Avdat

A thumb in your eye for the Fourth of July

Ben Myers reminds us of when Stanley Hauerwas literally scared the hell out of some teenagers.  Father Chris takes strong objection to Hauerwas' anti-patriotism, and Lee chimes in here.

My take begins in the car ride home from church Sunday.  "We should have sung The Star Spangled Banner in church today!"  said my younger son.  I, trying not to take this personally since I pick the hymns and get plenty of grief for it from the other parishioners, replied, "In church we sing songs that praise God, and The Star Spangled Banner isn't about God.  It's about the country." 

"Well, God made the country, didn't he?" asked my son, with more than a trace of exasperation.

This is a pretty good point.  Nation states, like the weather, are a part of the created order.  We ought to give thanks for their role in helping life flourish on the planet, and pray for protection from their worst excesses.

There's certainly a lot to give thanks for in the United States.  I'm thankful for bison and bald eagles.  For The Scarlett Letter and Fanfare for the Common Man.  Not to mention Born to Run, Take Five and Ten.  I'm awed by the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building.  I'm moved by the splendid isolation of the Outer Banks and the Appalachian Balds.  I'm proud of Martin Luther King, Jr., and intrigued by Abraham Lincoln's inscrutable, Almighty deity.  I'm thankful for public school teachers, and my letter carrier, for whom my wife leaves a batch of peanut brittle in the mailbox every Christmas.  And he too is an instrument of the state. 

There's also a lot to deplore:  Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.  Our incarceration rate, and our illegitimacy and abortion rates.  Our stockpile of nuclear weapons.  The banality and hucksterism of our consumer lifestyles.  Strip malls.  The Florida recount.  Waterboarding.

If an American flag in a sanctuary or a patriotic worship service lifts up to God all thanksgiving and no intercession; if it is a sign of a "my country right or wrong" mentality, then both it and the mentality are problematic.  The state cannot be a Christian's highest loyalty any more than the sun and the moon can be objects of Christian worship. 

Because Hauerwas is a pacifist, and because the modern nation state maintains a monopoly on the use of violence, Hauerwas and his devotees may assume that pacifism necessitates a rather harsh anti-Americanism.  But I am not sure this is the case, any more so than pacifism would demand contempt for one's biological family or, again, for the weather.  It simply means that, out of devotion to Christ, there are some things the Christian cannot do in order to preserve human relationships. 

I, for instance, don't own a gun because of my Christian beliefs.  So, even though I love my family to pieces, it would be that much harder for me to save my family from an attacker by using deadly force.  The same thing goes for my country.  I love my country, but because of the ministry of reconciliation that Christ has entrusted me with, I cannot kill its enemies. 

Much has been said about Hauerwas' bombastic rhetorical style.  Like President Bush, Hauerwas don't do nuance.  And I've already written that there is a necessary role for the gadfly in the Christian community. 

My problem with Hauerwas is that, as Father Chris observes, when someone in the audience doesn't storm out in a huff but actually presses him on the implications of his faith, he becomes a bit vague and mealy-mouthed.  His statements are fine as far as they go:  over the top indictments of both God-and-Country conservative Protestantism, and an overly-secularized liberal Protestant establishment.  But there's not much there to build an effective social witness on, the proof of which is his students' political quietism and George Walllace "not a dime's bit of difference" attitude toward our political scene.

And I have already written, but will say again, that the thick ecclesiology, and nonviolent but engaged, transformative approach to the American scene and liberal values that was embodied in the Civil Rights Movement is a far more faithful Church than Hauerwas' Church as a vestibule of the Kingdom.  In short, Hauerwas' philosophical mentor Alisdair MacIntyre is wrong.  We don't need another Benedict.  We need another MLK.  But don't look for a new MLK from within the camp of Hauerwas' strongest devotees.

Blinkered

The first comment at this Ivy Bush post is a pretty good example of the blinkered world view that keeps the fiasco in Iraq chugging along.  The commenter boils down "the Muslim World," a truly vast world that stretches from Lagos to Jakarta, encompassing deserts, jungles, and frigid mountains, where over a billion people live in cities, towns and villages, some under pro-American dictators, others in democracies, still others under anti-American dictators, to the hard-core ideology of Al Qaida. 

These people (all these people, apparently) needed to be taught a lesson after 9/11.  These people (again, all these people, I suppose) can't be trusted with nukes.  Deposing the Taliban in Afghanistan just wasn't enough to accomplish either of these goals.  So you get the invasion of Iraq.  Which, incidentally, fits the requirements for Just War for the above mentioned reasons.

Set aside the obvious fact that it's we who are getting taught a lesson by this little foray into imperialism.  In this world view, it doesn't matter whether the war is progressing well or not.  All that matters is that Muslims are getting killed in great numbers.

"Hopefully, the introduction of quasi-democracy and quasi-human rights in Iraq will do the trick," he writes.  Well, there isn't even "quasi-democracy" in Iraq.  There is a rump government, propped up by the Americans, that can't even command the loyalty of its own police and army, much less the millions of Iraqis it purports to govern.  But all that proves is that "these people" need their attitudes adjusted even more.  Heads I win; tails you lose.   

And set aside the fact that perhaps the rest of the world is as dubious about our stewardship of nuclear weapons as we are of theirs.  After all, we alone have actually used them.  It doesn't matter what a billion potential suicide bombers think.

What's truly preposterous is the idea that this makes for a Just War.  Going to war today to prevent something that might happen twenty years from now is in no way a last resort.  Moreover, it's hard to read off the pages of the New Testament, or even much of the Old Testament, a 21st century foreign policy of bombing people into an attitude adjustment.  It's all reason (of a decidedly warped kind), and no revelation. 

This is the mentality of the three out of ten Americans who still think that President Bush is doing a good job, and who rely on Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Bill O'Reilly to inform them about what's happening in the world.  I laud Jonathan for his perseverance, but I am not sure there's any argument than can break though the willed ignorance, myopia, and ethnic and religious prejudice that prop up such a mentality.

Three out of ten is still a pretty big number.  To quote Thomas Jefferson, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever."

Fifty-one percent

John Howard Yoder once identified over twenty different forms of pacifism.  I don't have the book before me, but I wonder which, if any, of his types would accommodate George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community.  From his biography:

...It is interesting that in the same sermon George seemed to take a step back from pacifism.

"My only qualification to speak is that at least I represent confusion.  In the First World War I was a serving soldier in a Highland regiment of the line; in the Second World War I was a pacifist in the doldrums.  At the present time, if I face my Christian responsibilities, I am not, without qualification, prepared to be either."

Despite his reputation as a totally convinced pacifist, the truth is that George wavered from time to time.

"The trouble is, I can't stand pacifists!" he would sometimes cry; and he was certainly more at home among military men than with convinced pacifists.  He always described himself as a "reluctant pacifist," and he was at pains to distance himself from people he called "passive-ists," quietists who felt that the correct Christian response was non-involvement in the affairs of the world.

"What kind of pacifist are you, George?"  Alec Vidler, the Cambridge theologian, asked him as the two men sat with Ronald Selby Wright in the University Club in Edinburgh.

"Fifty-one percent," was the reply.

Yup.  There's much I can affirm in this here fingers-crossed-behind-the-back affirmation of gospel non-violence.

Karl Barth and War, Part 8 and Wrap-Up

There is also much that is commendable about Barth’s ethics on the life and death issues.  In the discussion of suicide, Barth urges the application of the gospel rather than the law in order to stay the hand of the one who would take his/her own life.  Rather than condemning self-murder with a “Thou shalt live,” assure the suicidal person that “Thou mayest live.”  Even in times of almost unbearable crises, life remains a gift from God.  Accepted on those grounds, we are free us to respect our own lives and the lives of others.

Given our son’s aggressive behavior, there have been times over the past ten years that life has felt more like a burden to bear than a gift to be enjoyed.  And yet I have learned much humility, learned how to accommodate myself to the needs of others, and learned to be grateful for things that I might otherwise take for granted.  Life is a gift.

Interestingly, remaining committed to gospel nonviolence while living with an aggressively autistic child has taught me new respect for the soldiers, sailors and Marines deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It’s hard to stay in control when someone is really coming after you.  It must be even harder when that someone is a stranger, not a relative, hates you rather than loves you, and is trying to kill you rather than trying, however poorly, to communicate with you.  There have been terrible abuses perpetrated in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Yet I am astonished that there aren’t more.  And I am impressed with the professionalism of those in the armed forces, many of whom are half my age. 

“Thou mayest live,” even in the presence of the enemy, in ways that glorify God and build up the neighbor.  It’s true, although it shouldn’t be proffered as glib reassurance that would dismiss the agony of the depressed, suicidal person, or the desperate person who lives in a war zone. 

Barth’s call for church, state and individuals to engage in “peace work” points out some glaring deficiencies in the current political debates regarding Iraq.  Right now, it’s boiled down to the Democratic majority in Congress calling for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, while the President and his Republican allies resist those calls for withdrawal.  This, pardon me, “foreign policy of Onanism” doesn’t really grapple with how the United States, or American Christians, can be, in the words of Saint Francis’s prayer, “instruments of God’s peace, sowing love where there is hatred.”  Of course the particular accent of that conversation will vary depending on whether the venue is the sanctuary or the State Department, but both conversations seem to suffer from an impoverishment of imagination if our only options are “to arms,” or “to disarm.”

“If you want peace, work for justice,” says the bumper sticker.  Who’d have thought that the turgid German prose of a theologian like Karl Barth could be thus reduced and simplified?  Yet the sticker does seem to capture the essence of Barth’s call to eliminate the root causes of war.  I think that Barth would call on both Church and State to redouble their efforts to establish a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians.  That smoldering, sometimes red hot, and until recently much ignored conflict is a major irritant in the relationship between the western (post)Christian world and the Islamic world. 

And I wonder if a rethinking of the Church’s mission presence in the Middle East is not in order.  Rather than trying to convert Arab Muslims to evangelical Protestantism, why not support the ancient Orthodox communities who’ve faithfully witnessed to Christ lo these many centuries among their Muslim neighbors?  Presbyterians have long ministered to the body and the soul on the mission field, building hospitals and schools as well as churches and seminaries.  Is there a role for missionaries to nurture grass roots institutions of civil society, the absence of which seems to be hobbling whatever progress free and fair elections might have generated in Iraq?  Are there Presbyterians and other American Christians who are willing to answer a call to such mission service, or to underwrite it?

Yoder believes that the difference between democracy and other forms of government is one of degree and not kind.  He’s not willing to disregard the scripture’s call to nonviolence in order to save it.  And the liberal values that underwrite our version of democracy have been subject to trenchant critiques by other theologians to whom I am most indebted.

Yet I am mindful of Walter Wink’s assertion that democracy is nonviolence institutionalized.  While democracy predates Christianity, a form of it being practiced among the pagan Greeks, I think that we see something of Christ’s meekness, mildness and willingness to yield in the 49% who lose an election submitting voluntarily to the 51% who carried the day, rather than trying to get in the streets what they couldn’t get at the ballot box.  I don’t know if democracy is worth killing for, but it might be worth dying for. 

I know; I know; some wags have said that dying for the liberal nation-state “is like being asked to die for the telephone company,”[1] and I, like most Americans, cheerfully reserve the right to be as cynical about our politicians and our system of government as that quote is.  But most days the honorable example I see set by sisters and brothers in Christ who faithfully fulfill their civic duties keeps such cynicism at bay.

IX

In the end, it appears as though I remain a pacifist.  I’m not a very good pacifist; my pacifism is an amalgam of many, sometimes irreconcilable theological and political ideas, and I’m not very happy about being a pacifist.  It’s a lot safer criticizing the war in Iraq on the respectable grounds of Just War Theory than from the territory of principled opposition to violence per se.  But to quote the apostle Peter, “Lord, to whom can we go?  You have the words of eternal life.”  For me, there’s no running away from the revolution in power that God has revealed in Jesus Christ.  We have Karl Barth’s relentlessly Christocentric reworking of every Christian doctrine to thank for that, even if Barth himself did not follow that method to its logical conclusion in Church Dogmatics III.4. 

---

[1] Alisdair MacIntyre, as quoted by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon in Resident Aliens:  Life in the Christian Colony.  Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1989.  pp.35.

Karl Barth and War, Part 7

It’s always enjoyable when a mind as fecund as Barth’s leaves off pure doctrines for a while and engages real world experiences. Barth does so in Church Dogmatics III.4., but this time around I was surprised at how unhelpful some of Barth’s observations might be in our present context. The Religious Right imagines America as a “Christian nation.” The “senior fellows” at think tanks wax poetic about “American exceptionalism.” Given all this, a narrow exception for war on the grounds that a nation might have serious grounds for not surrendering its God-given treasure amounts to carte-blanche on this side of the Atlantic.

Not only is it a dubious exception on practical grounds, but on theological grounds as well. Elsewhere in III.4. of Church Dogmatics, Barth demolishes the notion that the nation-state is an order of creation. Before God the Creator, we are children and perhaps parents, male or female and perhaps husband and wife. But we are not created German, Swiss or American. Yet Barth’s exception seems to let this potentially mischievous idea in the back door.

There is much about the United States of America that is commendable. The fact that we need a wall to keep people out rather than keep them in is testimony to something good going on here. But God never made a covenant with the U.S.A. And what’s “good” for the U.S.A. is not necessarily good for the creation as a whole. We need a theology that reminds people of that, a theology that is “scandalous in its particularity” and yet is more or less immune to insularities.

Yoder argues that in the case of tiny Switzerland in the shadow of mighty Nazi Germany, Barth has, contrary to his stated method, not brought forth a clear command of God but rather a hard case. While we can sympathize with the Swiss dilemma between 1939 and 1945, we might also wonder if there were choices other than readying for war and passing out of existence. Such other options, had they been discovered by Barth and his fellow Swiss, might have been more faithful to the gospel, more effective, and more likely to yield a more consistent ethic on war and peace when Barth sat down to write it after the war was over. What about non-violent resistance? What about “strategic surrender,” as the Romans practiced on occasion against earlier hordes of “German barbarians?”

But I can sympathize with Barth. As I mentioned earlier, our older son is autistic. A particularly troubling manifestation of this disability is his lack of empathy and propensity to lash out both verbally and physically. It has always been our goal to maintain a calm disposition in the face of such behavior, but sometimes we fail.

And sometimes we’ve chosen to fail. We were desperate a couple of years ago because he was getting so big, and his potential to do serious harm was growing greater every day. So we tried corporal punishment. We both had grave doubts about it. We couldn’t justify it on moral grounds. But “desperate times call for desperate measures,” right?

In the end, we abandoned it because it seemed to make the situation worse, not better, and because we could tell how easily “legitimate” corporal punishment (if there is such a thing, which is doubtful) can become illegitimate. So we returned to the various behavioral modification techniques our psychiatrist and the fine people at TEACCH have taught us. And two and a half years later there is real improvement. He is older, and is better able to reflect on and talk about his anti-social behavior, and better equipped to be taught by us. And we are better at being the kinds of parents he needs us to be in order to thrive.

I’m not at all saying that the threat posed by my ten year old son, who, despite his disability, really does love us, is at all on the same level as the threat that the German Wehrmacht posed between 1939 and 1945. I’m just saying that I completely understand people who are caught in situations where violence seems to be the only option. At the same time I remain convinced that a commitment to nonviolence demands patience to “stand firm and see what the Lord can do.”

Karl Barth and War, Part 6

Scroll down to read previous entries.  Or go here to read the first one, and work your way up.

Where do we begin in our critique of Barth’s ethics of life and death before God the Creator?  Yoder raises important questions about whether or not Barth is entirely true to his method of disavowing casuistry, and whether Barth’s ethics are as seamlessly woven into Barth’s theology as he would like them to be. 

Barth argues that, out of respect for God’s sovereignty, ethics should “never say never.”  But what sort of sovereignty are we talking about here?  I still remember the friendly argument that would arise between my two theology professors, George Stroup and Shirley Guthrie, whenever the topic of the Sovereignty of God came up (which was frequently--it being a Presbyterian seminary classroom!)  Guthrie would say that Stroup, being rather at home in the theology of scholastic Calvinism, thought that, “God can do anything he damn well pleases.”  But Guthrie, a student of Barth’s at Basel, possessed a doctrine of sovereignty that was less absolute, and speculative:  God will always be true to God’s self as revealed in Jesus Christ.  Or, as the Study Catechism interprets the first article of the Creed, and the Kingly office of Christ:

“God is a God of love, and… God's love is powerful beyond measure,”

and,

“(Jesus Christ) was the Lord who took the form of a servant; he perfected royal power in weakness. With no sword but the sword of righteousness, and no power but the power of love, Christ defeated sin, evil and death by reigning from the cross.”

Now it might seem strange to charge Karl Barth with not being Barthian enough, but in this case it does seem that his ethics are beholden to a less Christocentric understanding of sovereignty than we might have expected.  Yoder puts it this way:

If God’s sovereignty is understood in the royal condescension of Christ rather than speculation about pure infinity, then crucifixion (the willing abandonment of the genuine values incarnate in the one just Man) and resurrection (the triumph of love over a predictable impossibility) are the modes of the exercise of sovereign authority.  From here it would seem to follow in classical Christian thought that God does have power to make relevant and adequate in every situation that which he has already commanded, without being forced by certain situations to “take another line.”  It is difficult to see how a denial of this would honor God more than the pacifist claim that, if we have once understood God in Jesus Christ, we have no room for predicting exceptions, or even for affirming the possibility of unpredictable exceptions.[1]

In other words, God demonstrates God’s sovereignty in the triumph of the suffering love poured out in Jesus Christ.  Any unqualified No to violence grounded in that revelation upholds rather than diminishes God’s sovereignty.

Besides, Yoder argues, if God is sovereign in the “God can do anything he damn well pleases” sense, “there is no reason why the extreme case (Grenzfall) should be at the border (Grenze).  There would be no reason why abortion should not at some time be commanded by God when no mother’s welfare is at stake…”[2]  If such is the case with God’s sovereignty, then we are indeed lost in the woods, rather than looking down a more or less straight fence row.

Barth is careful to ground his ethics in his theology.  Yet while Barth eschews absolutes in ethics, they abound in his more theological works.  Yoder observes, “(Barth) does not clearly ask whether it is possible to make general statements about good behavior which could have the same validity in ethics as a statement about the divinity of Christ can have in theology.”[3]  Maybe he should!  After all, what’s good for the goose…

It’s not altogether clear that Barth escapes casuistry.  While his categorical Nos followed by small qualifications are not intended to be understood as casuistic exceptions to the rule,[4] but rather zones where we might well hear God’s paradoxical command to respect life by taking it, it is nevertheless true that the exceptional case is a case. 

Rather than rejecting casuistry, perhaps we simply need better casuistry.  After all, casuistry seems to be precisely what Jesus is doing in the Sermon on the Mount.  He promulgates a principle:  “Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect.”  Like the sages of old, he brings forth examples from nature to both illustrate and justify his maxim:  “God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”  What do you know?  A “natural theology” of nonviolence!  And he shows what this maxim might look like in practice, applying it in turn to the real life cases of slaves owned by abusive masters, debtors in the dock, and the hapless shepherd who’s impressed by a passing column of Roman soldiers.  In each case, Jesus seems to be advocating a form of non-violent resistance that empowers and grants dignity to the oppressed, and affirms God’s free grace by not simply reversing the roles of oppressed and oppressor.[5]

The stumbling block for me when it comes to the Sermon is not the extremist ethic of pacifism, but the fact that Jesus isn’t talking to me here.  In terms of my socio-economic power, I have a lot more in common with the slave-owner, the creditor, and the imperial forces than I do with those who are hearing Jesus’s advice.  To the extent, then, that Barth makes us respect the specific context in which ethical maxims are uttered, I support his reservations about casuistry. 

But what about me?  What about people like me?  Is there any word of the Lord for us?  Are we permitted to overhear this conversation, and if so, what conclusions are we to draw about the vast amount of unjust wealth and power at the fingertips of first world folk like us?  What of other conversations with folk like me in the Bible?  Nathan’s confrontation of King David, John the Baptist’s advice to the soldiers, Jesus’s conversations with both Zaccheaus and the rich young ruler?  I don’t think that we need an ethics that would help us evade the plain sense of these and other texts.  I am opposed to “Jesuitical casuistry.”  But we do seem to need thoughtful, creative, prayerful engagement with both the world of scripture and the world of everyday experience, in a way that liberates the Church for faithful hearing and obeying rather than doing the thinking for them.  There may well be a role for casuistry in such a process.  And I believe that such faithful hearing and obeying may well result in one Christian admonishing another with a sentence beginning with “Never…”

---

[1] pp.70.

[2] pp.62.

[3] pp.60.

[4] Yoder, pp.31.

[5] Wink, Walter.  Engaging the Powers:  Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination.  Minneapolis:  Fortress, 1992.  Ch.9.

Karl Barth and War, Part 5

Scroll down to see previous installments...

Finally we arrive at our main topic, Barth’s analysis of war.  He begins by disabusing the reader of any prejudices that might render the topic more pleasant.  First, in days of old, nobles prosecuted wars with private armies.  Most people were bystanders, unless it were their riches looted and their daughters raped.  But that is no longer the case.  In modern nation-states, everyone is a citizen; therefore everyone is a combatant.  And everyone is responsible.

Secondly, while nations go to war under the banners of high-minded rhetoric, the reality is that, “It’s the money, stupid”:

Even though we may constantly forget it, we have no good reason not to recognize that modern war… is primarily and basically a struggle for coal, potash, ore, oil and rubber, for markets and communications, for more stable frontiers and spheres of influence as bases from which to deploy power for the acquisition of more power, especially of an economic kind.  To those who have eyes to see, it is especially evident to-day that there exists a worldwide armaments industry… which imperiously demands that war break out from time to time.[1]

One cannot read these half-century old words and not think “

Iraq

,” “Haliburton,” “neo-conservatism,” and other choice words.

Thirdly, the industrialization of war means “killing with neither glory, dignity nor chivalry, with neither restraint nor consideration in any respect.”[2]  One thinks of George C. Scott playing General Patton:  “I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country.” Or one thinks of the barbarism in the Pacific that Ken Burns documented in The War:  footage of Japanese soldiers flushed out of caves by flamethrowers and shot by American Marines at point blank range with no more thought than what one might give to swatting a fly on the wall.

Add three more points:  One, since all are responsible in modern war, all are guilty.  Two, the guilt of “the enemy” may consist of nothing more than that he/she fights for his/her country the same way that “we” do.  Three, war opens a Pandora’s box of iniquity.  “To kill effectively… must not those who wage war steal, rob, commit arson, lie, deceive, slander, and unfortunately to a large extent fornicate, not to speak of the almost inevitable repression of all the finer and weightier forms of obedience?"[3]

Given this world of iniquity that war sets fire to, Barth concludes that waging war is a far more dubious act than either abortion or suicide, a reversal of the usual ranking of illegitimate killing among both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians.[4]  He challenges the reader who would justify war on Christian grounds to admit that “the inflexible negative of pacifism has almost infinite arguments in its favor and is almost infinitely strong.”[5]

Almost.

What of the church and war?  In a small print section on pages 455-456 Barth disagrees with J.G. Heering that the blessing of war constituted the “fall” of Christianity.  Barth would go deeper.  The real problem is the collapse of a genuine ecclesiastical eschatology.  Around the time of

Constantine

, Christians began to defer too much to the logic of the present age that is passing away rather than being a sign, instrument and foretaste of the peaceable kingdom to come.  Sadly, the Reformation did not roll back this defective eschatology.  To the contrary, the Protestant churches dedicated themselves to the war machines of early modern nation-states with renewed vigor.  And this dedication has been only possible because of a willed ignorance on the part of the church’s doctors and pastors regarding the horrors of war, and the completely misguided notion that war is a normal state of affairs for the state.

Nein!  Barth argues that the state’s true mission, its opus proprium, is peace work,[6] not war work.  Both states and the individuals that comprise them are called to commit themselves to the task of uprooting the causes of war.  It’s not headline grabbing work, like the pacifist’s call for disarmament, or the militarist’s call for rearmament, but it’s the truly necessary work.  Only if the Church commits itself to peace work over the long haul, and holding out for peace long past the time when deferring to war would seem the prudent thing, can the Church’s blessing of war have any real weight.

But will Barth ever get around to mentioning an exceptional case, as he does when he considers suicide, abortion, self-defense, and capital punishment?  He finally does.  While even the very extermination of a nation-state may not be sufficient reason to bear arms, Jeremiah’s call to submit to the Babylonian yoke being a noteworthy example, “when a people or state has serious grounds for not being able to assume responsibility for the surrender of its independence, or, to put it even more sharply, when it has to defend within its borders the independence which it has serious grounds for not surrendering,” then God may well command the Christians within those borders to wage war.  In short, if God has entrusted to a particular nation, state or people a priceless treasure which God in God’s providence has determined not to pass out of human history, then the taking of human lives to preserve such a treasure is permissible.

What is Barth talking about?  you ask.  He gives one telling example:  a violation of Swiss neutrality.

In a departure from traditional just war theory, Barth argues that if this is the case, then those entrusted with the stewardship of this priceless gift should fight regardless of the likelihood of success.  For Isaiah told Ahaz to stand fast lest he not stand at all.  In a further departure from much reflection on the morality of war, Barth refuses to admit that such a case might be a matter of choosing between the lesser of two evils.  If it is God’s will, then it is good, and the Christian should fight “in faith and therefore with joyous and reckless determination.”[7]  One thinks of any number of stirring speeches spoken in books, movies and on stage by kings and commanders burdened with the task of rallying their troops for a battle in which the only glory they might gain is on the pages of history.

Barth concludes his discussion of war with an extended small print discussion of conscription and conscientious objection.  Because Barth is keen to emphasize the individual’s responsibility for war and peace, Barth thinks that a draft is fitting.  Because Barth rejects pacifism, he likewise rejects conscientious objection from military service.  He even finds unacceptable the C.O.’s desire to serve as a corpsman or clerk.  Barth’s not much for soothing the conscience of the C.O., pointing out that even these non-combatant roles ultimately serve the pointy end of the spear. 

Instead Barth advocates selective conscientious objection.  Christian citizens and soldiers are called to weigh the merits of each potential conflict.  If the cause of the war is “concretely an evil one,” then the Christian may well have to serve the state in the paradox of defying it.  However, Barth concedes that the state probably cannot make any legal provision for selective conscientious objection, and warns those who trod this path to gird up their loins, for the state will surely fine or imprison them.  But what are we to expect?  asks Barth.  In days of old we had prophets and martyrs.  Can’t the Church create such people today?

---

[1] CD III.4.  pp.452.

[2] CD III.4.  pp.453.

[3] CD III.4., pp.454.

[4] Yoder, pp.38.

[5] CD III.4.  pp.455.

[6] I’m indebted to John and Katherine Patterson’s book Blueberries for the Queen for the phrase “peace work.”  It’s a children’s book, illustrated by Susan Jeffers, about a little boy named William growing up during World War II.  In his dreams he’s a knight fighting to end the war, but by day he’s just the youngest in his family, unable to contribute to the war effort.  Interestingly, a real queen moves into William’s community that summer, the exiled Queen of the

Netherlands

.  This only fuels William’s imagination.  One day, William and his father are picking blueberries, and William asks him, “Is picking blueberries war work?”  His dad replies, “No, I think it’s more like peace work.  Nobody could be unhappy eating blueberries.  They chase all your worries away.”  William picks some blueberries, and manages to deliver them to the Queen herself in her summer home-away-from-home.  The last page finds William dreaming about the queen after the war is over.  “There is still a lot of peace work to be done.  Can we count on you?  William gave a deep bow.  Yes, Queen, he said.  He knew he was good at peace work.” 

[7] CD III.4.  pp.463.

Karl Barth and War, Part 4

Part One.

Part Two.

Part Three.

What such borderline cases may look like (click on link to Part Three) becomes clearer as Barth discusses various killing phenomena.  God may command suicide in order that persons under threat of torture not give up their companions.  Abortion may be permitted in order to save the life of the mother. 

In the case of euthanasia, which for Barth includes eugenics, the answer is an unqualified No.  Only in a small print section on page 427 does Barth consider the future possibility that human arrogance might be an unwanted factor as medical technology improves to the point where life can be extended beyond all reason.  Were Barth writing these pages today and not in 1950, he would certainly have to give this possibility in-depth treatment. 

Self-defense, Barth observes, is surely prohibited in scripture.  Yet the point of the commandment is to teach us that we do not live by our own strength and wits but by God’s grace.  The person who has been purged by God’s Word of all instincts toward self-preservation may in fact be called upon by God to act individually to restrain sin and defend order.  That these are tasks normally entrusted to the State goes without saying, but it is God’s command that redeems such an act from mere vigilantism.

As for the death penalty, well, it’s hard to see how such a sentence can serve the three customary rationales for state-sponsored justice--the protection of society, retribution, and rehabilitation.  Who is to say that a person is no longer teachable?  Why is there any need for vengeance now that Jesus has paid it all?  And surely protecting society doesn’t entail killing one of its own children!  That said, capital punishment may be in order for high treason in time of war, if the state’s existence is imperiled.

Karl Barth and War, Part 3

     Given all this, it’s reasonable to ask, Is Christian ethics even possible?  Are we not presented with a bewildering array of esoteric and unrelated orders from the Almighty to the innumerable human creatures that have walked the planet?  If we think of the command of God as a ray of light illuminating the human being, then isn’t the problem that we are lost amongst the beams like small children in a Redwood forest?

Barth would say No.  Though God may issue various and sundry commands, it is always God who is speaking.  So if it is true that, “Morning by morning new mercies I see,” then it’s also true that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.”  Ethics remains a possibility.  Barth wants to give his readers guidelines rather than answers, a “formed reference to the ethical event”[1] rather than casuistry.

So we do not stand bewildered in a forest of tall trees, but along a more or less straight line of fence posts.  In ethics, we connect those fence posts with some lumber of our own, always attentive to where the fence row might jog in or out.  Because, to be sure, it will.

Barth’s guidelines will almost never take the form of an absolute mandate or prohibition.  As we have already seen, God alone is absolute.  The astute reader will thus anticipate that Barth’s answer to the question “Is it always illegitimate to take a human life?” will be “No.” 

Genuine hearing and obeying means a genuine openness to whatever God might say.  True, God might have commanded us 99 times to turn the other cheek, but who’s to say God might not command us to beat our plowshares into swords the next time?  So out of respect for God’s sovereignty, Barth would say, we cannot categorically affirm pacifism.

And, we might add, Barth’s resistance to ethical absolutes on life and death issues such as war arises from his reading of the New Testament.  In a small print discussion on legitimate versus illegitimate killing in the Bible,[2] Barth notes that church discipline as practiced by the apostles resulted in death on at least three occasions, that of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5, and an unnamed sinner in the Corinthian congregation in 1 Corinthians 5.  Barth does not seize on these stories as so many people do who’ve already made up their minds about violence and look for a proof text to justify themselves.  After the death and resurrection of Jesus, isn’t it a wonder that such things occurred, and at the hands of Christians?  Barth seems to ask.  But there they are.  Outliers, to be sure.  But they are biblical texts that cannot be ignored.

That said, whatever exceptions will be few and far between.  God is pro-life.  Barth observes the following:  As Creator, God has willed that there be creatures with an existence distinct from the self-sufficient being of the One God in Three Persons.  That we are alive at all is an experience of grace, “God’s free gift of love which I cannot earn and do not deserve.”[3]  And our status as living creatures is fundamental to all other ethical tasks.  God in scripture has commanded “Thou shalt not kill.”  God in scripture takes an extraordinary interest in the nuts and bolts of biological processes.  “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news preached to them.”[4]  Jesus himself agonized in the Garden before he surrendered his life to the Gentiles, demonstrating that life is a precious gift.  And God raised Jesus from the dead, demonstrating God’s resolve to overcome all that would destroy life.  For these and many other reasons it is incumbent upon humanity to both respect and protect life.

In short, “the freedom for life to which a man is summoned by the command of God is the freedom to treat as a loan both the life of all men with his own and his own with that of all men.”[5]  But again, we already anticipate that Barth will tell us that there are times and places in which we may have to pay back that loan.  As an act of Christian stewardship of this good, yet fallen world, we may have to return to God that which God has loaned to others.

“Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out?”  God forbid!  “Indifference, wantonness, arbitrariness or anything else opposed to respect cannot even be considered as a commanded or even a permitted attitude.”[6] 

Nor is it the case that there are autonomous spheres of human existence where the Word of God is not expected to get a full hearing.  No two kingdoms talk here!  In all times and places God demands reveren