Avdat

Just what am I not supposed to forget this week?

It's going to be a long week of 9/11 retrospectives. Some will be thoughtful, moving and/or eloquent. Others will be sentimental and/or jingoistic.

I'm puzzled by how many remembrances admonish us to "Never forget," as if that terrible day weren't seared into our brains forever. Absent a diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease, how could any of us who are old enough to remember 9/11 ever forget it?

I suspect that some of the calls to "Never forget" are more about justifying everything that's happened since 9/11. Well, I don't buy that.

9/11 doesn't justify torture. 9/11 didn't justify the invasion of Iraq. 9/11 didn't justify the orgy of consumption in the 2000s which we are paying for now. 9/11 didn't justify the maligning of Islam, a noble religion practiced by a billion people. 9/11 doesn't justify continuing to fight in Afghanistan, propping up a corrupt government long after the architect of 9/11 has gone onto his eternal reward--such as it is.

What I will remember about 9/11, aside from the sheer horror of the day, is how badly we handled it. When we looked to our leaders to rally us in the face of evil, all they could come up with was, "Go shopping." Living well is the best revenge, they say, so living large must be so much the sweeter!

Like sheep we obeyed. The 2000s were the decade of the McMansion and the Hummer, conspicuous consumption on a truly baroque scale. Why, we made the Greed Is Good 80s look like an era of Puritan restraint.

And that's partly why we're in the mess we're in. Take away easy credit and cheap energy, and McMansions and Hummers will put you in the poor house. People have talked about bin Laden's goal of bankrupting America. He's come close, but indirectly, not by miring us in a land war in Asia, but by miring us in second homes in Vegas that we could never afford.

I'll also remember this decade's unique cast of incompetent and immoral public servants. The boomers have MacNamara and Nixon and Kissinger; the Gulf of Tonkin and My Lai. Gen Xers have Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld; WMDs in Iraq and Abu Ghraib.

Young men join the military for a variety of reasons--love of country, hatred of the enemy, a scholarship, a paycheck, to see the world or test oneself in extremis. Some of these reasons are valid, others less so. But what we must never forget is that old men start wars for a variety of reasons--national security, fears real or imagined, vanity, ignorance, vengeance, meanness, lies. This seems to hold whether the cause is just or unjust. And every young man or woman needs to consider that before joining the military. I will not forget to tell my sons that unpleasant truth once they come of age.

I will also tell my sons that patriotism cannot be reduced to military service, for that would call into question the patriotism of the overwhelming majority of Americans who've never donned a military uniform--a strange proposition. I will tell them what the World War II vet John F. Kennedy said, "War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."

We owe members of the military love and respect as human beings created in God's image and capable of extraordinary courage. We also owe it to them that we do not send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. We owe them adequate health care to heal their injured bodies and minds. We owe to ourselves and to them the work of making the society they've pledged to defend more just and equitable. On all these counts, we failed them over the past ten years. We shouldn't forget that.

We shouldn't forget that the evil of the terrorists rubbed off on us. There's no consensus on torture in our society today, thanks to the illegal acts and fearmongering of our elected leaders, aided and abetted by the media. The Viet Cong water-boarded our POWs. If we'd won that war, we'd have convicted their leaders and generals for war crimes that ex-Bush administration officials brag about in their memoirs.

History won't forget. History will judge them harshly, and judge us all the more because we failed to hold them accountable. After all, it's not as if America at the turn of the 21st century is a feudal state, lacking the institutions and mentalities to protect human rights and due process. We're without excuse.

I also will remember how inadequate "our" religion has been in the face of "their" evil. We Christians seem to have had three choices this past decade:

1. The crusader mentality of the religious right.
2. The shrill hectoring of liberal Protestantism.
3. The "I'm so over politics" pose of the communitarians.

Roman Catholics have been on the sidelines, first paying lawyers to strong-arm victims of abuse and their families and then paying out to the same.

The religious right is quite wrong about bin Laden representing Islam. They're quite wrong to want to dish out in the name of Christ the same type of treatment Christ received in their favorite snuff film The Passion. Liberals are right about consumerism and militarism, but no one's listening. Blame it on the low Christology, I suppose.

Communitarians are right that that church needs to re-group before it re-engages, lest it lose its soul, but they never get around to engagement. In fact they poo-poo it. It's no accident that thoughtful young Evangelicals flock to Hauerwas. Evangelicalism careens between Theocracy and Quietism. Hauerwas's ouvre is really a "thick Quietism" that gives young Evangelicals a way to choose the path not taken by  their Moral Majority parents without succumbing to a "Just Me and Jesus" sentimentality. But it doesn't give them a way to tell obvious truths like, "Election results matter."

Christians are ill-equipped to humanize politics these days.

Finally, we should remember the dead and their loved ones and friends. Remembering the dead is one thing that makes us human. And as the scripture says, "Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep." But that should go without saying, shouldn't it?

If I sound bitter it's because I am. And yet, what right have I to be bitter? As Matt Yglesias is fond of pointing out, ours are the best times in human history. Is bitterness a conceit of the privileged?

I don't think so. Lamenting mistakes, missed opportunities and unnecessary death is appropriate, even given our relative comfort and affluence.

But despite all the stupidity and nefariousness of the past decade, some good things have happened. Americans put aside their age-old prejudices and elected a black man President. Quite apart from our bombs, Arabs are demanding democracy and reshaping their societies. Who knows how it will turn out? For the best, I pray.

Providence has its own tale to tell apart from the depressingly familiar narratives in the headlines and history books. We shouldn't forget that, either.

Today, even pacifists can say justice was done

When history is being made, most people would do well to stay at home and go offline. Maybe I'm venturing out a little too early with this post, but here goes...

On the one hand, I think that there's one etiquette for victory or defeat in war, and another etiquette for victory or defeat on, say, the basketball court. A lot of people got that mixed up last night. 

On the other hand, last night was no time or place for sanctimonious tut-tutting about not delighting in anyone's death. And I saw a lot of that in my news feed from people with whom I otherwise agree.

Some who were short on sanctimony were long on platitudes. "Violence only breeds more violence." Well, sure. Osama Bin Laden instigated the worst mass murder in American history. No one who thinks that violence only breeds more violence should be surprised at the end he met.

Come now. Liberal pacifists (and I include myself in that category) ought to be able to tell the difference between crashing a hijacked airplane into an office building and a commando raid to kill the mastermind of that hijacking. It's the difference between violence that deliberately targets civilians, and violence that doesn't. It's the difference between violence managed by a lawful authority and violence that isn't.

In short, it's Just War Theory.

How I will spend my Megamillions winnings

Fast fact: for the cost of those 100 cruise missiles we lobbed at Colonel Gaddafi, we could have provided safe drinking water to the entire population of Congo. (HT) This depressed me so much that I went out and bought a Megamillions ticket. Given the waste, fraud and abuse at the highest levels of the federal government, somebody needs to be throwing some serious cash at some seriously important priorities.

I'll have to pay half of the $300 million in taxes. $70 million for water and sewer in Congo. That leaves $75 million. I'll keep enough to take the family to Iona every summer, and the rest I figure I'll give to some peace oriented think tank to convince the American people that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Because we are a well-intentioned people. We saved the world from Hitler, didn't we? (Well, with an assist from the Brits who stood in the gap, along with 30 million dead Russians.)

True, true, true.

But good intentions are more than made up for by the awful misery of war. Ever since World War II, we well-intentioned people with a ginormous military have been running around the world like a bull in a china shop. "The Good War" blinds us to an unpleasant truth: we have little to show for all the wars since then. Consider:

• Korea: Technically, the war's not over yet. Check back in 5 or 50 years.
• Vietnam: We lost the war. We lost 57,000 lives. Only the Civil War split the country worse. We still aren't over it.
• Lebanon: disaster.
• Grenada: victory!
• Libya: I don't know that bombing Gaddafi in the '80s accomplished anything, but it felt good at the time, didn't it?
• Gulf War: Won the war. Lost the peace.
• Haiti: we invade them periodically. Can't tell that it makes much of a difference.
• Somolia: a fiasco. Read all about it in Black Hawk Down.
• Kosovo: this appears to have been a success.
• Afghanistan. How much blood and treasure does it take to eliminate some guys armed with box cutters living in caves? How many generals would Lincoln have fired by now? This deference to military brass who clearly don't know how to prosecute this war is an unfortunate legacy of Vietnam.
• Iraq: FUBAR.
• Libya: stay tuned.

Madeleine Albright famously asked Colin Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if you can't use it?" But doesn't our track record belie the seemingly obvious implication of her question? Our most successful postwar deployment--to Europe as part of NATO--was in a purely defensive posture.

Long story short: we really need to stop starting wars.

And even when the others guys start it, we do have choices about how to respond. I remember right after 9/11 Jacques Chirac was paying a visit to Washington, and a reporter asked him about "The War on Terror," and he declined to characterize the effort against Al Qaeda as a "war." That struck me as strange at the time, but Stanley Hauerwas has made the point repeatedly that the term "war" properly describes a conflict between states, and when you talk about a "War on Terror," you aren't signaling your awesome determination so much as you are granting a state-like dignity to a rabble of religious fanatics. And you ought not do that.

It makes you wonder: what if we hadn't gone to war against Al Qaeda in 2001? What if we responded in a purely law enforcement mode? Has the war really made any difference in terms of our security, or could we have stopped the use of airplanes as projectiles simply with stopping the flow of money to Al Qaeda and stopping known terrorists from boarding planes?

I will spent the other $70 million raising these questions in public.

And No. I will not give you any money. You have clean drinking water. Your kids don't die from diarrhea. You don't have problems. Talk to the hand.

I am a cafeteria Mennonite, Part Deux

Nathan Lilje's comment on my I am a cafeteria Mennonite post is so good I'm posting it here, hoping it'll get the attention it deserves:

Well, one might say by this logic that most modern-day Mennonites are also cafeteria Mennonites. The Anabaptist commitment to nonviolence arose in a time when the whole tradition consisted of converts from Catholicism, focused on propagating their beliefs, and facing severe persecution for it. Eventually the Anabaptist sects decided to largely abandon proselytizing in order to remain alive. Consequently, the voluntary nature of the church is mostly a formality; participation in Anabaptist traditions is more genetically determined than for any mainline tradition. To say that the Mennonite commitment to nonviolence stems from the voluntary nature of the church is merely an historical formulation--it continues not because of the free choice of believers but because of the persistent influence of tradition. This is evident by the fact that the Quakers, who have no baptism whatsoever and wide tolerance for divergent beliefs, have maintained their commitment to nonviolence as well. There is no theological reason a Reformed pacifism or a Catholic pacifism could not be just as stable, they just doesn't have tradition behind them. In fact, I could formulate an argument that infant baptism is more conducive to nonviolent Christianity (were there to be a infant-baptizing tradition committed to this) than "believers" baptism, as it is currently practiced. It is true that once upon a time believers baptism implied a commitment to the ethical values of the church (including nonviolence when applicable). This was a time when most people in these sects were baptized in their 30's, and no one younger than their 20's. Today? The average Mennonite baptism is 13 (and in Baptist churches children are often baptized at nearly half that age). What does emphasizing the centrality of personal decision mean when you encourage people to make these decisions by age 13? Who takes seriously decision they make at 13? This seems to me to be a clear case of building your house on a foundation of sand. Thus, it might be argued, that Mennonite theology is undermined by current Mennonite practice. By contrast, the practice of infant baptism deemphasizes personal commitment and instead emphasizes God's calling. Of course, the Reformed theology is also undermined by current Reformed practice, as most Protestants no longer have their children baptized. But were this practice and theology to be wedded to a nonviolent ethical tradition, I think it would be equally conducive to this purpose as the old practices of the voluntary church, and more so than current Mennonite practice. For it posits that one's ethical commitments are not dependent upon personal volition, which is always changing, but upon God's immutable and inescapable calling, as evidenced by the practice of infant baptism. My point is, the Mennonite commitment to nonviolence isn't dependent upon their theology and practice but upon their historical tradition. Thus, I would say, why shouldn't everyone else admire them for that and ignore the rest if they don't buy it, to say, "Hey, maybe we should import their commitment to nonviolence to our different theological/sacramental tradition"?

Hiroshima and its legacy

Today is the 65th anniversary of the atomic bomb blast over Hiroshima. We should make mention of this event and its legacy.

To be sure, if it weren't for the bomb I might not be here today to make note of its dropping. My dad was on an amphibious ship in the Philippines rehearsing invasion maneuvers when the war ended. The bomb excused him from having to face kamikaze attacks and murderous onshore shelling. He was happy to go home, for any reason.

But that's too nearsighted a view to assess Hiroshima.

(A brief tangent: the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek wrote a review of The Hurt Locker last spring castigating the film and others like it for blinding its viewers to the real horrors of war. That is, despite the movie's "realistic" portrayal of the violence and terror a grunt has to face while doing his daily job, its micro focus actually "serves to obfuscate the key point: the need for a ruthless analysis of what we are doing in our political-military activity and what is at stake." Thus The Hurt Locker, Žižek maintains, is just a gorier version of The Green Berets.)

Perhaps our view of war, warped by the lens of such movies, and by the inability to contemplate what tens of thousands of people killed in one, fell swoop looks like, leads us to privilege the micro history, and fail to take seriously the real issues.

What about the big picture?

I am a cafeteria Mennonite

Maybe you've heard of cafeteria Catholics. Maybe you are one. Well in this post, Halden Doerge has a cautionary word for cafeteria Mennonites:

The Anabaptist tradition is not, first of all, about “nonviolence” but rather about the nature of discipleship, the church, the world and the meaning of Christ’s Lordship. You can’t divorce Anabaptist’s theology of peace from their commitment to things like believer’s baptism, voluntary church membership, congregationalism, the rejection of clericalism, and yes, opposition to certain understandings of sacramentalism. To do so is to fail to take the tradition with any real seriousness. The same is true for Anabaptists and Mennonites who quickly latch on to quasi-Catholic enthusiasm about sacramental theology. (Indeed, most of what I’m saying here applies, vice-versa, to free churchers who think they can appropriate whatever elements of Catholicism they find compelling, a similarly-common tendency.)

I came to a related conclusion a month ago when I taught a little course on the Didache for a dozen or so teens on campus for Project Burning Bush. I really wonder how compatible infant baptism is with the kind of high-commitment Christianity (non-violence, resistance to capitalism, church discipline as mutual accountability) that so many communitarians want.

What is Niebuhrian realism?

A. Just as Niebuhr himself wasn't so naive as to believe that we could build the kingdom of God on earth, Niebuhrian realists aren't naive enough to think that terrorists can be negotiated with, co-opted or appeased. They are murderers and religious fanatics, and they have to be killed.

B. Just as Niebuhr himself wasn't so naive as to believe that we could build the kingdom of God on earth, Niebuhrian realists aren't naive enough to think that we can rid the world of evildoers, or remake the world in our image. The best we can do is work for a relatively secure world while maintaining an healthy skepticism about our own means and motivations.

C. If Niebuhr hadn't been a tenured professor at Union Seminary, he'd have been that guy at the end of the bar debunking anything and everything. Niebuhrian Realism is not a coherent public theology; it's stained glass cynicism; thus the answer is Both A and B. Because cynics are cynical about everything.

Vote early and vote often!

On turning the other cheek

According to Walter Wink, the interpretive key to Matthew 5:39 is that Jesus specifies being struck on the right cheek. Why the right cheek? In a right-handed world, the only way that one could strike a person on the right cheek is by delivering a back-handed slap, like a master would to his slave. Thus Jesus is counseling the relatively powerless among his hearers on how to assert their equality. Offering the other cheek isn't a way to avoid getting hit again, but his time, he'll have to punch you like you're an equal. It's an appealing interpretation because it provides exegetical validation to the techniques of a variety of non-violent social change movements.

But is Wink correct? Yesterday I was reading On First Principles by Origen, and he chalks up the right cheek detail to one of those absurdities that litter the scriptures which demand a deeper, spiritual, non-literal interpretation:

What could be more unreasonable than the command which simple minds think the Savior gave to his apostles: "Salute no one on the road" [Luke 10:4]? The saying about the right cheek being struck [Matt. 5:39; Luke 6:29] is also most unlikely, for anyone who strikes would strike the left cheek with the right hand unless he happened to suffer from an unnatural condition.

Now Origen, a third century Alexandrian, is as far away from Jesus of Nazareth as I am from the War of 1812. But he is a lot closer to the Sermon on the Mount in time and space than Walter Wink is. If Jesus is speaking directly to the plight of a slave humiliated by a back-handed slap, then it seems like Origen would have recognized the context of that detail immediately.

What gives?

Another question: has anyone written a book on the history of the interpretation of "turning the other cheek?" I'm not familiar with one, but I'd be shocked if there weren't one out there. Seems like that'd be some low-hanging fruit for any number of people eager to get published.

Will the real Yoderians please stand up?

This Craig Carter post and the comments raises the question, If you're a pacifist, are your ethics for you or for everyone else? Some of comments insist that John Howard Yoder's pacifism, although it presupposes a churchly context, does not preclude Christians from strongly censuring state-sponsored violence, especially gratuitous or pre-emptive violence. Carter says that pacifism is not an ethic for nation-states, that commending non-violence to states is naive, and when free church people do so they forsake the Yoderian pacifism that rises out of their thick ecclesiology for the dread "liberal pacifism." The rejoinder is that Carter is not the Yoderian pacifist he claims to be, that he is advocating a two-kingdoms ethic that limits the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately the debate gets hashed out on the fraught terrain of Israel's security and its relationship with Gaza and Iran. Carter's politics are clearly neo-conservative, and I think his critics have the better of him when they point out that it's hard to get from Yoder to Israeli jets bombing Iran's nuclear facilities. But Carter's sidebar indicates that he's moving away from Yoder and really digging Augustine these days. I think it's questionable whether Augustine is a firm foundation for the kind of foreign and domestic policy today's Republican Party stands for, but whatever. It's his journey, not mine.

But I also wonder if a dual ethic for Church and State always amounts to placing the state beyond the reach of Christ's Lordship. We recently took up Church-State issues in my medieval church seminar, which gave me a chance to read a little bit of Bernard of Clairvaux's Treatise on Consideration, which sort of scrambled my categories regarding war and peace, and Church and State.

The setup: A century before Bernard, Peter Damian said that Church and State exist in a non-hierarchical, symbiotic relationship, and if each does their duty well, then each will preserve the other. Then along came Hildebrand, who asserted (in hysterical language) that the Church was morally superior to the State; therefore the Church is entitled to rule as a super-state in Christendom, even to the point of popes deposing kings.

Now Bernard also believed that the Church was morally superior to the State, but for that very reason the Church (read--the Clergy) ought not get involved in secular affairs. It's too sordid a business. But he was no Anabaptist, nor was he a two-kingdoms quietist. He thought that the Church ought to direct the State, but from a distance. Hands that wield the sword are not clean enough to be raised in prayer. But hands that wield the sword need someone to raise clean hands on their behalf, so that the sword executes justice and not tyranny.

It's a dual ethic that doesn't place the state beyond the reach of Christian ethics. But it does so by treating the violence endemic to statecraft not in ethical terms but in terms of holiness and purity. Soldiering or trying cases is like burying the dead or making leather goods was in ancient Israel--absolutely necessary, and defiling. A holy place, attended to by holy persons, is also absolutely necessary. So everybody does their respective job, and God preserves the society. Which gives you what is, from our vantage point, the utterly weird paradox of a man like Bernard, who'd no sooner be a soldier than be a prostitute, and yet who preached a crusade.

Of course this is unworkable for our contemporary context for all kinds of reasons. A major reason is that in a democracy everyone's a citizen, which means that everyone's a potential soldier. If everyone's a potential soldier, it's hard to think about the military in terms of a necessary but necessarily stigmatized social subgroup. The idea that some people need to renounce violence in order to perfect the practitioners of violence is kept alive, I suppose, in the military 's quaint requirement that chaplains not be armed, but nobody else is articulating that kind of non-violence.

So I don't really know why I'm bringing this up, except to say that a dual-ethic hasn't always meant giving the State a moral free pass, and that studying Church History continues to shuffle the theological deck of cards that the contemporary context has dealt me.

Everybody hates Reinhold Niebuhr

Halden links to Paul Griffiths' reflections on violence. Halden likes Griffiths' writing style but detects a malodorous whiff of Niebuhrian thought in Griffiths' post, for it demands remorse for and not repentance from violence in the time before the eschaton.

Adam Kotsko in turn faults the conservative (Niebuhrian?) response to pacifism because it insists that the person who resorts to violence feel bad about it. In fact, he argues, there are times when killing is and ought to be a joyful experience. Inglourious Basterds here we go again. Or, if you don't care for that example, the example of domestic violence ought to do, which undid Adam's previous interest in Cristian nonviolence. It's quite satisfying, and rightly so, when an abused women turns the tables on her abuser.

So Niebuhrian realism must (always regretfully) wage war on two fronts: against the Yoderian pacifists like Halden who rightly point out that Niebuhr's lack of a robust ecclesiology and eschatology lead him into "weak resignation to the evils we deplore"; and against what we might call the Carrie Underwood school of ethics in which plotting revenge and executing it are at times not only morally justifiable but immensely pleasurable.

I think that the only way to square Halden's rightful abhorrence of violence with Adam's rightful joy when justice is duly served is with the terribly unfashionable concept of hell. Consider Paul's warning to the Romans not to avenge themselves but leave room for the wrath of God. "No, if your enemy is hungry, feed him... for in doing so you will heap burning coals on his head." I used to think that this was a way of shaming the wrongdoer into repentance, much like Walter Wink's interpretation of "going the extra mile." But some people can't be shamed. And more to the point, I've come to decide that those burning coals are in fact the fires of hell.

It was Ignatius of Antioch who persuaded me. Ignatius' letters, composed on his way to his martyrdom in Rome, are shot through with apocalyptic thought and its attendant dualism and determinism. One telling quote from his letter to the Roman Church: "All the way from Syria to Rome I am fighting with wild beasts, by land and sea, night and day, chained as I am to ten leopards ((I lean to a detachment of soldiers), who only get worse the better you treat them. But by their injustices I am becoming a better disciple..."

So Ignatius does not smuggle secret correspondence to the churches in order to orchestrate an attack on his convoy that will spring him and give him the Tarantino-like opportunity to etch a cross in the face of his murdered guards. He returns good for evil as a kind of personal spiritual discipline; but there's more to it than that. Like Ignatius' jailers, evil regimes are routinely depicted as wild beasts in other apocalyptic texts, and in these texts they always meet the same end. They're slaughtered.

The only thing that saves Ignatius and any other pacifist from a freakish masochism is an apocalyptic world view; the certainty that they are literally killing their captors with kindness. When his forbearance in the face of injustice only incites further acts of injustice, Ignatius knows, even if they don't, that he is giving his jailers enough rope to hang themselves. Which is why, without a real and I am afraid, literal hell, pacifism is a form of mental illness.

On the other hand, I find the idea of joyful killing repugnant and untenable. Adam faults pacifists for wanting to keep their hands clean more than seeing justice done, but "joyful killing" implies that there is such a thing as clean vengeance, and there's not. Yoder's Nevertheless is spot on here; for it rightly argues that any critique of pacifism can be applied with equal force to those who would defend violence. Perhaps the wife beater set on fire in his own bed has it coming to him, and perhaps he has a mother who loves him and to whom will fall the grim and unjust burden of identifying his body in the morgue. There is always collateral damage, which is why Niebuhr is right. There can never be no such thing as joyful vengeance.