- Exodus 23: 20-33

When Hernan Cortes first arrived in the Americas, the Aztecs he met with thought he was a long-awaited god, whom their prophets had said would come in that very year. They thought he was Quetzalcoatl, the son of god, and honored him in a manner befitting a god. He was received with great pomp and ceremony by Monteczuma II, king of the Aztecs. What happened afterwards is, of course, a matter of dispute, but both sides agree is reeks of opprobium. The European conquistadors and colonialists in the 16th through the 19th centuries claimed they were planting flags in foreign countries for “Gold, God and Glory“. From the accounts of Las Casas, a Spanish priest who was horrified that Spanish soldiers were raping native women and spearing their babies on sticks, and decided to write his harrowing account of the genocide that was occurring, since he believed that Spain would be damned if it continued sponsoring these men, “Gold” and “Glory” seem to leave “God” a far-distant third in their motivations. Though of course there were also people like Las Casas, who had the conscience to be horrified.

The Aztecs believed that they were being attacked by invisible arrows that pierced them and made them ill – not too bad a visualization of the works of virulent diseases. By way of explanation for the rape and pillage and inexplicable interest in the fictional “El Dorado”, they came to tell a story that the white man suffered from a sickness that only gold could cure -  that in the absence of gold, they went mad.

The Igbo people of what is now Nigeria (or so I am told) believed that the white men who came to their shores were dead ancestors come to visit, because their own skins turned pale when they died. The cowrie shells traded for slaves represented the bodies of their ancestral dead drowned at sea – they believed they were redeeming their ancestors, which they bought in exchange for the enemies, who were shipped off to the Americas – an efficient, not to mention profitable way of ridding the land of one’s enemies.

All this is painful history, and doubly painful for those who call themselves Christians – because it’s pretty good ammunition for the argument that Christians are no better than non-Christians; that sometimes pagans treat Christians better than vice versa. And to people who whip out this argument, I guess there’s only one thing to say: it’s true. Nominal or practicing, those who have flown the banner of Christ have behaved no better and no worse at their best and worst at various times in history.

So, all this begs the question: Where was God in all this?

image source

Where was God in the former Yugoslavia, when people (professedly Christian) with extremely minor differences started killing, raping, pillaging neighbouring villages? Where was God when Rwanda descended into chaos? Where was God when the Serbians assassinated the Archbishop Ferdinand of Bavaria, setting off the chain of events that we retrospectively called, first the Great War, and then (because it had a sequel) World War I? Why did God ask the Israelis to commit, in the Promised Land, what sounds like genocide? Why does Steven Pinker have the ammunition to point out that what he considers “Old Testament Morality” frequently involves condemning interracial marriages, slaughtering children, killing livestock, a scorched-earth policy and taking no prisoners?

These are not easy questions to answer. But I will attempt a preliminary answer. You see, arguably, all this was Plan B – the 40 year wander, rather than the straightforward 4-day trip out of Egypt into the Promised Land. Not that the straight-forward trip is easy – it probably involved as much patience, if not more. In the passage from Exodus, it is “fear”, “hornets” and poorer health that are the chosen agents of God’s judgment on a sinful people – not military victory. (And if we look at the military victories actually in Plan B, we’ll realize that a lot of them don’t even involve fighting, and certainly not greater military might or cunning, but that’s another article). I’m not saying that fear, confusion, hornets, starvation and disease are pleasant things, but they are NOT genocide.

So, let’s look at God’s Plan A: His idea of divinely-sanctioned colonialism:

1) You will eat good food.

2) You will not fall ill, and live as long as your body was made for living.

3) All your procreation will be successful.

4) People will get scared of you (people are usually scared of people who eat good food despite not having a whole lot of resources, don’t fall ill, and multiply quickly – sound familiar?)

5) People will start leaving the lands (usually because they’ve exhausted them – remember, we are in a mix of hunter-gatherer/nomadic/agricultural society, and over-farming is a recurring issue in agricultural societies)

6) Hornets!

7) People will be very fed up with hornets, and slowly let the land (which they probably have overworked – remember only Israel was told to keep the Sabbath) lie fallow. When the land has lied fallow, nature will take over and re-grow and re-fertilize and re-irrigate the land (see the World Without Us)

Generally, remember that this will take a long, long, long, long time. Don’t be impatient.

9) I have set apart a limited amount of land for you. I’ve told you where the boundaries are. Keep your sights on that land only and don’t be greedy.

10) Do NOT worship any of the gods of the other peoples around you. Keep yourselves separate spiritually (and since it helps – physically – and only in the portion of the land I’ve designated). Do NOT make compromises with the other peoples (because it will lead you to compromise My law) **

What can I say? History tells us we are not very good at following Plan A (cf. The Garden of Eden). Well, if only God explained himself better – we might protest – but history’s track record of that isn’t too good either. God is kind to us, and sometimes He gives an explanation, but even then we’re not very good at understanding the explanation. Mostly, we are impatient. When God has promised us something, we want it NOW. We’d prefer to speed things up. We don’t like the long-term stuff. We are hardwired to be demanding and mopey and annoying, like small children when they are hungry. The trouble with being God’s child, though, is that he’s a good Father. And good fathers usually demand that their children grow up.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

- St Paul, to the Corinthians, Letter #1: Chapter 13, verse 11

Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men.
- St Paul to the Corinthians, Letter #1: Chapter 14, verse 20

**In the original version of this article, this paragraph read

“10)DO NOT try to speed up the process by intermarrying, because that means your wives will convince you to worship their gods. Also, since women had rarely any choice in the matter, “intermarrying” probably meant rape, abduction, forced marriage to form alliances, polygamy (especially harems for kings and patriarchs), etc.”

but I thought better of it since it was not a helpful embellishment of the passage. I apologize if it was not a helpful speculation.

Yes. Five years of Cambridge, Massachusetts with its white steepled churches and its air of vague Unitarianism has definitely rubbed off on me. There are bits I’m personally not proud of – play-acting the New Yorkery sophisticate dodging the hard questions, swirling cheap wine in dirty glasses, trying on different affectations, flipping through fashion magazines with a worshipful intensity that made me hate my body, and above all, intellectual snobbery and pure, blind prejudice. Prejudice that made me hold anyone who called themselves Republican or tacked up a Bush family photo in their dorm in mild contempt, when it was always my philosophy to treat everyone as equal, beautiful, and valuable. I guess it was not until I shipped myself off to my supposedly dream-job in Manhattan itself that I realized this stuff would crush me. The refinement, the condescension, the pretty phrases turned at elite tables, the self-congratulation on one’s own openness and cosmopolitanism. The ironic conviction that you are the most tolerant of the tolerant, and that therefore everyone else should be like you.

But I am liberal. Because beneath that supersubtle veneer, I am dispossessed. I am poor. I am needy, and I need help. I need lifting up.

I glower with resentment that my particular gifts and vocation have always immediately conjured pictures of abject poverty (cf. Avenue Q’s opening number…”What do you do with a B.A. in English?” Seriously, the most depressing 3 minutes of my Manhattan summer…). That is, unless you throw in the towel and become a consultant. Not that I have anything against consultants, it’s the salary that’s the problem for me. You see, I would much rather carry the burden of poverty – for now – than the burden of riches. It’s simply a matter of what temptations I’m more liable to yield to. I know myself. I would be a workaholic. I would not keep the Sabbath. As it is, my eye for beauty gets me into all sorts of trouble with gluttony and lust and pride – I do not need to stoke those fires. I would get obsessed with fashion. I would be filled with anxiety. I would die a slow death in Manhattan, like Madam Bovary, surrounded by exquisite things. I loved New York, but New York couldn’t care less. And I’m not mature enough to opt out of something my dear friends will no doubt find themselves legitimately enjoying – the wonderful restaurants, the museum openings, the fabulous fashions, the privileged refinement of the thing.

How is it fair that my friend is gifted with the vocation of being a Goldman Sachs trader, who enjoys every second of making 20% profit on any given capital, who fits easily in with the New York set, and I am equally gifted but in the bizzaro-artist-writer vocation? Why should I pay for the sins of a society that values one category of gifts more than another? Why should I pay for the fact that I am simply a very very long term (as in, in undiscovered time, a couple of centuries later, when they unearth my poems from a little drawer, if at all, sort of long-term) investment? Or that ultimately, my work will only be recognized in heaven? I mean, I would simply be happy with the dole. But nope, no dole. Also, I’m not even a citizen. So even though I’ve been through this marvelous Harvard education, in two months, grace period on my visa is up, and yup! Deportation to Mexico or Canada.

And I come from a long line of those who were dispossessed, sometimes very obviously because of this artistic disposition. My great grandfather, who goes by the label of “useless poet” in the family oral history, eloped with someone else’s betrothed. To avoid being drowned by the village, they escaped from China to Malaya, where they scratched out a living (or rather, she did) selling cakes and writing name-poems on commission. They gave away two daughters because they didn’t have enough money. Their only son was snatched away by a wealthy landlord. My great-grandmother died of a broken heart, and her husband walked distractedly out of the house, trailing my grandmother and her sister, aged 5 and 7. They walked all the way down the peninsula to Singapore, only to have the girls kidnapped and sold off at a temple where their father had left them in trust.

On the other side of my family, my great-grandfather came to America as an indentured laborer from China. He planted rice in Hawaii, then made good and opened a small tailoring business. He sent for my great-grandmother, and they had a whole string of children who were born American citizens. Not wanting them to lose touch with their culture, he sent them back to China for schooling. Then America passed the Chinese Exclusion Act (I still remember reading about this with tears in my eyes, in the Tozzer Library at Harvard – in that moment, history became unbearably personal – ), and my great-grandfather hurried back to prevent losing everything he had built. But then war broke out, and the family in Asia lost their papers. They had no proof they had ever lived in America. Eventually, my great-grandfather died alone in the mountains of Hawaii in 1940. He did not know what had happened to his wife or children. His grave is there – I visited it, left him a freshly-cut bird of paradise. Meanwhile, the family moved south and south as the Japanese advanced from Manchuria into Hong Kong and into Malaya and finally Singapore. They lost two brothers along the way. They starved in that war, getting bloated cos there was only tapioca to eat, but my grandmother also fell in love and married my grandfather.

So you see, between slavery, immigration, kidnapping, debilitating depression, war, sickness, separation, homelessness, spontaneous poetic elopement and the final, inevitable fall, I can’t help but sympathize with the poor, even though I was born into the fortunate generation that attained comfortable upper-middle-class-ness. It is my legacy. I am homeless myself – but in good company. “Foxes have dens to live in, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place even to lay his head. (Luke 9:58)”. Jesus lived a life of radical dependence on charity, sponsorship, donations – often from rich women, who would open their homes to him. This is not to say he wasn’t also royal, authoritative, just, wholesome, honorable, and the greatest warrior who ever lived. But he was gentle as well as severe, merciful as well as just, beautiful as well as terrible. I wouldn’t say he was liberal – I prefer the word Generous. In Chinese, there is a proverb that says a good man is one with a stomach so big it could hold a boat: this is a picture of generosity. A boat is also a generous thing – it is always headed outwards, its prow facing the world – it represents hope, always containing something else for someone else – Jesus was like that. He was a truly Generous soul.

And His Generosity is wise and extravagant. Of course if you give the homeless man on the corner a quarter you don’t know if it will go towards drugs or his next meal. But if you give him a sandwich, or even better, piece after piece of the most exquisite Swiss designer chocolate, you know exactly what he’s going to do with it, and it is a tiny glimpse of the Kingdom of God. I mean, it’s actually a completely sound application of Diminishing Marginal Returns. How monotonous that chocolate is to someone who feasts upon it every day! But to the homeless man, it is a revelation! Because so much lies buried, so much human potential, so much light and heat and power that goes untapped and is dispersed dimly because of a lack of opportunity. But beyond lack of opportunity there is a larger sin at hand – that ancient sin that blinds us from looking that crazy muttering bag lady in the eye and seeing Jesus.

My grandmother, whom I have never met, passed on to me her insatiable hunger for knowledge. Sold into slavery, she listened secretly behind the curtain as the two sons of the household were educated, and taught herself to read and write. By the time she was married at 16, barefoot and pregnant with 6 children and one adoptee, she was reading the Chinese classics – Dream of the Red Chambers, Journey to the West, and her personal favourite, the epic of war and war strategy, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Did she go to Harvard? Nope. But she sure deserved to be here. I mean, talk about admissions essay material.

I am their representative. My grandmother was one of the most generous people I know. She gave her house to the church when she died – she was my maternal grandmother, and my paternal grandfather was the one who founded that church and served as its first pastor. My parents were married in this church founded upon the backs of their two families, whose stories magnificently intertwined. I am their daughter.

And I realize it is only because of them that I can afford to be generous. It is only because, by a complicated string of Providences, I don’t have to worry about supporting my parents or my siblings, despite being the eldest child (and suffering subconsciously, through no fault of my parents, from the Chinese First Child syndrome). How can I, with all I have received from my family, my culture, my country, fritter it away on acquiring rather than giving? It is a calling that has blown through generations, a realization of the hopes and dreams held beyond even them by unknown, nameless, illiterate ancestors – to tell stories, to discern the meanings of names, to sing hymns, to love wisely and fiercely and well, to read and to know and to do and make new things -

How can I, knowing these things, then turn away and ignore such a siren call? How can I, seeing these things, then turn away and not spread my wings? Hopefully, by the Grace of Christ Jesus our Lord, by the Grace that calls men and women to Himself from generation to generation, the apple will not fall too far from the tree.

Mortimer M. Huang: A Valediction Liturgy

Reader 1:

from The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

Gandalf Falls into Shadow

The dark figure streaming with fire raced towards them. The orcs yelled and poured over the stone gangways. Then Boromir raised his horn and blew. Loud the challenge rang and bellowed, like the shout of many throats under the cavernous roof. For a moment the orcs quailed and the firey shadow halted. Then the echoes died as suddenly as a flame blown out by a dark wind, and the enemy advanced again.

‘Over the bridge!’ cried Gandalf, recalling his strength. ‘Fly! This is a foe beyond any of you. I must hold the narrow way. Fly!’ Aragorn and Boromir did not heed the command, but still held their ground, side by side, behind Gandalf at the far end of the bridge. The others halted just within the doorway at the hall’s end, and turned, unable to leave their leader to face the enemy alone. The Balrog reached the bridge. Gahdalf stood in the middle of the span, leaning on the staff in his left hand, but in his other hand Galmdring gleamed, cold and white. His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings. It raised the whip, and the thongs whined and cracked. Fire came from its nostrils. But Gandalf stood firm.

‘You shall not pass,’ he said. The orcs stood still, and a dead silence fell. ‘I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udun. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass.’

The Balrog made no answer. The fire in it seemed to die, but the darkness grew. It stepped forward slowly on to the bridge, and suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall; but still Gandalf could be seen, glimmering in the gloom; he seemd small, and altogether alone: grey and bent, like a wizened tree before the onset of a storm. From out of the shadow a red sword leaped flaming. Glamdring glittered white in answer.

There was a ringing clash and a stab of white fire. The Balrog fell back and its sword flew up in molten fragments. The wizard swayed on the bridge, stepped back a pace, and then again stood still.

‘You cannot pass!’ he said.

With a bound the Balrog leaped full upon the bridge. Its whip whirled and hissed.

At that moment Gandalf lifted his staff, and crying aloud he smote the bridge before him. The staff broke asunder and fell from his hand. A blinding sheet of white flame sprang up. The bridge cracked. Right at the Balrog’s feet it broke, and the stone upon which it stood crashed into the gulf, while the rest remained, poised, quivering, like a tongue of rock thrust out into emptiness.

With a terrible cry the Balrog fell forward, and its shadow plunged down and vanished. But even as it fell it swung its whip, and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard’s knees, dragging him to the brink. He staggered and fell, grasp vainly at the stone, and slid into the abyss. ‘Fly, you fools!’ he cried, and was gone.

The fires went out, and blank darkness fell. The company stood rooted with horror staring into the pit. Even as Aragorn and Boromir came flying back, the rest of the bridge cracked and fell. With a cry Aragorn roused them.

‘Come! I will lead you now!…. we must obey his last command. Follow me!’

-

Celebrant:

I am Resurrection and I am Life, says the Lord.
Whoever has faith in me shall have life,
even though he die.
And everyone who has life,
and has committed himself to me in faith,
shall not die for ever.

As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives
and that at the last he will stand upon the earth.
After my awaking, he will raise me up;
and in my body I shall see God.
I myself shall see, and my eyes behold him
who is my friend and not a stranger.

For none of us has life in himself,
and none becomes his own master when he dies.
For if we have life, we are alive in the Lord,
and if we die, we die in the Lord.
So, then, whether we live or die,
we are the Lord’s possession.

In the midst of life we are in death;
from whom can we seek help?
From you alone, O Lord,
who by our sins are justly angered.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Hymn: In the Sweet By and By

There’s a land that is fairer than day,
And by faith we can see it afar;
For the Father waits over the way
To prepare us a dwelling place there.

Refrain

In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore;
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

We shall sing on that beautiful shore
The melodious songs of the blessed;
And our spirits shall sorrow no more,
Not a sigh for the blessing of rest.

Refrain

To our bountiful Father above,
We will offer our tribute of praise
For the glorious gift of His love
And the blessings that hallow our days.

Refrain

Reader 2: A Reading from the Old Testament

Genesis 18

The Three Visitors

¹ The LORD appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. ²Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground.

³ He said, “If I have found favor in your eyes, my lord, ^[a] do not pass your servant by. ⁴ Let a little water be brought, and then you may all wash your feet and rest under this tree. ⁵ Let me get you something to eat, so you can be refreshed and then go on your way—now that you have come to your servant.”
“Very well,” they answered, “do as you say.”

⁶ So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. “Quick,” he said, “get three seahs ^[b] of fine flour and knead it and bake some bread.”

⁷ Then he ran to the herd and selected a choice, tender calf and gave it to a servant, who hurried to prepare it. ⁸ He then brought some curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared, and set these before them. While they ate, he stood near them under a tree.

⁹ “Where is your wife Sarah?” they asked him.
“There, in the tent,” he said.

¹⁰ Then the LORD ^[c] said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.”
Now Sarah was listening at the entrance to the tent, which was behind him. ¹¹ Abraham and Sarah were already old and well advanced in years, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing. ¹² So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, “After I am worn out and my master ^[d] is old, will I now have this pleasure?”

¹³ Then the LORD said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Will I really have a child, now that I am old?’ ¹⁴ Is anything too hard for the LORD ? I will return to you at the appointed time next year and Sarah will have a son.”

¹⁵ Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, “I did not laugh.”
But he said, “Yes, you did laugh.”

Song: Bright Eyes (Watership Down)

Music and Lyrics by Mike Batt

Is it a kind of dream
Floating out on the tide
Following the river of death downstream
Oh, is it a dream?

There’s a fog along the horizon
A strange glow in the sky
And nobody seems to know where you go
And what does it mean?
Oh, is it a dream?

Bright eyes
Burning like fire
Bright eyes
How can you close and fail?
How can the light that burned so brightly
Suddenly burn so pale?
Bright eyes

Is it a kind of shadow
Reaching into the night
Wandering over the hills unseen
Or is it a dream?

There’s a high wind in the trees
A cold sound in the air
And nobody ever knows when you go
And where do you start
Oh, into the dark

Bright eyes
Burning like fire
Bright eyes
How can you close and fail?
How can the light that burned so brightly
Suddenly burn so pale?
Bright eyes

Bright eyes
Burning like fire
Bright eyes
How can you close and fail?
How can the light that burned so brightly
Suddenly burn so pale?
Bright eyes

Reader 1: Lord of the Rings Continued

Thus, at last, they came beyond hope under the sky and felt the wind on their faces. They did not halt until they were out of bowshot from the walls. The shadow of Misty Mountains lay upon it, but eastward there was golden light on the land. It was but one hour after noon. The sun was shining; the clouds were white and high.

They looked back. Dark yawned the archway of the Gates under the mountain-shadow. Faint and far beneath the earth rolled the slow drum-beats: doom. A thin black smoke trailed out. Nothing else was to be seen; the dale all around was empty. Doom. Grief at last wholly overcame them, and they wept long: some standing and silent, some cast upon the ground. Doom, doom. The drum-beats faded.

Celebrant: Let us now speak well of the dead.

Congregation is invited to share eulogies.

Reader 3: A Reading from the New Testament from the Gospel of John

On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. ¹⁸Bethany was less than two miles^[a] from Jerusalem, ¹⁹and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother. ²⁰When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home.

²¹“Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. ²²But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”

²³Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

²⁴Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”

²⁵Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; ²⁶and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

²⁷“Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I believe that you are the Christ,^[b] the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”

²⁸And after she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary aside. “The Teacher is here,” she said, “and is asking for you.” ²⁹When Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to him. ³⁰Now Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. ³¹When the Jews who had been with Mary in the house, comforting her, noticed how quickly she got up and went out, they followed her, supposing she was going to the tomb to mourn there.

³²When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

³³When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. ³⁴“Where have you laid him?” he asked.
“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.

³⁵Jesus wept.

Hymn: It is Well with my Soul

Words: Horatio G. Spafford, 1873; Music: Philip P. Bliss

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Refrain

It is well, with my soul,
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.

Refrain

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

Refrain

For me, be it Christ, be it Christ hence to live:
If Jordan above me shall roll,
No pang shall be mine, for in death as in life
Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul.

Refrain

But, Lord, ‘tis for Thee, for Thy coming we wait,
The sky, not the grave, is our goal;
Oh trump of the angel! Oh voice of the Lord!
Blessèd hope, blessèd rest of my soul!

Refrain

And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.

Refrain

Reader 4: The Windhover, Gerald Manly Hopkins

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Responsive Reading: Psalm 90 Domino, refugium
* = Celebrant, no * = Congregation
LORD, thou hast been our refuge, *
from one generation to another.
Before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever the earth and the world were made, *
thou art God from everlasting, and the world without end.
Thou turnest man to destruction; *
again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men.
For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday
when it is past, *
and as a watch in the night.
As soon as thou scatterest them they are even as a sleep, *
and fade away suddenly like the grass.
In the morning it is green, and groweth up; *
but in the evening it is cut down, dried up, and withered.
For we consume away in thy displeasure, *
and are afraid at thy wrathful indignation.
Thou hast set our misdeeds before thee, *
and our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

For when thou are angry all our days are gone; *
we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.
The days of our age are threescore years and ten;
and though men be so strong that thy come to fourscore years, *
yet is their strength then but labor and sorrow,
so soon passeth it away, and we are gone.
So teach us to number our days, *
that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

Psalm 121 (to music)

I lift my eyes to the hills

where does my help come from?

My help comes from the Lord,

the maker of heaven and earth -

He will not let my foot slip

He who watches over me will not slumber -

Indeed, he who watches over Israel

Will neither slumber nor sleep -

The LORD watches over you—

the LORD is your shade at your right hand;

the sun will not harm you by day,

nor the moon by night.

The LORD will keep you from all harm—

he will watch over your life;

the LORD will watch over your coming and going

both now and forevermore.

Hymn: To God be the Glory

To God be the glory, great things He has done;
So loved He the world that He gave us His Son,
Who yielded His life an atonement for sin,
And opened the life gate that all may go in.

Refrain

Praise the Lord, praise the Lord,
Let the earth hear His voice!
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord,
Let the people rejoice!
O come to the Father, through Jesus the Son,
And give Him the glory, great things He has done.

O perfect redemption, the purchase of blood,
To every believer the promise of God;
The vilest offender who truly believes,
That moment from Jesus a pardon receives.

Refrain

Great things He has taught us, great things He has done,
And great our rejoicing through Jesus the Son;
But purer, and higher, and greater will be
Our wonder, our transport, when Jesus we see.

Refrain

Reader 5: Love, We Must Part Now

Philip Larkin

Love, we must part now: do not let it be
Calamitious and bitter. In the past
There has been too much moonlight and self-pity:
Let us have done with it: for now at last
Never has sun more boldly paced the sky,
Never were hearts more eager to be free,
To kick down worlds, lash forests; you and I
No longer hold them; we are husks, that see
The grain going forward to a different use.

There is regret. Always, there is regret.
But it is better that our lives unloose,
As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,
Break from an estuary with their courses set,
And waving part, and waving drop from sight.

Reader 7: Revelation 21: The New Heaven and New Earth (ESV)

21:1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place [1] of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, [2] and God himself will be with them as their God. [3] 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

5 And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” 6 And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. 7 The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son. 8 But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”

9 Then came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues and spoke to me, saying, “Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.” 10 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, 11 having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. 12 It had a great, high wall, with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and on the gates the names of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel were inscribed— 13 on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates. 14 And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

15 And the one who spoke with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city and its gates and walls. 16 The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its width. And he measured the city with his rod, 12,000 stadia. [4] Its length and width and height are equal. 17 He also measured its wall, 144 cubits [5] by human measurement, which is also an angel’s measurement. 18 The wall was built of jasper, while the city was pure gold, clear as glass. 19 The foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with every kind of jewel. The first was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, 20 the fifth onyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, the twelfth amethyst. 21 And the twelve gates were twelve pearls, each of the gates made of a single pearl, and the street of the city was pure gold, transparent as glass.

22 And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.23 And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. 24 By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, 25 and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. 26 They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. 27 But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.

Celebrant and People: Psalm 23 King James Version

The LORD is my shepherd; *
I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; *
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul; *
he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his
Name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; *
for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of
mine enemies; *
thou annointest my head with oil;
my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days
of my life, *
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

Celebrant:

Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death,
and giving life to those in the tomb.

The Sun of Righteousness is gloriously risen, giving light to
those who sat in darkness and in the shadow of death.

The Lord will guide our feet into the way of peace, having
taken away the sin of the world.

Christ will open the kingdom of heaven to all who believe in
his Name, saying, Come, O blessed of my Father; inherit the
kingdom prepared for you.

Into paradise may the angels lead thee; and at thy coming

may the martyrs receive thee, and bring thee into the holy
city Jerusalem.

Give rest, O Christ, to thy servant(s) with thy saints,
where sorrow and pain are no more,
neither sighing, but life everlasting.

Thou only art immortal, the creator and maker of mankind;
and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and unto earth shall
we return. For so thou didst ordain when thou createdst me,
saying, “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” All

we go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make
our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Give rest, O Christ, to thy servant(s) with thy saints,
where sorrow and pain are no more,
neither sighing, but life everlasting.

Celebrant 2:

Into thy hands, O merciful Savior, we commend thy servant
N. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech thee, a sheep of thine
own fold, a lamb of thine own flock, a sinner of thine own
redeeming. Receive him into the arms of thy mercy, into the
blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious
company of the saints in light. Amen.

Celebrant and People:

Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.

Almighty God, Father of mercies and giver of comfort:
Deal graciously, we pray thee, with all those who mourn, that
casting every care on thee, they may know the consolation of
thy love; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Our worship has ended, our service has begun -

Go in Christ to love and serve the world -

It’s been sweltering down here in the Lower Regions – you would think you were in the high summer of Boston, but no, it’s just hell. Anyhow, outbreaks of gonorrhea and florescent mosquitoes aside, things plod along as usual. But enough about the weather.

I note with some consternation that your charge has graduated from Harvard. How she managed this I am not entirely certain, given our strenuous efforts to achieve the exact opposite. Yes, we did a little grind of victory when she took a year off, but look what that did – she merely slipped further from our grasp thanks to the humiliation the disorientation produced! Again, the Enemy’s ways are clearly not our ways – curse his Heavenly Highness and his Unendurable Everlasting Sneakiness! I swear, He truly hits Below the Diabolical Belt! Not even our brightest philosophers can get their heads around his tiresome Divine Paradoxes. And now she has that awful little diploma, adorned with that noisome blinking “VERITAS” shield (which we can never seem to penetrate, and humans the world over venerate)! I am tempted to despair, Wigglesworm. Sometimes I look at my oeuvre, at my life’s work, and I must confess I am very near Despair.

img source

We were doing so well! Do you remember those first dark days of freshman year, when her overweening arrogance wafted in sweet waves, producing responsive aversion in all those around her? Her mindless ambition, her directionless hunger for praise and affection and validation? She was all potential! Yes, there was all of that tangled morass of her “conservative Christian background” (we are working on that particular phrase – hopefully the Cliche Factory will get their act together), but here she was, un-moored from her conservative little country, eager to be seduced by “American” “freedom” and “liberalism” (whatever humans mean by these terms! – the UnLit. Critics are still working to establish exactly what, though I am personally skeptical that department will ever get any definitions straight – why those particular faculty are still on the University’s payroll is one of Hell’s Unfathomable Mysteries, as far as I’m concerned). She was so eager to throw off the shackles of parental control! – In short, delightfully corruptible, an ingenue of the first order. You even steered her clear of most of the Christian organizations on campus, as per my advice, fairly successfully, by making them seem “lame”, self-righteous and racially or culturally or economically segregated to her own self-righteous self.

However, even then, cracks were beginning to appear. It was collective hubris of the first order that made the Council of Diabolicals conclude the Enemy had evacuated the liberal spectrum of New England churches – the entire Second Council of the Diabolicals has now retrospectively determined this judgment was entirely wrong-footed (again, never underestimate the Enemy or his infuriating persistence!). That she went to church at all should have set your alarm bells ringing – indeed, I remember expressly forbidding you to let her go! “Oh, Nuncle Screwtape, it’s just an itty bitty ultra-liberal service! The sermon isn’t even ever longer than twelve minutes!” You do recall, of course, that Time is merely one of 88,9087 dimensions? All those Quantum Catechisms! – What was it the Enemy says of himself? “One day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”?

I think He said this through that random fisherman he picked up along the way on which he built the church – it is so annoying when this happens! I mean, here we are, with all the best civil servants in the Lower Kingdom, laboring to understand dimensions, and then this burly bearded fellow who’s been catching fish his whole short human life goes and blurts that out and is handed the very keys to the Kingdom. I mean, it’s one thing to require us to keep tabs on highly educated people like your patient and one excellent ex-servant of Our Father, Saul of Tarsus (who nevertheless turned out disastrously good – cf. pretty much most of the New “Testament”), but fishermen? Come on! No matter, again – I digress!

I expressly forbid you to let her in a church! “But it’s only got old people in it!” you protested, when I pointed out your error. Wigglesworm, sometimes you exasperate me! Old people are some of the most dangerous Beings alive, particularly if they are in the Enemy’s Camp.  Yes, we have caused Human Society to denigrate the elderly; but don’t you see, that was a product of the Dark Lakes of Distortion, and not a reflection of Actuality! We made them obsessed with youth, obsessed with appearance impossible to upkeep beyond the age of 30. We made them worship at the Temple of Eternal Youth. Hell, Our Father Below is old, and wise, and proud of it. The Enemy himself goes by the pretentious, typically self-aggrandizing title of “Ancient of Days” – do not underestimate old people!

Furthermore, there were all those dead people to reckon with! Remember, we are talking about New England here: its very name rank with the memory of headstrong warriors of the Enemy’s Camp, the ground littered with their headstones. We have only begun to grasp the power of the Enemy’s aged fortresses, which seems mysteriously derived from the simple presence of these graves. In fact, our Archeologists (particularly in the Anti-Catholic Department) recently presented a paper on precisely this phenomenon – it seems that hefty generals of the Enemy’s camp, such as that rigidly incorruptible failed tyrant, George Washington, or that annoyingly selfless self-promoter, Martin Luther King Jr, seem to leave impenetrable barriers to diabolic entry in the places where they have blasphemed against Our Father. It is most curious, and we are hoping to harness this power to develop a portable prison-house for our own errant devils. But I digress -

Then there was that whole very fruitful phase when she worshiped at the fair-browed Temple of False Art, ingratiating herself with all the “right” people, breaking commandment after commandment in the name of “exploration” and the seeking of “wisdom”, which we encouraged in everything but the Enemy’s Book. She was so far gone that she even entertained thoughts of transferring to the Second University, thinking that it would have been better to be celebrated there as a writer than panned as a critic in her assigned English department. I was particularly proud of the moment when, realizing with my not-inconsiderable insight that your charge is by nature a ladder-climber, we placed ladder after ladder in front of her, every rung a good intention – ladders of popularity, academics, sophistication, veneration, spiritual purity – chuckling with anticipation as she exhausted herself and bled her hands and feet dry, growing thirstier and hungrier by the minute, the ladders plunging, in reality, into the Flames.

Then, there was that sweet, sweet moment in which we relished victory – her near vanquishing, when her sweet flesh was practically touching the tip of my tongue – her despair so ripe, her corruption so sweet, her devastation so deep and broad like some diabolic hymn. We had destroyed her – we had severed her ties with her family, trashed her friendships to shreds, completely stripped her of every shred of self-worth and dignity, starved her soul with a combination of derision and shame.

But did you seal the deal? Did you obey my instructions to consume her immediately? Oh no, you had to go and simmer that soup, you had to go find that Onion and that Carrot, and etc, etc. We were already warned about the power of Onions by Dostoyevsky, Wigglesworm! You should have known better. Really, if the UnLit Department were not squabbling all the time, and would actually teach the moral implications of true and false fiction, we would avoid a lot of these spectacular failures! This was your fatal flaw, Wigglesworm. In your hubris, in your complacency, you did not guard over her struggling corpse. No! You were bustling about, keen to make it all “perfect”, whatever that means (that must have rubbed off from her! I have warned you never to pick up your charge’s characteristics!). You were eager to impress me, eager to cook me a delicious morsel that would satisfy my ravenous hunger. Well, my dear Wigglesworm, your kind consideration ensures that I will not go hungry. You robbed me of this girl, Wigglesworm, with your silly infatuation with the goodness of a meal and the preparation of it. You allowed yourself to enjoy the process, when in fact you should have grabbed hold of the ends and tore! Ah, my delectable Wiggie, I almost pity you in my shriveled kernel of a heart.

Anyhow, thanks to your negligence, the Enemy sneaked one “true” friend to your charge. I honestly did not see this coming myself. I had thought there would be none of the Enemy’s Camp in the Temple of False Art. I do not know why it is so hard to move with the Enemy’s omnipresence in mind. Perhaps he uses one of those starry Invisibility Cloaks of his to prevent other Beings from sensing it most of the time; whatever it is, we must constantly tack our sails to account for it even if the wind does not fill them, because His presence is always greater than we imagine. Oh, if only we could replicate the technology!

Anyhow, this “true” friend mediated with her and her enemies; also, despite her rejection of them, her family came flocking about (families always do this! Why, I cannot begin to understand), and then there was that whole damned business about her great-grandmother, who passed into the realms of gold when she was a prefrosh, interceding for her. Again this has something to do with the dead lying around – a total nuisance to our work! Because this entire network of communication is sealed off to us, despite the Virulent Wreckers in the Sillycon Valley of the Shadow of Death hacking away at it day and night, we cannot breach or intercept these messages. Believe me, it’s like trying to read Demotic without the Rosetta Stone.

Anyway, we do not fully know how this happened, but somehow, by the skin of her teeth, she was snatched out of our hands. Oh, what howling fury resounded in hell that day! How the Harpies clawed and screeched, how they tore at their hair! How the Crustaceous Crabs scuttled left and right and left and right, pinching our buttocks and nipping at our ears! How the larval lakes boiled, how the boat on the Styx creaked and threatened to splinter to shards! How our stomachs growled, at the loss of this precious morsel!

And now she is off in some untouchable realm (temporarily, but still),  surrounded by that weird little cloud of buzzing insects that the Enemy calls “Grace” – and what’s more, she’s writing and drawing and filming and learning to govern her capricious tongue, singing songs and psalms and trying to be St. Peter and St. Paul and David and Isaiah and oldies of that ilk, as well as George Herbert and John Donne and that terrible mind that violated my psyche some fifty years ago now; silly and dark and bright and powerful and helpless, mourning and comforting and rejoicing and deliriously running around for all the world like some undiscovered child, and in short being fully alive and “truly” herself – and all through no effort of her own.

Oh the howls of frustration! What just really gets me is how utterly inappropriate her behavior is – like David dancing around half-naked like a wild thing at the head of a processional -  there she is, standing in the white-hot sight of the Enemy, feeling for all the world like some white wizard’s only beloved daughter, a wizard who rules a far-away kingdom from a little rock with a Book (even though she’s just a nerdy fresh graduate, unemployed, napping in bookstores, in danger of becoming an illegal immigrant with a homeless bunny) acting as though she’s Blessed continually! In her hand is a bright sword, and she raises on her arm a shield – yes, that very stupid shield with “Truth” written on it in bloody Latin, of all things; and the sword is of course the “Word”, and she runs around talking about “Peace” and “Reconciliation” from Above – complete poppycock, of course – we all know, especially in the Academy, this world contains only War and Division! And she’s not alone, too, there’s a whole bunch of them, swarming around like little bleeping satellites beaming messages around about the University.

This – this was supposed to be our Great Failure*, Wigglesworm! This was our “Godless Harvard*“! What the hell? Where did you go wrong? And worse still, she’s graduating, and she has no fear, for the Enemy is with her? His rod and his staff, they comfort her? It’s just too much to bear. I swear, we were ready to turn on one another and eat, and I believe that’s exactly what we did. And do, my delectable Monsieur Wigg.

You are to report to my chambers at doom doom o’clock this afternoon. You may bring a cardboard box along with you, to collect your things. As you know, in hell, no poor devil is ever relieved. We are tired, but none of us ever retire. Errant devilings like yourself are customarily fired – efficiently and quite, quite literally. Don’t worry about your patient – I will be reassigning her to the far more sophisticated and very accomplished Derthcliffe. If you have any next of kin, which I sincerely doubt, since they are apt to deny you considering your fatal failure, you may write short notices to them. But hasten, and come to the Feast, my little one, my  dove – come to the Feast, and I assure you, this time I will take, and eat.

Yours Hungerly,

Screwtape

* photos from the Harvard Crimson

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor tries to explain what in particular accounts for this presumed difference between America and Europe. At least one of the reasons, Taylor suggests, that may account for the difference is America never had an ancient regime in which a hierarchical social order was given legitimacy by the church. Also at work may be the different role of elites in determining general attitudes toward belief and unbelief. For example, the skepticism of academic elites in British society had more effect in England because elites have more prestige in British society than elites in America.

Taylor suggests that the primary reason for the American difference is due to the development of a common civil religion that allowed Americans, as well as immigrants in America, to understand their faiths as contributing to a consensus summed up by the motto, “E pluribus Unum.” This is in marked contrast to Europe where religious identities have been the source of division either between dissenters and the national church or between church and lay forces. But in America religious difference is subordinated to “one nation under God.” Religious people in America may find they are in deep disagreement about abortion or gay marriage, but those disagreements are subordinated to their common loyalty to America.[1] But that subordination also includes their faith in God; that is, whatever kind of Christian (or non-Christian) they may or may not be, their faith should be in harmony with what it means to be an American.

Taylor observes that this difference also accounts for the respective attitudes Europeans and Americans have toward national identities. Europeans generally are quite reticent about national identity. That they are so Taylor attributes to the experience and memory of the First and Second World Wars that devastated Europe. He observes that war, even wars that seem “righteous,” now make most Europeans uneasy. But that is not the case with Americans. Americans’ lack of unease with war may be, Taylor suggests, because they wrongly think there are fewer skeletons in the American closet when compared to the European closet. Yet Taylor thinks the reason for the American support of war is simpler. “It is easier,” Taylor observes, “to be unreservedly confident in your own righteousness when you are the hegemonic power.”[2]

I have no doubt Taylor is right to think America’s unrivaled power in the world gives Americans a sense of confidence about our role as the “world’s policeman,” but I think Taylor does not make articulate — to use one of Taylor’s favorite words — the relationship between American civil religion, our assumption that we are a “religious nation,” and why war for most Americans is unproblematic.[3] War is a moral necessity for America because it provides the experience of the “Unum” that makes the “pluribus” possible. War is America’s central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.[4] World War I was the decisive moment because it was that war that finally healed the wounds caused by the civil war.

This is well documented by Richard Gamble in his book, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation. Gamble provides ample evidence to show how liberal Protestants justified the first World War as redemptive for the nation and church. For example, Lyman Abbott, a well known progressive Protestant who had sought to reconcile Christianity with evolution, argued that America as a Christian nation must be willing to be self-sacrificial in service to other nations. Therefore America rightly opposed “pagan” Germany because Germany is a society in which “the poor serve the rich, the weak serve the strong, the ignorant serve the wise.” By contrast America is a society of “organized Christianity” in which the “rich serve the poor, the strong serve the weak, the wise serve the ignorant.”[5]

Harry Emerson Fosdick, the exemplification of Protestant liberalism, went so far as to suggest in an article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1919, that the returning troops would present a special challenge to the nation and the churches. He argued that the soldiers would have learned the meaning of self-sacrifice through the experience of the war. Moreover they would have experienced the potential of cooperative action through the regenerative power of devotion to a higher cause. Accordingly the returning soldiers would challenge reactionary views of society and the church because they would expect to remake the world to which they returned to correspond to the lessons they learned from the war.[6] War, in short, was seen as the laboratory for more egalitarian social policies advocates of the Protestant social gospel so desperately tried to achieve.

Christianity and democracy in America were and continue to be, through the experience of war, inextricably linked. Thus Arthur McGiffert, the president of Union Theological Seminary, argued that religion was necessary “to promote and sustain democracy.” Religion, according to McGiffert, had to dispose of its “egoistic and other-worldly character” by becoming socially responsible. “The religion of democracy” he warned, “must cease to minister to selfishness by promising personal salvation, and must cease to impede human progress by turning the attention of religious men from the conditions here to rewards elsewhere.”[7] Such was the lesson to be learned from war.

I call attention to how Americans understood the theological and moral significance of World War I because I think we fail to appreciate what Taylor identifies as the American civil religion if we do not take the American understanding of war into account. For example, Taylor observes that the traditional American synthesis of “civil religion” associated with a non-denominational Christianity with a strong connection to civilized order is still, unlike its British counterpart, in its “hot” phase. That it is so, however, has everything to do with the American experience of war as constitutive of the substance of our civil religion.

The significance of war for American civil religion can be missed even by political theorists as insightful as C.B. Macpherson. Macpherson identified two versions of liberal democracy, which he argued shape American democracy but are in conflict with one another. The first form of liberal democracy is one in which a capitalist market society is assumed to be compatible with democratic processes. This form of democracy, no matter how modified it may be by the rise of the welfare state, remains dominant — particularly in America. It has, of course, been given renewed theoretical legitimacy with the development in American political science of various accounts of balance of power models between groups.

The other version of liberal democracy Macpherson associates with John Stuart Mill’s attempt to moralize liberalism by arguing that a liberal society must be one in which all the members of the social order are equally free to realize their capabilities. From Macpherson’s perspective, liberal democracy, particularly the democracy of the United States, has tried to combine both forms of liberalism.[8] Thus at times “liberal” means the stronger can dominate the weak as long as they follow market rules, while at other times it means the attempt, usually through state agency, to achieve freedom for all to develop their capacity. As a result American politics cannot help but appear incoherent as different and contradictory policy alternatives are put forward in the name of “freedom.”[9]

For example, the right of abortion is defended in the name of an individual’s right to have control over her body, but it is still assumed that laws against suicide make sense in the name of preventing harm. Moreover, that portions of the American society think it legitimate to appeal to their religious convictions to address such issues is seen by some to be a threat to the consensus that makes America work. Thus Taylor’s observation that even though the Protestant character of the original American civil religion has been broadened to include “all faiths” or “no faiths” there is still a strong “religious” character to American public life. That such is the case is confirmed by the very existence of secularist and liberal believers who seek a more secular America.[10]

I have no doubt that Macpherson is right that both forms of liberalism shape American life, but the tension between them can go unnoticed exactly because America is so wealthy and has the common moral experience of war. Of course it turns out that wealth makes war necessary. Yet Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because war must be understood as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy. From such a perspective, September 11 was absolutely necessary for the moral health of the republic. That America must fight an unending war against terrorism means Americans have a common enemy that unites us.

If I am close to being right about the place of war for sustaining the American difference I find that as a Christian I wish America as a nation was more “secular” and the Christianity of America was less American. Put differently I wish America was more like Europe. For I fear the Christianity of America, a Christianity that from a European perspective seems vital, is not capable of being a political challenge to what is done in the name of the American difference. In short, the great difficulty is how to keep America, in the proper sense, secular.

In order to elaborate this observation, I think it helpful to call attention to Mark Lilla’s important new book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West. Lilla begins his book by giving voice to a sentiment raised after September 11, 2001 and occasioned by the Bush presidency. They simply cannot believe what they thought had been left behind has returned. Lilla observes he had assumed that battles over revelation and reason, dogmatic purity and toleration, divine duty and common decency had been relegated to the scrap heap of history. So “we,” that is, people like Lilla, “find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that leave societies in ruin. We had assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.”[11]

Lilla seeks, therefore, to do nothing less than to defend what he describes as the great separation, that is, “to develop habits of thinking and talking about politics exclusively in human terms without appeals to divine revelation or cosmological speculation.”[12] Lilla understands this separation to be an extraordinary achievement because political theology is a “primordial form of thought” which for millennia provided the well of ideas and symbols for organizing society and shaping moral lives. In the West Christianity was the source of political theology even though the political theology Christianity represented could not help but create political societies that were and are inherently unstable. The instability is the result of the Christian presumption that they are at once in the world but not of it. For example, Christians have always had trouble making sense of an empire they accidentally acquired.[13] Lilla argues it was Hobbes who found the way, after a millennium of Christian political theology, to discuss religion and the common good without making reference to the nexus between God, man, and the world. He was able to do so because Hobbes, anticipating Feuerbach, had the wisdom to turn questions about God into questions about human behavior; to reduce that behavior to psychological states, and then to portray those states as artifacts of desire, ignorance, and the material
environment.[14]

For Hobbes the gods are born out of fear of death, poverty, and calamity; but Hobbes knew better than to try to deny such fear. Rather he focused fear on one figure alone, the sovereign. Such a sovereign,
Hobbes called him an “earthly God,” could ensure that his subjects should fear no other sovereigns but him. No longer would there be a tension between church and crown because now the sovereign would make clear that salvation depended on obedience to himself.

Lilla thinks Hobbes’ great achievement, this great separation which is crucial for the art of living in a liberal democratic order, is secured by three developments. The first is the intellectual separation made possible by the scientific revolution in which a now-mute natural world is separated from its creator. As a result investigations of nature can be separated from thoughts about God. Secondly, the crucial distinction between the public and the private is developed, relegating religious convictions and practices to the latter. To be sure, Lilla acknowledges, Hobbes made the sovereign responsible for public worship, but not for actually mounting an inquisition to determine if citizens actually believed “Jesus is the Christ.” Thirdly, perhaps less obvious but equally consequential, is Hobbes’ argument for separating academic inquiry from ecclesiastical control. Thus one of the achievements of Hobbes’ project can be seen in theology’s becoming, as it has in modernity, but another academic discipline relegated to divinity schools.[15]

Though Hobbes is often thought to legitimate a violent understanding of politics, that is, human existence as a war of all against all, Lilla argues that Hobbes is actually trying to limit the violence that is unleashed by political theology. For when war is undertaken in the name of God there can be no limit to killing because so much is allegedly at stake. That is why human beings who believe in God commit acts in war no animal would commit. Animals kill only to eat and reproduce, but humans fight to get into heaven.[16] Hobbes, on Lilla’s reading, is the first great realist in international affairs. After Hobbes, war at least has the potential to be humanely limited because it can be fought for selfish
reasons.

Lilla suggests Locke and Hume provided softer accounts of Hobbes’s Leviathan but in doing so they remained fundamentally Hobbesian. Like Hobbes they wanted to protect modern man from the superstition and violence associated with political theology by developing liberal habits of mind. In particular, Locke thought it possible and necessary to liberalize Christianity itself, which Lilla suggests bore fruit in the work of Rousseau, Kant, and Protestant liberals such as Schleiermacher and Troeltsch. Yet Lilla judges the attempt of Protestant liberals to ground religion in human experience to be a failure because:

It failed to inspire conviction about the Christian faith among nominal Christians, or attachment to Jewish destiny among nominal Jews. Once liberal theologians succeeded, as they did, in portraying biblical faith as the highest expression of moral consciousness and the precondition of modern life, they were unable to explain why modern men and women should still consider themselves to be Christians and Jews rather than simply modern men and women.[17]

Such is the dilemma of Christians in America. Just to the extent Christians try to be “political” by playing by the rules set down by “the great separation” they cannot help but become unintelligible not only to their neighbors but, more importantly, to themselves. I think this helps account for the strident character of the rhetoric of the religious right in America. Though claiming to represent a conservative form of Christianity, the religious right is politically a form of Protestant liberalism. The religious right makes a fetish of this or that belief, e.g. the substitutionary account of the atonement; they think is the hallmark of Christianity, but by doing so they play the game determined by the great separation, that is, Christianity has become primarily a matter of “belief.”

Yet secular people in America fear the religious right. They do so because they think that the rise of the religious right and Islam threaten the “great separation.” Thus Lilla ends his book reminding those who are like him committed to Hobbes’ great achievement that they are the exception. They cannot expect other civilizations to follow the path of the West. But according to Lilla the West has made the choice to protect individuals from the harms they can inflict on one another in the name of religion. It has done so by securing fundamental liberties and by leaving the spiritual destinies of each person in their own hands. In short, Americans have chosen to keep our “politics unilluminated by the light of revelation. If our experiment is to work, we must rely on our own lucidity.”[18]

But Lilla’s account of the great separation does not explain how a country allegedly shaped by Hobbes and Locke is, particularly in reference to war, a nation which understands itself in religious terms.[19] Americans are said to be the beacon of hope for all people, requiring sacrifices for the good of the world. In short, Lilla does not explain why it is very hard to keep the secular secular in America. Once the church has been relegated to the “private” it turns out the nation takes on the language of the church. It is not Christians and Muslims that challenge the great separation, but rather it is “America.”

Yet Lilla’s sense that Hobbes’ achievement may be threatened is widely shared by others in America. For example in his book, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up On the Meaning of Life, Anthony Kronman sounds themes very similar to Lilla. The
university, as Lilla suggested, is the key agent for sustaining the great separation. According to Kronmen it was, of course, true that the early universities in America would have been shaped by Protestant piety. But after the civil war, Kronmen argues, universities in America were organized to be institutions to sustain a secular and humanistic account of life. Students would be initiated into a secular humanistic way of life through reading the great texts of the Western tradition. Through such reading students would learn “that it is possible to explore the meaning of life in a deliberate and organized way even after its religious foundations have been called into doubt.”[20]

This perspective supplied the grounds for those in the humanities to believe they had the competence and the authority to lead students in a disciplined study of the human condition in order that they might pursue their own personal search for meaning. Such pedagogy assumed that no fixed conception of the end of human life or a single right way to live can be sustained. For according to Kronman there simply is no “vantage point we can ever occupy from which our lives can be seen as a whole.”[21] Secular humanism does not require that God be rejected or even thought to be irrelevant to life as long as such judgments are left to the individual.

Kronman acknowledges that death is the most determinative challenge that confronts the secular humanist. “We all die, and know we will, and must adjust ourselves to the shadow which the foreknowledge of death casts over the whole of our lives.”[22] Yet death also forces us to recognize that whatever meaning life may have depends on us. Accordingly, life for the secular humanist is self-contradictory. For the secular humanist seeks to abolish the limits that give their longings meaning, that is, they seek to be in control, yet in the attempt to seize control they come to recognize that without the limits they seek to overcome the ends they seek could not exist.[23]

Sounding very much like Lilla’s account of Hobbes, Kronman argues that religion, drawing on our fears, seeks to have us revalue the limits of life by accepting those limits as an occasion for gratitude rather than rebellion. The smug cosmopolitan and secular observers of the rise of this religious revival think this development to be shallow and mindless. Kronman thinks such an attitude fails to recognize that the problem is not the death of God but the death of man. It is the task of the university to be the church for the rebirth of a humanism that is more honest and honorable than any religion can offer.[24]

Kronman’s understanding of secular humanism assumes what Lilla calls the great separation, thus confirming Lilla’s contention that the university is the crucial institution to sustain liberal social orders. Yet Kronman fears that the secular university has lost its way by becoming a research university beset by the demands of the politically correct. I certainly think the humanities have lost their centrality in the modern university, but I think that loss is due much more to the humanism Kronman advocates. For once the “great separation” is accepted then a Hobbesian world cannot be avoided, that is, a death determined world committed to the defeat of death. In such a world the university cannot help but become the home of technologies designed to increase our power over fate.

Such a world, and the universities that serve it, must go to war in an effort to defeat those forces in the world that threaten our security. Americans are determined to live in a world of safety even if we have to go to war to make the world safe. That project is often justified, and this is Kronman’s list, in the name of ideals of individual freedom and toleration; of democratic government; of respect for the rights of minorities and for human rights generally; a reliance on markets as a mechanism for the organization of economic life; the acceptance of the truths of modern science and the ubiquitous employment of its technological products as aspirational goals all should want. According to Kronman “to be openly opposed to any of these things is to be a reactionary, a zealot, and obscurantist who refuses to recognize the moral and intellectual authority of this ensemble of modern ideas and institutions.”[25] I have little doubt that Kronman believes this, but that he does so means he simply cannot see what the rest of the world sees, namely, that this is an ideology for a culture of death.

Kronman and Lilla are to be commended for their willingness to advocate secular humanism as a moral, educational, and political project. They simply seem to assume that the secular humanist will be more peace loving. But I find it hard to find any evidence that would support such a conclusion.

By calling attention to Lilla and Kronman I hope to have helped us see that if we as Christians are to begin to reclaim the political theology required by the truthfulness of Christian convictions we will need to begin by doing theology unapologetically. In particular that means Christians must reclaim theology as a knowledge central for the work of any university worthy of the name “university.” That will require, at least in America, a recovery of the church as a polity capable of challenging the presumptions that the state is the agency of peace. In short, if the analysis I have tried to develop concerning the American difference is close to being right, it should make clear that a commitment to Christian nonviolence is the presumption necessary for the church to reassert its political significance.

In Veritatis Splendor John Paul II claimed that there is an inseparable connection between truth and freedom which if broken results in totalitarianism. America is a society built on the assumption that freedom must precede truth. Therefore America is presumed to be the alternative to totalitarianism. However, if my account of the American difference is correct I think that presumption needs to be reexamined particularly in light of the way war sustains American political life.

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[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp.b522-527.

[2] Taylor, p. 528.

[3] For Taylor’s emphasis on the significance of being articulate for locating our lives morally see, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 92-107.

[4] I develop this account of war in my essay, “Sacrificing the Sacrifices of War,” Criswell Theological Review, 4, 2 (Spring, 2007), pp. 77-96. The significance of the civil war is crucial in order to understand the liturgical significance of war in American life.

See. For example, my essay, “Why War is a Moral Necessity for America or How Realistic is Realism?” Seminary Ridge Review, 9, 2 (Spring, 2007), pp. 25-37.

[5] Richard Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2003), p. 155.

[6] Gamble, p. 211.

[7] Gamble, p. 214.

[8] C.B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 1.

[9] Thus Alasdair MacIntyre’s now classic description in After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) of the inability in liberal societies to know what might count as an argument.

[10] Taylor, p. 528.

[11] Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the
Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 3.

[12] Lilla, p. 5. Charles Taylor, in a very interesting review of Lilla’s book, argues Lilla’s understanding of political theology fails to do justice to the natural law justifications of early modern thought that did not appeal directly to revelation or to premises drawn from revelation. Taylor observes Lilla’s argument depends on his view of political theology suggested later in his book that a genuine secular politics presumes a mechanistic understanding of the cosmos. Taylor, thus, challenges Lilla’s presumption that“the great separation” has ever been quite the achievement Lilla assumes. Taylor’s review is in the “Immanent Frame” sponsored by the Social Science Research Council.

[13] Lilla, pp. 42-45. Lilla observes that although Christianity “is inescapably political, it proved incapable of integrating this fact into Christian theology. The political organization of medieval Europe, tottering on that theological ambivalence, could not have been more perfectly arranged to exacerbate the conflict inherent in all political life…Perhaps if Christianity had seen itself as the political religion it really was, presenting the pope as an earthly sovereign with full authority over secular matters, some bloodshed could have been avoided. But living as a Christian means being in the world, including the political world, while somehow not being of it. It means living with a false consciousness.” (p.86) Lilla associates this instability in Christian political theology to the dialectic between transcendence and immanence at the heart of the incarnation. For such an astute reader of Barth it is surprising Lilla fails to understand that what is meant by such a dialectic must be Christologically determined.

[14] Lilla, p. 88.

[15] Lilla, pp. 89-91.

[16] Lilla, pp. 84-85.

[17] Lilla, p. 248.

[18] Lilla, pp. 308-309.

[19] See, for example, Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004).

[20] Anthony Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up On the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 74.

[21] Kronman, p. 34.

[22] Kronman, p. 76.

[23] Kronman, p. 232.

[24] Kronman, p. 243. Kronman is more than ready to declare that any “religion” at some point must demand a sacrifice of the intellect because a religion finally insists that at some point thinking is not adequate to questions of life’s meaning. So every religion in a basic sense must be fundamentalist because the answers it is prepared to give to life’s questions are anchored in its own convictions. (pp. 198-199.) Kronman does not supply the necessary philosophical defense of his understanding of rationality.

[25] Kronman, pp. 172-173.
________________________________________________________________________

Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at the Divinity School of Duke University with a joint appointment at Duke Law School. He was named “America’s Best Theologian” by Time magazine in 2001.

What is it Good For?

I was seven when I first saw war.  It was 1995, and NATO had recently entered Bosnia, joining a conflict marked by incredibly brazen war crimes, including ethnic cleansing and brutal mass rape.

As the conflict raged on that September, I watched from the safety of my living room in DC’s posh suburbs.  All I could see of the war — indeed, all most of America could see — was whatever news-media outlets relayed to us from the front.  So the night-vision footage that CNN talking heads analyzed over and over again didn’t really feel like war; it might as well have been a green-and-black fireworks show that was taking place “somewhere else.”

I’ll chalk it up in part to my age, but I don’t think my detachment was unique.  My distance from the violence left me unshaken by war’s gruesome realities and perversions.  The Gospel should snap us out of this placidity and demand that we recognize the way war deforms the soul, even when it is happening halfway around the world.

We look ahead, of course, to a new heaven and a new earth in which all Creation is freed of such ills.  But if we resign ourselves either to a purely apocalyptic eschatology (waiting idly for God to act because the world is so wracked by sin) or to a purely realized eschatology (not expecting God to ever act because it’s all up to us), we cheapen the Gospel.  Instead, Christians should hope constantly for God’s return to, as NT Wright says, “put things to rights,” all the while living into the Kingdom and anticipating life under the final reign of Jesus.  The Cross and the Resurrection call Christians out of passive hope into active, missional hope.

This means living in such a way as to bear witness to the world as it will be — that is, living as a people that loves peace as much as God does.  We ought to consider Isaiah 2 and take seriously what it means to hope actively for a world in which the nations will beat their swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks and tanks into tractors.  What does it mean to live faithfully to Jesus’ proclamation of a new and perpetual Jubilee in a world as yet unredeemed?

It’s not a simple question to answer, and so we tackle one particular aspect of it — war and what Christians ought to think of it — in this issue.  We’re particularly pleased to feature Professors Stanley Hauerwas and Glen Stassen in this issue.  Stassen, of Fuller Theological Seminary, applies his “Just Peacemaking” theory to terrorism to ask what Christians can actively do to seek peace (p. 8).  And Hauerwas, one of the world’s sharpest and most provocative theologians, examines the ties between American civil religion and war (p. 24).  Join us as we think critically and Christianly about war and the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Let us reframe the question: Do we take the hope of Christ seriously enough actually to trust in it?

Nonviolence is a consequence of hearing the glad tidings of the Gospel. It follows from obedience to the messiah who would rather die than take up the sword of revolutionary violence, the God who does not wish for us to pursue temporal peace and justice in the way of Pharoah.

We reject the modernist compromise of Schliermacher and Niebuhr, and we will not accept a sanitized “realist” Christianity that has been run through the meat-grinder to be made palatable to the liberal democratic establishment. Karl Barth initiates this project of liberating God-talk: He puts forth a totalizing Christian vision of how the universe is and ought to be, wresting lordship from convenience and returning it to Christ Jesus. And his student, the Mennonite John Howard Yoder, finishes the fight, demanding that the Church recognize Jesus as Lord of not just our hearts, but our politics, as well.

We must believe so fiercely in this lordship and in the truth of the Gospel – indeed, to the exclusion of many things that others believe – that we adopt nonviolence in part to protect the God-breathcd lives of those who disagree with us. But even more, we must reject violence to protect ourselves from doing as sinners do: killing. We are violent creatures; avowing nonviolence acknowledges our impulse to dominate the weak and meets it head-on. A commitment to peace frees us to claim the truth of the Gospel without becoming Caesar.

Most of all, we must choose nonviolence because we bear witness to a peace that is yet to come, and so we remain faithful to that hope even as we work toward what should be right now. Active nonviolence is how we steadfastly live in anticipation of the Kingdom, already knowing how the story ends: Love wins. Such an ethic trusts in God and affirms our commitment neither to give up nor to idolize our own agency in the drama of history. And in the face of the ultimate sacrifice, as my brother says, “Christians who trust in the Prince of Peace must pray that they will be faithful when the time conics for them to bear witness to the power of God rather than to the power of violence.” Some things are worth dying for – even if for once we actually do have to turn the other cheek.

Samir Paul ’10, Editor-in-Chief of The Harvard Ichthus, is a senior computer science concentrator in Mather House.

Charles Clark, Dartmouth

The question, “When should Christians go to war?” suggests two principal readings. The first reading is, “When support a war politically?” and the second is, “When should Christians fight as soldiers?” Just War Theory, pioneered by Augustine and Aquinas, is primarily concerned with the former, that is, with the actions of nations in forming and executing policies regarding the use of force. One facet of Just War Theory is a set of principles for evaluating the justice of a nation’s entrance into war. These principles mandate that a nation going to war must possess just cause, proper authority, right intention and reasonable hope for success. I accept these principles on the grounds that they discourage self-serving, unnecessarily violent conflicts, which are contrary to the Christian’s responsibility to cultivate peace, while allowing Christians to support wars that seek to address wrongs committed against themselves and others with the measured use of force, which is in keeping with a Christian’s responsibility to enact and defend justice. Moreover Just War Theory allows cooperation on war policy between Christians and non-Christians, which is evidenced by its influence on the United Nations Charter. Christians are responsible for exercising their political rights and praying for those in authority in order that peace may be disrupted only when necessary to establish justice.

As to when individuals should participate in a war directly the New Testament presents Cornelius, a Roman centurion who becomes a Christian. Centurions were career military men with years of experience in battle. Even prior to his conversion, Cornelius is described as “righteous,” and he is not commanded to leave the military in order to follow Christ. So his occupation excludes neither righteousness nor Christian discipleship. And in 2 Timothy 2, Paul compares Timothy’s role as a servant of the Gospel to that of a soldier who dutifully serves his commanding officer. My conclusion from these passages is that the profession of a soldier is as moral or immoral as the actions of the individual soldier in the performance of his duty, which could be said for any profession. Put another way, the question of when Christians should become soldiers is little different from the question of when Christians should become doctors, lawyers, or bankers.

Charles Clark ’11, Editor-in-Chief of the Dartmouth Apologia, is a Dartmouth junior studying Literary Theory and Classical Archaeology.

Jinju Pottenger, Princeton

Murder is strongly condemned in the Bible, from the very first murder of Abel by Cain up through the Ten Commandments and countless times in the New Testament. However, does war fall under the prohibition of murder? The ancient Israelites, under God’s direction, waged wars that offend the secular reader who rejects God’s sovereignty over all life. But elsewhere the Bible comes down strongly on the side of peace, from the Psalms to the Benedictions. In fact, it appears that Ecclesiastes 3:8b, “There is a time for war, and a time for peace,” sums up our relationship with war: Sometimes, war is God’s will and waging it is part of His greater purpose and plan.

However, war as it is fought today could not be fought for purposes further from those of God. Wars of genocide and greed are clearly sinful. Wars that are fought brutally, with the maximization of suffering, are also not condoned. Jus ad bellum and jus in bello both matter.

I would go so far as to say that all wars waged in a modem nation-state system are against God’s will, and ones in which Christians should not participate. The state primarily protects its own interests, which is in radical contrast to God’s call to his children – namely, to act oppositely to our own interests for His sake. Although war is permissible when directly led by God, war for the sake of national security is the same as war for the sake of territorial expansion or other illegitimate reasons. War as nation-states wage it today is sin.

By way of analogy, a nation-state going to war is like an individual whose job requires murder. Both the state and the individual are made more secure by their actions: the former against state failure by warring with threats; the latter against poverty. However, there are other, less sinful options for the individual seeking provision and for the state seeking security.

While war may be permissible for Christians under certain circumstances, in the modern age, it is not so because of the tension between God’s command that we love our enemies and the state’s command that we kill them for the sake of national security. Human life is God-given and God-breathed and can only be taken at His command and without error – namely, not through the system we have now.

Jinju Pottenger ’10 of Princeton’s Revisions, is a senior at the Woodrow Wilson School in Mathey College.

Hans Anderson, Yale

There is a war which we Christians must wage always and in all places: Jesus announced, “I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34; cf. Luke 12:51), while Paul clarified, “We do not wage war as the world does; the weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world” (II Corinthians 10:3-4). Christians wage the war of the Spirit, the war against sin and evil (cf. Ephesians 6:12; 1 Peter 2:11). This war is not one from which Christians may choose to abstain, for when a Christian gives her life to Christ, the fallen world declares war upon her (cf. Matthew 24:9; John 15:18). Nor can Christians expect this war to cease (cf. II Corinthians 6:14-16) until darkness is at last dispelled and all things are made new in Christ.

Precisely because Christians wage war against the very kingdom of darkness binding up the world, the perfect Christian life excludes war either of the world or for the world. Jesus blessed the peacemakers (Matthew 5:9), but He did not bless the warriors. Why? “My kingdom is not of this world,” He said; “if it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest” (John 18:36). When Peter cut off a man’s ear to defend Jesus, Jesus rebuked him and healed the victim (inter alia, Luke 22:50-51). If Christ would not permit Peter to fight in His own righteous defense, how could we ever presume to fight in defense of any worldly cause? Jesus healed the servant’s ear to show Christians our proper place vis-à-vis worldly war: We are to minister to the victims of violence rather than to combat even unjust violence with our own.

Of course, certain Christians hold a doctrine of “just war”, as if murder ceased to be sin whenever certain conditions are met. This doctrine is an invention foreign to the faith of the apostles, patristic writers (e.g. John Chrysostom, “On The Priesthood”), and early martyrs (cf. Acts 7:59-60, 14:19-22). There is one condition alone which supersedes God’s interdiction against murder: God’s extraordinary authorization.  Otherwise, Christ calls us to peace. More precisely, He calls us to spiritual war always and in all places against the very temptation which would draw us into worldly war.

Hans Anderson ’10, former Executive Editor of The Yale Logos, is a senior Ethics, Politics, and Economics major in Saybrook College.

The key to Bonhoeffer’s thought is an understanding of what he means by “deeds of free responsibility for the sake of the other.” [1] The necessity of a situation can call for acts of violence (hence, an individual is called to be “responsible”), but this does not mitigate the sin entailed in violence (hence, the act is “free”, not ordered by the law of God).

There is now no law behind which the responsible man can take cover, and there is, therefore, also no law which can compel the responsible man to take any particular decision in the face of such necessities. In this situation there can only be the complete renunciation of every law, together with the knowledge that here one must make one’s decision as a free venture, together also with the open admission that here the law is being infringed and violated and that necessity knows no commandment. [2]

Bonhoeffer here is talking about “law” in two different senses. In the first sentence, he points out that violence cannot be mandated as part of the normal course of life. The decision to take violent steps for “the greater good” can never be formulated as a strict law to be followed; all violence must be seen as nonnormative action. Choosing the lesser of two evils should not be the course charted out in everyday life; it is reserved for extraordinary circumstances, when all other choices fail. The second sentence takes law instead to mean both “generally accepted moral principles” [3] and the call of conscience, which traces itself back to some “universal law of good.” [4] Although these laws must sometimes be broken by the responsible person, necessity does not expiate the guilt of their violation. Bonhoeffer rejects the attitude that places the individual’s own holiness and guiltlessness at the center of his action, rather than the well-being of others.

Living for the other, Bonhoeffer says, is simply following the example of Christ, who is the perfect “man for others” [5]. Because Christ did not live for himself, but lived for us, so too we must not live for ourselves. Bonhoeffer points out, “Jesus is not concerned with the proclamation and realization of new ethical ideals; he is not concerned with Himself being good (Matt. 19:17); he is concerned solely with love for the real man, and for that reason he is able to enter into the fellowship of the guilt of men and take the burden of their guilt upon Himself.” [6] However, Bonhoeffer’s explanation is deeply problematic. The fact remains that Christ was “tempted in every way, just as we are — yet was without sin” (Heb 4:15). Moreover, He calls us to be “perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48). If this is so, how can we justify breaking God’s law? How is any possible rationalization of violence adequate?

This is a difficult objection and cannot be sidestepped. It is not right to say that we must give up our convictions and break God’s laws for the sake of the “greatest good.” Similar arguments have been used to justify atrocities. On the other hand, the Great Commandment, to love others as you love yourself, is “the entire law summed up in a single command” (Galatians 5:14). There seems no clear way to decide what to do when absolute purity and love for the other conflict. Bonhoeffer’s answer is that “this does not mean an everlasting conflict, but the winning of ultimate unity; for indeed the foundation, the essence and the goal of concrete responsibility is the same Jesus Christ who is the Lord of conscience.” [7] If one’s conscience, which is bound to the law, is subservient to Christ, who is the ultimate example of free responsibility, then somehow the two can be reconciled. Bonhoeffer points not to ideals or principles, but to the person of Jesus, our example and Lord. It is by looking to Him alone, not to a formula, that we can resolve the tension inherent in the decision to violate laws for the sake of others.

How, then, can Bonhoeffer’s thought help us to live our lives? After all, as Bonhoeffer points out, there can be no concrete guidelines set out beforehand to govern when violence should be used. He cannot help us to decide when we must use it, and when to abstain. Perhaps the greatest benefit of Bonhoeffer’s argument is not to give practical help on deciding when violence must be used, but to guard against two different, competing views. The first is the argument of strict pacifists, that we must never stoop to any sort of violence whatsoever, even if it seems to be for the most just cause. Bonhoeffer argues that to refuse to take on guilt for the sake of others is to refuse to follow the example of Christ. On the other hand, his argument also guards against the mistake of those who say that violence should simply be another ordinary aspect of life. Violence of necessity must be used under only extraordinary circumstances. It must not be countenanced except when absolutely necessary for the good of others, and even then it is not a morally easy choice. The difficulty of this is, of course, in the contingency of it all; it would be much easier to simply say that either violence is never acceptable or that it is always acceptable, provided it is used in a well-intentioned way.

However, life constantly presents situations that are not simple or morally clear; the nuance of Bonhoeffer’s thought fits the complexity of the world. Bonhoeffer’s thought, which led to such heroic and costly action done for the sake of others, tells us where we can stand: not fixed in strict obedience to unbending laws, nor in a chaos of relativity without recourse, but looking to the lordship of Jesus Christ.

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[1] This concept is elucidated in Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Reality and Resistance, by Larry

Rasmussen (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005).

[2] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. New York: Macmillan, 1955, pp. 208-209.

[3] Ethics p. 207.

[4] Ethics p. 212.

[5] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. New York: Macmillan, 1953,

p. 210.

[6] Ethics, pp. 209-210.

[7] Ethics, p. 216.

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Anne Goetz ‘ll, an English concentrator in Pforzheimer House, is Books & Arts Editor of The Ichthus.

For too long, people have treated Jesus’ teachings of peacemaking practices as if they were general principles. This diverts us from building our houses on the rock — actually living out Jesus’ words.

What is Just Peacemaking?

We have fashioned just peacemaking by beginning with Jesus’ teachings of peacemaking practices — as the way of realism — and connecting with analogous effective practices in our time. Our ten just peacemaking practices are concrete practices that are working in real history to prevent the destruction of war. Each just peacemaking practice is a historically contextualized teaching of Jesus analogously contextualized for our time. And each is being demonstrated to work effectively to prevent numerous wars, as attested by recent historical experience and the disciplines of political science and international relations. The new paradigm with its practices was developed by thirty interdenominational Christian ethicists and international relations specialists — the majority supporters of just war theory, and the minority pacifists — and is now being adapted by leading Muslim and Jewish scholars, based on the texts of their faiths. [1] We do not agree on the justice of making wars, but we agree on the need to prevent wars by specific practices that work. The ten practices of just peacemaking are:

1.   (Mt 5:38-42) Support nonviolent direct action, as practiced by Mohatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent direct action has toppled dictators such as Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the Shah in Iran, and Erich Honecker in East Germany. It is based on Jesus’ way of transforming initiatives.

2.   (Mt. 5:38-42) Take independent initiatives, as developed by the social psychologist Charles Osgood. This practice is how President George Bush senior and Gorbachev got rid of half their nuclear weapons.

3.   (Mt. 5:21-26) Use cooperative conflict resolution. President Carter used this practice to achieve peace in the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel; many other negotiations have prevented wars. [2]

4.   (Mt. 7:1-5) Acknowledge responsibility for conflict and injustice and seek repentance and forgiveness. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa used this practice to end longstanding historical injustices, and president Obama is nudging Turkey to use it to heal deep resentment over the Armenian genocide in 1915.

5.   (Mt. 6:19-33) Advance human rights, religious liberty, and democracy. During the 20th century, democracies with human rights fought no wars against one another.

6.   (Mt. 6:19-33) Foster just and sustainable economic development. Political scientist Ted Gurr has demonstrated that the most frequent cause of intranational violence, civil war, insurgency, and terrorism is not absolute poverty, but deprivation relative to expectations. [3]

7.   (Mt. 5:43ff.) Work with cooperative forces in the international system. International cooperation is crucial for progress toward abolishing nuclear weapons worldwide.

8.   (Mt. 5:43ff.) Strengthen the United Nations and international efforts for cooperation and human rights. Unilateral policies cause more wars. The unilateral policies of the previous U.S. administration have demonstrated the point, engaging the U.S. in the War on Terrorism, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War. This calls for the present administration to engage in healing initiatives of cooperation.

9.   (Mt. 26:52) Reduce offensive weapons and weapons trade. Reducing offensive weapons, especially nuclear weapons, and also the arms trade in weapons to developing countries, makes war less likely.

10.   Encourage grassroots peacemaking groups (Jesus’ strategy of gathering disciples and starting groups in villages). [4]

Just Peacemaking in Today’s World

Can this new paradigm for the ethics of peace and war, Just Peacemaking, guide us to more effective and preventive policy in our time of terrorist threat in the presence of nuclear weapons?

One thing is clear: declaring war on terrorism, on Afghanistan, and on Iraq, while abdicating responsibility for justice for Palestinians and for security for Israel, has not decreased terrorism but increased it. In fact, declaring “war on terrorism” is a euphemism for war on Muslim terrorists and two Muslim nations (Afghanistan and Iraq). The anger of Arabs and Muslims has increased accordingly, along with recruitment of terrorists. The official report of the U.S. Department of State on international terrorism shows the astounding increase in terrorist incidents worldwide since the Iraq War and the torture of prisoners:

208 terrorist attacks caused 625 deaths in 2003;

3,168 attacks caused 1,907 deaths in 2004.

Approximately 14,500 attacks caused 22,605 deaths in 2007.

The just peacemaking practices of human rights and sustainable economic development are crucial for halting recruitment to terrorism. This is how Turkey has basically ended the PKK terrorism of its Kurds. Economists Alan Krueger and Jitka Malecková5 show that “when Palestinian college enrollment doubled in the early 1980s, coinciding with a sharp increase in the unemployment rate for college graduates,” and “the real daily wage of college graduates fell by around 30 percent,” then frustrated and angry Palestinians turned to the popular intifada of 1988. When “the Israeli occupation of the territories and lack of an effective capital market or banking system…prevented the labor markets in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from equilibrating,” the violent intifada of 2000 broke out.

Another thing is clear: avoiding talking with North Korea for seven years, and avoiding talking with Iran ever since the hostage crisis in 1979, while threatening them as the axis of evil, has not decreased their determination to produce plutonium or enrich uranium. North Korea has produced the plutonium for about nine atomic bombs, and tested one bomb. Iran is now enriching uranium to 3.5 percent, enough to run electricity generators, but not to be fissile material in bombs. They would need to enrich to 85 percent for a bomb. Their level of enrichment is being monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. If they expel the IAEC monitors and switch their centrifuges to producing highly enriched uranium, it would take them a month or two to have enough to construct a bomb. It would probably take a couple of years to perfect the technology to build a bomb.

Just peacemaking has a better response than refusing to talk. Its practices of justice, cooperative conflict resolution, and international cooperation are crucial. In fact, the Bush administration, led by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, finally allowed Christopher Hill to talk with the North Korean representative, and in two days he worked out the agreement for them to shut down their reactor and hopefully to give up their plutonium, depending on how relations go during the Obama administration.

Influential editorials in The Wall Street Journal (January 4 and 13, 2007) by seventeen conservative U.S. former national security policy-makers, including George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, James Goodby, and Sam Nunn, declared that the existence of large numbers of nuclear weapons in the world threatens to destroy untold numbers of humankind; and it decreases U.S. security. Today’s problem is preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons into more dangerous hands. They agree that the United States would be far more secure in a nuclear-free world. The power of the U.S. military to deter a conventional attack is more effective than nuclear weapons are against a nuclear attack. This means that if Christians work toward eliminating nuclear weapons, we have influential allies. [6]

These conservative national security experts advocate specific steps: extend key provisions of the 1991 and 2002 treaties verifying and reducing the size of nuclear forces internationally, agree with Russia to move away from operational plans for massive nuclear attacks based on short warning times, ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, affirm the development of the fissile materials cutoff treaty to halt production internationally of nuclear fissile materials for weapons, develop an international system that provides reliable supplies of nuclear fuel for electricity so nations like Iran do not have an incentive to enrich uranium unilaterally, accelerate Nunn-Lugar programs for security for nuclear weapons and for preventing terrorists from acquiring a nuclear bomb, strengthen inspections for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and reach agreement for further reductions in nuclear weapons internationally. The more worldwide reductions in nuclear weapons are achieved, the safer we all are. President Obama has now declared for these steps and has begun to implement them. But unilateral disarmament would not solve the problem. It must be achieved by the just peacemaking practices of international cooperation and cooperative conflict resolution.

Additional Resources

In this space, I cannot explain further how just peacemaking practices help with the threat of nuclear weapons in the context of terrorism. The websites mentioned above help. The book, Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm, (Pilgrim Press) helps more.

See also:

• http://documents.fuller.edu/news/pubs/tnn/2009_spring/1_just_peacemaking.asp.
• “War on Terrorism? A Realistic Look at Alternatives,” in Gerald Schlabach, ed., Just Policing, Not War (Liturgical Press: 2007).
• “Just Peacemaking Reduces Terrorism between Palestine and Israel,” in War in the Bible and Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Richard Hess and Elmer Martens (Eisenbrauns: 2008), 127-148.
• “Humanitarian Intervention, Just Peacemaking and the United Nations,” Concilium: The Return of the Just War, ed. Marìa Pilar Aquino and Dietmar Mieth (London: SCM Press, 2002), 83-93.

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[1] See http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr214.html.

[2] See www.matthew5project.org.

[3] We explain this in the section, “Recruitment of Terrorists,” pp. 5ff. and in chapter 6 of the 2008 edition of Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm.

[4] Every Church a Peace Church (www.ecapc.org) has links to church peace fellowships.

[5] Krueger and Malecková, “Education, Poverty, Political Violence and Terrorism: is there a Causal connection?” manuscript, May, 2002.

[6] See http://twofuturesproject.org/ for the movement toward abolition.

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Glen Stassen is the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, and the co-author of Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context and Just Peacemaking.

In looking for the earliest commentary on war we are met with darkness. We have no accounts of the church’s thinking until the late second-century, and when our historical record begins, discernable Christian views are surprisingly subtle. From the 170s A.D. to the time of Constantine, it does seem clear that most Christians were decidedly anti-militarist. An early martyr, Maximilian, was put to death, for instance, for refusing to become a solider, and writings attributed to the third-century bishop Hippolytus demand that Christians should not become soldiers. Yet we have no evidence of the general acceptance of such a principle or, indeed, evidence that, in the inverse situation, Roman soldiers who converted to Christianity were required to leave military service.

It is worth remembering, of course, that we cannot fully distinguish principle and practice in our interpretation of the distant past. The Roman army’s role in persecution of Christians or a distrust of the lifestyle of soldiers may have generated Christian anti-militarist sentiment as much as thought-through objections to Christian involvement in potential violence.

For answers, the Early Church engaged with the life and teachings of Jesus to determine a morality of war. In seeking to faithfully interpret scripture in its imperial context, the early church did not to resort to proof-texting: the Sermon on the Mount’s injunction to turn the other cheek, for instance, was always interpreted as part of a broader conception of love for God and neighbor. Pastoral concerns, moreover, seemed to play a larger role in developing Christian thinking than systematic theological or ethical inquiry. Specific situations necessitated particular answers: the welcomed reality of soldiers’ conversions was more important, perhaps, than maintaining a single moral position.

Moral discourse about war, therefore, was built from concrete Christian love. Such concreteness led to complexity. While love demands that an individual should not inflict harm, the church came to believe that love calls too for actions that prevent harm, actions that remove harm and actions that promote good. Love does not only call for self-control and individual responsibility, but for constructive action on behalf of others. This would later be classically articulated in the Just-War theory of Augustine.

Christians maintained a strong ethic of self-sacrifice. While most came to accept that love demanded action to prevent harm to others, the use of lethal force was believed unacceptable for self-defense. This logic survived in Christian thought until the middle ages when Thomas Aquinas and others argued that an individual’s own life, as part of God’s good creation, demands protection. To love one’s neighbor as oneself means that one’s life has value. Action to protect one’s life is therefore right, even if it results in the aggressor’s death.

When love is understood as demanding the preventing and removing of harm, human judgment needs to be exercised. There must be discernment of what is just. There must be ways of determining, for example, who is in the wrong when violence occurs. Potential victims need protection.

Now, it seems a certain level of humility is required in any such calculation. All too often in Christian history, there has been too great a certainty in the identification of the transgressor. The zeal to righteous action carries dangers. We should remember, in Ronald Baintons’ words, that in disputes among Christians it is the saints who burn the saints. Caution cannot, however, lead to inaction. There are obvious examples. It would take a particularly brave pacifist to argue that, in principle, the allies’ military action against Hitler’s Germany should not have happened.

There are pitfalls, of course, in looking to the church before Constantine for guidance on the morality of war. Theirs was a very different world. Some recent Christian voices, for instance, often fetishize the early church’s relative powerlessness. These voices respond to the conflicting demands of love by absenting Christians from difficult choices in our current political realities where U.S. Christians have power.

The second-century critic Celsus attacked anti-militarist Christians for enjoying the fruits of Roman order while refusing to play their part in its maintenance. Today, there are Christian voices who too easily appeal to Christianity as a minority position and Christians as resident aliens; just as easily, through the centuries, Christian interests have been equated with national interests.

I am convinced that there is a dangerous avoidance of responsibility when Christians’ duties and interests are understood as peculiarly distinct from those of other citizens’; when others participate in war for an understood common good, while Christians maintain their principles. Such distinctions neglect the pervasiveness of human sin. The structures of our daily lives in communities, institutions and nations continually place us in positions where we harm others even without intention; where any choice, including inaction, brings hurtful consequences for others.

If we accept the intuition of the early church that love demands the prevention of harm to others, we will need to discern and act. We will undoubtedly find ourselves with dirty hands. We will make mistakes. Our choices will be compromised. In such moments, however, our full conception of love will surely allow us to fall back on hope, and the grace and forgiveness we believe comes from God.

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Andrew C. Forsyth is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School. He received his Master of Theological Studies degree in 2009.