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I have gone back lately to read Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular by Stanley Hauerwas (Duke University Press, 1994). I am not sure that I find Stanley's text more entertaining, more intellectually stimulating, or more spiritually moving for me. I had a colleague at PLNU who long ago noted that I read Stanley devotionally -- which is true and, for Stanley, probably very ironic.

I will share from several essays in the book over the next week or so -- it has some excellent exemplars of Hauerwas' theological high journalism. One essay stuck out as immensely relevant now: "Whose 'Just' War? Which Peace?" He wrote the essay after the first Gulf War (which he merely called "The Gulf War" not knowing at the time that it would be continuing over a decade later in mutated form. The essay is remarkably astute, even clairavoyant, about the events to follow.

Today people look back at the "First Gulf War" as "the good war." Today's unpopular war in Iraq, however, has its basis in the public relations spin in the early 90's invasion of Iraq. Hauerwas writes "hoping to convince the many Christians who supported the Gulf War that on Christian grounds such support was a mistake. The so-called just war theory, rather than helping Christians discern where their loyalties should be, in fact made it more difficult for Christians to distinguish their story from the story of the United States of America. As a result, appeals to that theory led to an uncritical legitimation of the Gulf War by most American Christians. This outcome should not be surprising since most Christians in America continue to believe that this is a 'Christian nation' (p. 137). The fact that Christians embraced the first Gulf War through "just war theory" made it easier for them to embrace the unprovoked invasion of Iraq in 2003 via the same theory. Given information, available then but widely available now, such thinking either stretches such just war thinking to incoherence or shows that just war thinking never could, especially in the modern era, do the work that it is supposed to do.

Hauerwas contends that "the Gulf War was conceived and fought by . . . political realists who found it useful to justify it on grounds of just war. No doubt, s ome have cynically gone about this project, but I suspect that many realists who have justified the war on those grounds genuinely believe that the war was conceived and fought as a just war. But from a realist perspective what must be acknowledged is that those with the biggest armies and the best technology can call any war just, if they so choose, when or if they have won it" (p. 140). If so, the difference between the current Iraqi war and the "First Gulf War" is that it has not been won after it was declared over. Of course, in a historical perspective one sees that the current conflict continues the early '90s conflict. The realist position was never very "realistic."

Hauerwas describes the rationale for the Gulf War: "The war in the Gulf was prosecuted by a military shaped by realistic presuppositions, justified by the crusade rhetoric of the cold war, and determined not to repeat Vietnam. Americans were able to fight the war in the Gulf as an allegedly just war, not because America is a nation whose foreign and military policies are formed by just war doctrine, but because America is a nation whose military had been shaped by realists to serve the crusade against communism. American Christians, undisciplined as they are by any serious reflection on the morality of war, enthusiasticaly backed this war as simply a providential instance of good versus evil" (p. 144). This rhetoric was continued by the second Bush administration -- thus showing more continuity between the Bush I and Bush II than recognized. Yet the more ambitious political ends of the invasion showed the ideological nature of the rationales when the occupational strategies turned Iraq more into a Vietnam-like popular insurgency rather than a crusade-like "War on Terror."

War within the context of democracies depend upon the ability of the war-makers to control the media to provide always available justification for war -- regular disinformation (it is remarkable how the New York Times editorial page has followed public opinion in their assessment of the war). This again goes back to the first Gulf War, but likewise, has proven the Achilles heal in the Bush preemptive war policy: "Through the methods by which the administration and military controlled descriptions of the war, Americans belieed that they had prosecuted a war in which 'no one got killed.' That fact that there were thousands of Iraqi casualties is not thought to be morally relevant. As a rult, the Iraqi war has put realist and just warrior alike in the difficult position of having to meet the unreal expectations of the public in the future. Now realist and just warrior must justify future wars to the American people who believe in the technological fantasy of a war in which no one gets killed -- when 'no one' mans any U.S. soldiers. As a result of this spin control that has fired the crusade mentality, the fundamental question for advocates of just war theory or realism is how democracies are to develop virtues in their citizens to fight wars with limited purposes, not crusades" (pp. 146-47).

This has been the fall out in Iraq. "Some one" (i.e. American soldiers) are getting killed, dying in horrible and barbaric ways. War without death (of "real people, i.e., Americans) is the fantasy into which Americans bought -- and still do. The denial of Lancelot's study of the total Iraqi death toll (confirmed in its methodology by the British government among others) within American discourse shows that Hauerwas was correct: if it's not a Crusade, Americans don't really want war. It's not that they are opposed to war, but the US as God's elect nation should only fight crusades. This is why there is no real "peace movement" in the US -- the ideology of the nation-state as the focus of moral allegiance cannot stand a peace movement for no one is willing to suffer the consequences of not going to war.

Thus Hauerwas wants, in this essay, to recognize the concrete socio-historical position of those who argue for "just war", rather than seeing just war as an abstract, moral landry list of what it takes to go to war. Hauerwas argues "To understand the Gulf War, it is crucial to understand the interrelation of moral and political imperialism excemplified by American justification of the war. Imperialism derives from the hegemonic power of an empire that presumes, exactly because it is an empire, that anyone, anywhere if given the opportunity would want to be part of the empire. A false universalism is created that necessarily blinds the imperialists, since they believe that they represent the nonbiased view of humanity" (p. 150). What deeper confirmation do Hauerwas' insight than the belief, espoused by many neo-conservatives that the Iraqis "will welcome us as liberators"?

Finally, Hauerwas concludes the essay, "Surely the saddest aspect of the war for Christians should have been its celebration as a victory and of those who fought it as heroes. No doubt many fought bravely and even heroically, but the orgy of crusading patriotism that this war unleashed surely should have been resisted by Christians. The flags and yellow ribbons on churches are testimony to how little Christians in America realize that our loyalty to God is incompatible with those who would war in the name of an abstract justice. Christians should have recognized that such 'justice' is but another form of idolatry to just the degree it asked us to kill. I pray that God will judge us accordingly" (p. 152).

Perhaps God has judged us accordingly. The celebration of the Gulf War in the churches lowered the ability of the churches to resist an unprovoked war called on at the very least ambiguous data, the result of an elective policy rather than a military contingency. The United States is paying; the conservative evangelical church is paying for its mindless idolatrous loyalty. There is a sense of secularism that is spreading and a justification for a theological liberalism (itself at the forefront of justifying the first Gulf War and the invasion of Afghanistan), it seems to me at large in our culture. But I wonder if congregations have gotten it -- I wonder what was celebrated in congregations throughout the United States -- Pentecost or Memorial Day? I'm deeply suspicious that I know the answer.

I am not a pacificist; I am a Christian. Hauerwas reminds us over and over again that "Christians do not become Christians and then decide to be nonviolent. Rather, nonviolence is simply one of the essential practices that is intrinsic to the story of beinga a Christian. 'Being a Christian' is to be incorporated into a community constituted bythe stories of God, which, as a consequence, necessarily puts one in tension with the world that does not share those stories" (p. 137). I think that the problem with war is that it offends "the God revealed in Christ," not that war is "irrational given the progression of the human race" (p. 141). I pray that this day after Pentecost Sunday, we might remember this offense to God, maybe even make a memorial day of it.

Posted by johnwright at 2:17 PM | Comments (17)

As I continue to read and contemplate on the life of the church catholic in the 20th century, I continue to find myself rethinking the categories that seem 'natural' to us. I continue to find ways that seem to me to make the crucial distinctions not within "evangelical Protestant," "mainline Protestant," or "Roman Catholic" (not to leave Orthodoxy out!), but within each of these larger socio-historical Christian movements. I am coming more and more to see the difference as the groups within each that either find the center of their faith in Jesus Christ or those who seek to make Jesus Christ an answer to the local context to which the church seeks to address. In the 20th century, this local context has been either been the individual as defined by the liberal nation-state or its inverse, the collective, as defined by a socialist nation-state (or some sort of synthesis between the two).

In contrast to this, I find evangelical evangelicals, evangelical mainline Protestants, and evangelical Roman Catholics. By 'evangelical,' I mean the classical sense of evangelical -- the gospel of Jesus Christ, handing down the faith given to us that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and was raised from the dead and appeared to the apostles according to the Scriptures. The "relevance" of the church's witness is not found in addressing the particularity of a local context, but in expressing what is true in God's revelation to us in Jesus Christ. The meaning of all humanity, all history, and all creation is found in Jesus as defined by the Chalcedonian rule of Jesus's full divinity and full humanity. Jesus as truly God reveals the true God to us; Jesus as true human also reveals true humanity to us.

I found it fascinating, then, to find John Webster explicate the full Christian humanism of Karl Barth grounded in the doctrine of the Incarnation. The basis of God's revelation to humanity is not some particular transcendental faculty in humanity, some condition to which God conforms. God's revelation is Jesus Christ. For Barth, "theology does not first work out the antecedent conditions under which a revelation from God might be possible, and only subsequently present Jesus Christ as the actual fulfillment of this possibility" (p. 63). Barth writes that 'God's revelation taking place is utterly simple, the simple reality of God' (I/2, p. 11). Jesus' name thus indicates that which in its divine objectivity is constitutive of all reality. All talk of God, creation, humanity, salvation and glory can in one sense be only a repetition or drawing out of this name" (Webster, p. 63).

This becomes worked out in Barth's understanding of humanity. Barth wants no part of a given anthropology, found in disciplines without reference to God. Our human nature is found revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Webster argues, "From the outset, the comprehensive scope of Barth's proposal is evident. In his anthropology, he is not simply talking of the being of the Christian or of the religious person, but of humanity as such, for 'a decision has been made concerning the being and nature of every man by the mere fact that with him and among all other men He too has become a man. No matter who or what or where he may be, he cannot alter the fact that this One is also man. And because this One is also man, every man in his place and time is changed' (III/2, p. 133). . . . Barth is not offering a general ontology of sociality or relationality, but making the very particular assertion that it is because Jesus Christ is Neighbour, Companion, Brother and Counterpart (cf. III/2, p. 134) that we are constituted as the beings that we are and knowable as such. . . . human being is unthinkable apart from the fact that 'man is with God because he is with Jesus' (III/2, p 136)" (Webster, pp. 100-101). Human nature bears transcendental worth, not from a transcendental value found in 'human rights' but objectively, eternally, personally in every human being because of God's revelation of humanity in Jesus Christ. In Jesus each and every human being is revealed as loved by God.

As I read this, I was struck by the structural parallel between Barth's explication of the Christian faith in its humanistic depth and John Paul II's Christological turn and its continuation in Benedict XVI. What struck me was the insistence for John Paul II that believers needed to interpret the Vatican II document "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World" (Gaudium et Spes) through the Christological statement in paragraph 22. The Council wrote, "The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of humanity take on light. For Adam, the first human, was a future of him who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and his love, fully reveals humans to humans ourselves and makes human's calling clear. . . . Such is the mystery of humans, and it is a great one, as seen by believers in the light of Christian revelation. Through Christ and in Christ, the riddles of sorrow and death grow meaningful. Apart from his Gospel, they overwhelm us."

Whether both were exploring the grammatical implications of the Incarnation as witnessed to at Chalcedon, or whether there is a line of influence from Barth to the Vatican Council and then picked up by John Paul II (directly or through de Lubac or Balthasar or Ratzinger?), one finds the deepest continuation of Barth's concerns and thought in the post-Paul VIth papacy.

If this is so, it suggests the depths of God's call for the church to its Christ the Center in the late 20th and early 21st century. Previous distinctions pale in light of deeper divisions today that are forming within various fragmenting members of the body of Christ as they define themselves in the interest politics of contemporary liberalism rather than by their Center. One sees here the profound catholicity of Barth and the profound reform in post-Vatican II Catholicism for a witness in the deepest affirmation of the dignity and honor of each and every human person -- the Incarnation of the Word of God in Jesus Christ. This is the common witness towards life that we affirm and discover about ourselves as we engage in the personal works of mercy -- the life that we see revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

Posted by johnwright at 7:24 PM | Comments (5)

After finishing the bulk of grading yesterday, I finished John Webster's book, Karl Barth (2nd edition). It is hard knowing whether to be more impressed with the analytic clarity and fairness of Webster's treatment or with the beauty of Barth's thought. It is, however, an outstanding introduction to Barth in only 175 pages!!

I also printed out Benedict XVI's opening address to the Roman Catholic Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean. I had glanced over it last week. A friend, Aaron Friberg, had sent me a NY Times article on it .

It is fascinating how the press just can't get Benedict correct. The article begins speaking of what Benedict "condemns" in two consecutive paragraphs, and then writes "His views were largely consistent with those he held in his earlier life as Joseph Ratzinger, a conservative and contentious cardinal." I am reminded again what J. Augustine DiNoia wrote in the essay that I blogged on Monday, "When the Church, in this environment, advances her vision of the integral human good, her interventions are frequently caricatured as retrogressive and intrusive. The alternative anthropology has so powerful a hold on the media, the international aid agencies, many NGOs, and other influential bodies that it is difficult to advance the Christian vision of the integral human good through dialogue, argument and counter-argument." If one is not an emotivist, one is condemned as one who constantly condemns.

As I read Benedict's address, I couldn't help hearing Barth's concerns ring out, but without the "shrillness" of which Barth is sometimes accused (both unfairly and fairly). As I read Benedict, I hear Barthian convictions and concerns transformed and elevated by the incorporation into a deeper catholicity than Barth's reformed position allowed. It hear Barth placed more deeply within an Augustinian framework through de Lubac. Of course, in so saying, I merely am saying I hear the gospel in its full evangelical, catholic, and orthodox sense.

At the center of Benedict's address is Jesus Christ as the revelation of God. Barth could not say the following any clearer: "God is the foundational reality, not a God who is merely imagined or hypothetical, but God with a human face; he is God-with-us, the God who loves even to the Cross. When the disciple arrives at an understanding of this love of Christ "to the end", he cannot fail to respond to this love with a similar love: "I will follow you wherever you go" (Luke 9:57)." Likewise Benedict speaks of the importance of immersion in the "Word of God" as the most important task of the church: "First and foremost, Christ makes his person, his life and his teaching known to us through the word of God. . . . To achieve this, we must train people to read and meditate on the word of God: this must become their staple diet, so that, through their own experience, the faithful will see that the words of Jesus are spirit and life (cf. John 6:63). Otherwise, how could they proclaim a message whose content and spirit they do not know thoroughly? We must build our missionary commitment and the whole of our lives on the rock of the word of God." (It is interesting that the NY Time article doesn't mention this Christological or Scriptural center to Benedict's speech!)

I aslo want to bring out the common understanding of the role of the church amid the unjust structures and battles for control of a society's resources under the guise of the contemporary nation-state. Benedict uses "political" in the sense of the hegemony that the nation-state bears over the resources of those within its borders. Yet in so doing he points out that the political task of the church remains, and must remain, independent of any of these disputes precisely for the sake of its commitment to the poor and to a genuine justice:

"This political task is not the immediate competence of the Church. Respect for a healthy secularity -- including the pluralism of political opinions -- is essential in the authentic Christian tradition. If the Church were to start transforming herself into a directly political subject, she would do less, not more, for the poor and for justice, because she would lose her independence and her moral authority, identifying herself with a single political path and with debatable partisan positions. The Church is the advocate of justice and of the poor, precisely because she does not identify with politicians nor with partisan interests. Only by remaining independent can she teach the great criteria and inalienable values, guide consciences and offer a life choice that goes beyond the political sphere."

The church's allegiance is ultimately to its Lord, Jesus Christ, who points us to the poor, the hungry, the sick, and those who suffer under injustice.

Of course, Barth is rightly understood and praised for having the theological resources to resist the Nazi's co-optation of the church for its political program, supported by the liberal Protestant theological establishment. Webster points to an essay Barth wrote in 1946, "The Christian Community and the Civil Community." Webster summarizes the themes of the essay: "the role of the state as providential witness to Christ's rule; the state as protection against chaos by the rule of law; the repudiation of the direct identity between God's dominion and political society" (p. 152).

Webster then quotes Barth's 1941 "Letter to Great Britain from Switzerland": "the world in which we live is the place where Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and present age is the time of God's long-suffering until the day when the same Jesus Christ shall come again in His glory . . . Since this is true, the world in which we live is not some sinsiter wilderness where fate or chance holds sway, or where all sorts of 'principalities and powers' run riot unrestrained and rage about unchecked. . . . There is no doubt that such 'principalities andpowers' . . . do exist . . . But at the same time it is written, and we can and must hold on to it even today: that although at the present the glory of the Kingdom of God is held out to us only as a hope, yet the Kingly Rule of Christ extends not merely over the Church as the congregation of the faithful but . . . over the whole universe in all its height and depths; and it also confronts and overrules with sovereign dignity the principalities and powers and evil spirits of this world."

Webster then summarizes: "But Christ's kingly rule is not a mere consoling warrant for indolence; because Christ rule the world, Christians are called to resist the passivity which totalitarian regimes breed, to be not simply political subjects but political agents" (pp. 153-54).

A third way -- to avoid "the passivity which totalitarian regimes breed" -- and the contemporary nation-state is a type of totalitarian regime -- but not be pulled into the fighting between the 'principalities and powers' but to live faithfully to Christ in all spheres of life in obeying the command of God to witness through involvement in the life of the poor, the sick, the hungry. Here Barth and Benedict come together in their non-foundational theology that finds its foundation in the revelation of the one True God in the face of Jesus Christ, God's great "Yes" to humanity.

As I continue reading and reflecting, I am beginning to wonder whether Barth's impact may ironically have become more evident in the life of the Roman Catholic Church rather than in the so-called "Protestant" tradition from which Barth supposed spoke. Of course, that may be because Barth, in his very commitment to a reformed church, spoke simultaneously as one deeply commited to catholicity through the church's witness to Jesus Christ. As his health failed in the 1960's, and theological liberalism, never really relinquishing its pull in Western Christianity, re-emerged in the concern for "contextually-relevant" theologies, Barth's christocentric thought that must lead to catholicity found a home within a Roman Catholic church equally committed to reform and revitalization back towards the "human face of God in Jesus Christ."

Posted by johnwright at 10:38 AM | Comments (4)

I am making my way through finals -- slowly but surely. I hope that the next weeks will afford me the opportunity to share thoughts and readings with you on my blog. The intensity of life has been reflected on the limits of blogging that I've done.

It is no secret that I am interesting in the growing convergence between evangelical catholics and catholic evangelicals and the remnants of evangelical and orthodox mainline Protestants as a source of great hope for the future faithful unity of witness and mission of Christ's one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. It is this particular convergence that produces (and shows the continual depths of division) in events such as when Francis Beckwith announced last week his return to the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church. It seems to me that what has been called "post-liberalism" provides a promising discourse to explore this new convergence as it is arising.

In some ways, I have no stake in the label "post-liberal". Obviously liberalism is still strong and vital in evangelicalism, mainline Protestantism, and even within Roman Catholicism. The liberal nation-state still maintains its hegemonic stranglehold on what counts as "political action" in the world. Moreover if "post-liberal" is meant to represent one consumerist choice among various theological methodologies to provide a way to speak of God within today's culture, I have no interest in the term at all. Yet if "post-liberal" can name a way of returning to the sources of the evangelical, catholic, and orthodox Christian tradition with a vitality to work for the unity of the church and its mission in the world, I'm all for it.

In this light I was reminded last week about an important tie between the so-called "post-liberals" and the Christological-centered renewal of Roman Catholicism that continues in Benedict XVI from John Paul II. It is little noticed that James A. DiNoia (for the American theological scene), also known as J. Augustine DiNoia, O.P. was a graduate of Yale in the late '80's or early '90s and is now the third ranking official in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, having arrived in Rome recruited by Cardinal Ratzinger in 2002.

This came to mind because Father DiNoia gave an excellent plenary address to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (http://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=4340&wf=rsscol) in which he emphasized aspects from Benedict XVI's Deus Caritas Est. He emphasizes what he sees as the two major points from the encyclical. He reminds the group that the Encyclical finds its origins deeply within the Augustinian tradition -- in language echoing de Lubac's retrieval of the single supernatural end for humanity in God: "for Christian faith the whole range of human desire -- or, to use more technical language, the inclination to the good embedded in the very structure of human existence -- finds it complete fulfillment in the love of the triune God, and nothing less. Although Pope Benedict does not use this expression in the encyclical, we might call this unity of and continuity between eros and agape 'the sanctification of desire.'"

Di Noia continues this reading of the Encyclical. "This second point is captured brilliantly in a passage from paragraph 19 of the encyclical: 'The entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man: it seeks his evangelization through Word and Sacrament …; and it seeks to promote man in the various arenas of life and human activity. Love is therefore the service that the Church carries out in order to attend constantly to man's sufferings and his needs, including material needs.'" He explicates this a little more: "Man does not live on bread alone, indeed, but he needs bread in order to live. Integral human fulfillment encompasses a range of created goods even as it necessarily entails a directedness, an inner tendency, toward the enjoyment of the uncreated Good who is God himself, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who enjoy a communion of life into which we, created persons who are not God, are invited to share as their friends -- and nothing less. This integral human good is the object of the Church's service of charity: the ultimate good and the intermediate or subordinate goods, the spiritual well-being and the material well-being, the goods of this earthly life and the good beyond life."

Di Noia takes the implications of this for Christian social scientific thought. He writes, "In accord with the traditional Catholic principle, reason retains its integrity and proper finality, but faith contributes to its work by locating the objects of scientific inquiry on, so to speak, the widest possible conceptual map -- that provided by our awareness of the divine desire to share the communion of trinitarian life with creaturely persons, or, to use the terms of the encyclical, the integral human good." The Christian social scientist must then learn to think liberated from secular, reductionistic social scientific methods that see the good only within creation -- and thereby lose the human good. He argues, " the alternative anthropology espouses the socially constructed character of truth and reality, the priority of cultural diversity, the deconstruction of all moral norms, and priority of personal choice" -- in other words, what MacIntyre would call 'emotivism'.

He notes that this provides a problem for the church's engagement in such situations -- problems that we have found at times at Mid-City, for instance, in the refusal of the church's pastors to be present as pastors in the clinic run by the "Health-Faith Alliance." Di Noia writes, "When the Church, in this environment, advances her vision of the integral human good, her interventions are frequently caricatured as retrogressive and intrusive. The alternative anthropology has so powerful a hold on the media, the international aid agencies, many NGOs, and other influential bodies that it is difficult to advance the Christian vision of the integral human good through dialogue, argument and counter-argument. The new anthropology is viewed, in effect, as self-evident and not in need of argument. This situation has created many practical problems that sometimes make it difficult for Catholic aid agencies even to function at the local, national, and even international levels."

He concludes, "It is urgent for social scientists whose practice of their disciplines does not in principle exclude some broad account of the integral human good to counter this secular anthropology and the social engineering programs inspired by it. The straightforward, and well-argued account of the Christian vision of the integral human good presented in "Deus Caritas Est" should facilitate the kind of discussion and argument which needs to take place."

It is interesting to look at the thought of the agenda at Mid-City and in post-liberalism in this light. It is the retrieval of a simple and profound message of the gospel of Jesus Christ, of an evangelic, catholic, and orthodox Christianity, that can pull catholic evangelicals, evangelical catholics, and post-liberal Protestants towards a common visible unity of the body of Christ in the world: "Integral human fulfillment encompasses a range of created goods even as it necessarily entails a directedness, an inner tendency, toward the enjoyment of the uncreated Good who is God himself, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who enjoy a communion of life into which we, created persons who are not God, are invited to share as their friends -- and nothing less. This integral human good is the object of the Church's service of charity."

Posted by johnwright at 12:09 PM | Comments (9)