." (Letter 213, pp. 288-289 of the Carpenter edition, quoted by Pearce on p. 153, although his footnote mistakenly says this letter is found on pp 213-14 of the Carpenter volume.)

Now if there is one thing it would be impossible to imagine, it would be a depressed hobbit. How could Tolkien view history as "one long defeat" and also be cheerful, fond of creature comforts and in love with nature? By being an Augustinian, of course.

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.