Avdat

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.

Save us from weak resignation

I have no idea what to think about the ongoing war in Afghanistan. I do not speak any of Afghanistan's myriad of languages, have never read a good history of the place, and have never visited there. Moreover, I know very little about fighting a counterinsurgency.

I have a commitment to Christian nonviolence. At the same time I acknowledged that the 2001 NATO war to depose the Taliban and dismantle Al Qaida met the Just War criteria. I think that there's a case to be made to "see this thing through" here that I never found very convincing in Iraq, since the latter was a war conceived in sin.

There's a problem with Just War criteria: it gives good advice about when to get into a war (the answer is, "Hardly ever," if you take the criteria seriously), but it doesn't offer much guidance about when or if to get out of a war.

One criterion is "reasonable chance of success," which means that Just War theory allows pragmatism a role in the morality of war, although a far more circumscribed role than rulers would prefer. But as I said earlier, I'm no expert on either war or Afghanistan, so I have no idea if the new strategy there will work.

I'm not even sure what "work" means. Jeffersonian democracy in Central Asia? Or enough calm to allow for us to not have to withdraw under fire? That's all that the counterinsurgency seems to have accomplished in Iraq, although that's more than I thought we'd accomplish. Are we fighting for "peace with honor" in Central Asia?

One factor that might make a difference is, Do the Afghans themselves want us there? I've heard nothing said on this subject.

It's been almost eight years since we went to war in Afghanistan. That's two years longer than the war in Europe that began seventy years ago today. I was sick to my stomach a good bit in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, not only at what those wicked men had done, but also at the war that was bound to occur.

Eight years later and war no longer fills me with dread. I'm inured to it--the drip, drip, drip of American blood over there, somewhere. Another suicide bomb. Another dozen brown-skinned people blown to bits. War is the muzak of our lives, omnipresent, yet barely detectable. It's got to be a hundred dead to get me to look away from the dishes I'm putting away and toward the radio and the NPR reporter's sober voice.

I greatly lament that cynical people in our government and media have so successfully hardened the hearts of the American people over the past eight years by waving the bloody shirt, fearmongering, and lying. The tacit support of torture is Exhibit A. But my own resignation in the face of endless war is proof that I'm not immune to their designs.

Where's the Palestinian Gandhi?

Gershom Gorenberg wonders. Some of the more fascinating paragraphs include:

So why not adopt the strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience, the methods of Gandhi? That question has been asked for years, by moderate Israelis and by Westerners with sympathy for both sides. It comes packed with assumptions. It implies that Israelis accept a civilian death toll like that in Gaza only when they believe it is the unavoidable price of self-defense. It presumes that Israel remains a society whose citizens would not long allow their government to use deadly force against masses of nonviolent demonstrators. And it suggests that if Palestinians succeeded in shedding the image of terrorists and appeared internationally as saints, they would succeed in bringing unbearable Western pressure against Israel.

But even if patronizing, the question remains valid: Sainthood can work. Britain abandoned India; Montgomery's buses were desegregated.

As an Israeli, to imagine [a Palestinian Gandhi or MLK] is disturbing for another reason: This is a fantasy of a political savior who comes from the adversary's side because one's own has no answers. Israeli politics has become a junkyard of broken ideologies. The outgoing government of Ehud Olmert succeeded neither in negotiating peace nor in bringing quiet to the Gazan border with military force. Meanwhile, settlement construction continued, deepening Israel's entanglement in the West Bank. In February's election, a majority of Israelis voted for parties that offered no expectation of an end to the conflict. We have failed to manufacture hope. Let the Palestinians do it.

And,

In a 1978 book, Tin Soldiers on Jerusalem Beach, Israeli psychologist Amia Lieblich described a young Israeli man in a group therapy session. He talks about a recurring dream of being with his parents, before his own birth, in their home in Poland, as German soldiers pound the door. "The knocking is the most frightening sound I have ever heard. You have to kick the door with your nailed boots and rap it with the butt of your gun to get the right blend. .  .  . When I was on a patrol searching for Arab terrorists in an Arab village, I was the one to knock like that on doors." In the dream, he says, "Outside the door I am a man .  .  . I have a rifle and lots of ammunition. I am with my unit, we are together. We are the victors," wearing Gestapo uniforms. He is horrified both by being strong and being the victim. If the whole country could have been put on the couch, it might have spoken like this.

It's well worth your time.

MLK

What Yglesias said:

By the standards of today’s discourse, King would be considered deeply unserious. Serious people understand that if you think something is important, the serious way to go about expressing that is by voicing support for having other people go kill other people. Doubts about the ethics of such action are loathesome moral equivalence and doubts about their wisdom demonstrate naïveté. King wouldn’t qualify as a “civil rights Democrat”—not enough bloodshed.

The irony is that adherence to nonviolence is one of the main reasons King is such an admired and mainstream figure today. If he’d decided à la Tom Friedman that the white south needed a “suck on this” moment, or followed the lead of Hamas or Shimon Peres in deciding the best way to teach the population a lesson was to terrorize them, he’d be a jailed or executed despised criminal. And the ethic of nonviolence that King appealed to has deep roots in the Christian tradition that unites the majority of black and white Americans. And yet even though this Christian nonviolence is in many ways the most mainstream aspect of this radical figure who’s become a mainstream icon, it’s something that none dare take seriously today.

Aiding and abetting

At The Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten In Before where I wait tables, the computer is God, omniscient and providential. It knows your tip percentage. It knows how many pricey add-ons your guests order--appetizers, cocktails, desserts. It knows what the guests who fill out the online surveys think about you.

From this data the computer generates a score which determines how often your section is seated per round. This sets up the age-old battle between merit and seniority. Veteran servers resent it when a new employee gets seated more than they do just because they're more highly rated.

More interesting is that it recasts the waiter's role as a salesperson. Some of my co-workers simply cannot stand being put in the position of pushing "food that's going to be thrown away to people who don't need it," as another server said to me.

We do throw away a shocking amount of food. Half-eaten burgers, piles of french fries, half-melted ice cream running around a nibbled on piece of chocolate cake--it all goes into a 50 gallon trash can that we fill every shift. Interestingly, I've never had to pitch a half-drunk bottle of beer!

It's also quite true that people don't need all this food. Americans are fat, fat, fat people. So fat that a lot of them simply cannot fit into our booths. My opinion is that if your man boobs and your gut are pressing up and down on the table, performing a kind of human mammogram on our furniture, then rather than glaring at me, you should go home and eat celery sticks for dinner.

The co-worker I mentioned earlier vowed she'd have to work the rest of her life for the Peace Corps to atone for working in such an environment. I replied that we all have a lot to atone for, just living in this country.

For me it raises the issue of individual responsibility in the face of structural sin. I am reminded of Phillip Hallie's book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, about the Huguenot pastor and pacifist, Andre Trocme, whose congregation and village saved 3,000 Jewish children from being murdered during World War II. Though a pacifist, Trocme served in the French military in the 1920s, and if I'm remembering the story correctly, declared his reservations about violence to his commanding officer while they were in the field in north Africa. His commander acidly responded that out here, it was too late to take an exception to violence, from which Trocme concluded that peacemaking's most important season was peace time. If one waits until hostilities have broken out in order to take a stand against violence, then one has waited too long.

What this has to do with my situation is that if you take your stand against American excess at the point of waiting tables in a casual dining eatery, you've waited too long. I do need the money, so I do talk up the appetizers. I also offer them a to-go box, and hope that they don't store up additional wrath for them and me by declining.

The Peace Corps is a great calling, but I hope that my co-worker, who is preparing for a career in the medical field, finds a way to serve here as well and educate people about good health, and not just treat them for the damage they've done to themselves by saddling up to buffet lines year after year.

But are people teachable? It is good to quote Thomas Jefferson when dumping a plate of soggy, uneaten salad into a trash can: "If God is just, I tremble for my country."

Not your father's just war theory

I read a nice little essay on Augustine's Just War Theory yesterday.  At the moment, the author and book escape me, but I'll cite them ASAP.  The essay both situated the theory in the broader framework of Augustine's thought, and demonstrated how difficult it is for moderns to make use of it, his assumptions being so different than ours.

"Disordered loves" as the taproot of sin is a familiar Augustinian teaching.  In short, something that can be taken away from you by force (life, health, loved ones, property, possessions, reputation, etc.) should never be your dearest love.  Better to love those virtues that we are given by God's grace, and which are ours forever because God is eternal. 

This means that for Augustine, the killing of people and breaking of things that is part and parcel of war is not his greatest concern.  His concern is the vices that are the engine of war:  greed, the lust to dominate, revenge, and so forth. 

So war cannot be justified on the basis of self-defense, since life and property are but transient earthly goods.  It can only be defended on pedagogical grounds, to punish vice and promote virtue. 

Surprise!  "Teaching people a lesson" may actually be a legitimate Augustinian rationale for war, although the Iraq War is more an example of somebody kicking the dog because his boss yelled at him.  The essay mentions the Falklands War, in which nothing much of material value was at stake, but the principles of international law and norms had been ridden roughshod over by the Argentinian junta.

This means that both pacifists who abhor war because of its enormous human costs, and non-pacifists who abhor the idea that one wouldn't defend one's kin if attacked, won't find much sympathy from Augustine, because neither agrees with his first principles.  We're all more Hobbesian than Augustinian, says the author.

Augustine's Just War theory also strongly emphasizes legitimate authority as a criterion, and assumes a rather quietistic stance toward authority.  We, being children of the Enlightenment, can imagine both revolution and conscientious objection in a way that would have been unthinkable for Augustine.

All this is to say that you can't just wait until hostilities are about to commence, and trot our the five or six Just War criteria as some sort of pregame check list.  Perhaps if Augustine knew of nuclear weapons and Martin Luther King, Jr., he might have given us a very different theory.  Because he didn't, we can't use his criteria without critical reflection.  On the other hand, there's no better time than war, with the exception, perhaps, of peace (!) to pose the Augustinian (and Christological) question, "Do you love me more than these?"

More hermeneutics

Via Leaving Muenster I found this argument for de-canonizing violent biblical texts.  The author, Hector Avalos, makes the following points: 

1. It is axiomatic that God is nonviolent.
2. The idea of a canon owes itself to an imperialistic logic of control and domination.
3. In fact, however, the canon is open, as can be demonstrated from numerous examples from history, including Luther's desire to shelve the Epistle of James, the differences between Protestant and Roman Catholic Bibles, etc.
4. It is more intellectually honest to de-canonize biblical texts that don't accord with #1 than to spiritualize their meaning or simply ignore them.

Now it goes without saying that the argument is dead on arrival because no one has sufficient authority to white-out certain texts.  It certainly doesn't help that the proposal comes from a man who freely admits to believing that "our life would be better if ancient religious texts did not have any role in validating or authorizing modern behavior."

That said, the article is a useful conversation starter for how we ought to deal with difficult passages of scripture. 

One response might be to question the author's assumption--which he doesn't believe but would, if he were a believer--that God is nonviolent.  It seems clear that peace is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and God calls Christians to the ministry of reconciliation.  But just because God wants us to be pacifists doesn't mean God is one.  It may be that God jealously guards violence as his sole prerogative, and only comfortable, suburbanite peaceniks would think otherwise.  This seems to be the plain sense of Romans 12:19-20, a text which the author hasn't yet put on the chopping block, but should probably think seriously about.

Against "spiritualizing texts" Avalos argues that authorial intent is the only valid way to interpret the scriptures, for any other way opens the door to relativism and silliness.  Why, we could just as easily interpret the Germans in Mein Kampf to be "all people," and glide right over that anti-Semitic talk! 

Sigh.  Does Godwin's Law apply to referred journals or only to the Internet?

I guess it's my affinity for the Communion of Saints, but I think of violent texts and their authors as members of the family.  Maybe deranged members of the family--a crazy aunt locked in the attic, or living more or less comfortably in a mental institution with lush, green lawns--but family nonetheless.  And I think we have a duty to both listen to them, and listen for and delight in what is redeemable in their discordant and discomfiting talk, for to silence voices that scare us seems um, unworthy of a nonviolent lifestyle.

So I think we could a lot worse than Augustine's hermeneutic that says if your interpretation doesn't contribute to love of God and love of neighbor, then you've misinterpreted the text, no matter what the plain sense of the text says.  And such a hermeneutic is by no means arbitrary, for Jesus himself says that on these two commandments hang the law and the prophets.  In other words, the Living Word reveals an interpretive principle within the Written Word, a principle that's better than taking a pair of scissors to the text.

Beating plowshares into swords

A follow-up to yesterday's post on Bejamin Kedar's Crusade and Mission.  From a modern standpoint, the Crusades certainly do seem to be a significant departure from early Christianity.  That incongruity wasn't lost on some medieval Christian crusade critics, who took Jesus's sheathing of Peter's sword with literal seriousness. 

Nor was it lost on the Muslims.  More than once, Kedar reports on Muslims who criticized what Catholics were doing to their lands on the basis of Christian history, pointing out that the Christian faith had originally spread peacefully, but was now expanding by bloodshed.

What's hinted at is the idea that Christianity and Islam have different dispensations, Christianity as a pacifistic monotheism, and Islam as monotheism destined for statecraft.  I wonder if I'm reading something into these scattered comments, or not...

At any rate, it reminds me of Halden's question "Is Christianity a civilizational project?"  It also reminds of Fr. Chris's comments on Stanley Hauerwas's project:

[Mealy-mouthed] is precisely what [Hauerwas]has been the couple of times where I have challenged him to explain how his opposition to coercive behavior translates to a coherent public theology. He said the usual (laudable) stuff about Christians needing to be more creative about finding alternatives to violence, but then he let loose a whole string of nonsense about "being committed to this conversation" and "wanting to contribute to spaces" where people talk about Christian engagement in the world. I have never heard an answer from him that is convincing about how one can embody this "non-coercive" Jesus ethic and not completely cede all *state* activities to non-Christians. I continue to be skeptical of any theology that seems to imply Christians can't take part in democratic government.

So here's some talking points for mealy-mouthed Stanley the next time someone asks him if he means we must cede all state activities to non-Christians:  "Hell no!  You damned sure can worship the God of Abraham and kill the enemy!  Just convert to Islam!"

By the way, where did Fr. Chris's blog go?