Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
AMERICAN CIVIL RELIGION:
GOOD NEWS OF WHICH KINGDOM?
A Thesis
Submitted to
Eastern Mennonite Seminary
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Master of Arts in Religion
by
LeVon R. Smoker, B.A.
________________________________
Mark Thiessen Nation, PhD date
To my sister Darla
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................1
CHAPTER ONE: A False Imitation of the Gospel..............................................................8
American Freedom and Sacrifice.......................................................................12
Justification: Theologizing the Unholy..............................................................24
The President’s Use of Biblical Language and Straussian Advisors..................28
CHAPTER TWO: Which Things Are First at First Things?.............................................34
“If Your Eye is Healthy...”..................................................................................37
The Prior Commitment to America....................................................................50
CHAPTER THREE: Political Bodies in the Epistle to the Romans..................................59
Slavery: Subjugation of the Body to a Master....................................................62
“Flesh” as National Identity................................................................................71
Political Bodies Which Live and Walk by the Spirit of God..............................78
CONCLUSION: The True Gospel.....................................................................................87
BIBLIOGRAPHY..............................................................................................................96
iii
Introduction
As a young churchgoer, I remember hearing the Sunday School stories of the
trials, temptations, and failures of the children of Israel. I recall thinking that they seemed
like such a pathetic lot—constantly messing things up in spite of the good things that God
had done for them, rejecting God and following other people’s gods in the process. What
an idolatrous bunch of people! When God was so clearly for them and with them, they
still were drawn to the worship of idols.
Idolatry. I remember thinking (for a few weeks or a few years—I’m not sure
which) in my preteen mind that it was nice that idolatry was not a problem for us
twentiethcentury followers of God. What a relief! The most pervasive pathology of the
Israelites had faded from existence never to tempt us in our modern world. At least in the
Western world, people didn’t bow down before gods made with human hands or for that
matter anything else made with human hands. Those things were in the category of
“superstition,” and we were not superstitious people.
But something clicked in my growing mind about this Old Testament scourge
called idolatry. Did it really disappear or did it slowly evolve into something else—maybe
something harder to see and more difficult to name? Idolatry was a very serious problem
1
2
for the children of Israel, and the priority of the first commandment—“You shall have no
other gods before me”—seemed to indicate that it was not a temptation that would
dissipate over time. Perhaps idolatry had “shapeshifted” into the form of those things
which give human societies power and control (or the illusion thereof) over the world and
nature. Wealth has been suggested as the primary contemporary idol, and the pursuit of it
certainly consumes a great amount of time and energy in our society. Many Christians
will agree that idolatry in the forms of consumerism and materialism is a problem in
American culture. But what it lacks is the unifying force of rituals and sacrifices. Persons
will rarely commit themselves to fight and die specifically for the cause of acquisition
unless the cause is in some way elevated to the realm of religious nationalism. Before this
commitment can happen, they must be acculturated, schooled, and indoctrinated into the
ways and narratives of that entity which they are defending. It must be more than a mere
material pursuit. The allencompassing narrative of the nationstate provides the ultimate
cause and so I ask these questions: Has allegiance to the modern nationstate—America
—become the idolatry of our times? Which narrative gets privileged—a biblical one or
an American one?
Given the ubiquity and widespread cultivation of nationalism, patriotism, and
exceptionalism in both Christian and secular institutions, it would seem that an American
narrative is the one that we truly hope will save us. Since the attacks of September 11,
3
2001, the language of civil religion has become more evident in public discourse. Former
New York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani made these statements prior to leaving office:
All that matters is that you embrace America and understand its ideals and what
it’s all about. Abraham Lincoln used to say that the test of your Americanism was
not your family tree, the test of your Americanism was your belief in America.
Because we’re like a religion, really, a secular religion. We believe in ideas and
ideals. We’re not one race, we’re many. We’re not one ethnic group, we’re
everyone. We’re not one language, we’re all of these people. So what ties us
together? We’re tied together by our belief in political democracy; we’re tied
together by our belief in religious freedom. We’re tied together by our belief in
capitalism, a free economy where people make they’re [sic] own choices about
spending their money. We’re tied together because we respect human life. We’re
tied together because we respect the rule of law. Those are the ideas that make us
Americans.
The reason I chose to give my farewell address here is because this chapel is
thricehallowed ground. This is a place of really special importance to people
who have a feeling and a sense and an emotion and an understanding of
patriotism. It is hallowed by the fact that it was consecrated as a house of God in
1766. That’s a long time ago. And then in April of 1789, George Washington
came here after he was inaugurated as the first President of our Republic. He
prayed right here in this church, which makes it very sacred ground to people
who care deeply about America. Then it was consecrated one more time, on
September 11th.1
Guiliani’s reference to being an American is spoken from his background of being a
descendant of immigrants who chose America, not only as a place to live, but as a
complete identity—a “secular religion.” His wanting to make sense of the attacks and
1
Archives of Rudolph W. Giuliani, 107th Mayor, Farewell Address at St. Paul’s Chapel, 27 December
2001, <http://www.nyc.gov/html/rwg/html/2001b/farewell.html> (11 July 2006). The high level of emotion
following September 11, 2001 certainly underlies Giuliani’s language in great part, but the effect of this
language needs to be considered.
4
give words of comfort in this speech is perfectly understandable, but Christians must
reflect on his words and idioms which are definitely religious. How do professing
Christians understand this language? Do they represent biblical Christianity? Do they
conflict with biblical Christianity?
The pluralism in Giuliani’s “secular religion” stands out; Americans have many
aspects which could divide them—race, ethnicity, language. These differences are
overcome by ideals, one of which is religious freedom. Interestingly, America is not tied
together by religious belief in the God of Israel, but “by our belief in religious freedom.”
This striking prioritization is such that
Protestant, Catholic, Jew, and ethical humanist forget their differences and pull
together. Confessional idiosyncrasies are demoted to the level of folklore....
[W]hat we have here is not a coalition of faiths but a new religion, significantly
different from each of the particular traditions it claims to transcend and to fuse.2
As I write this, my home country, the United States of America, is engaged in
open war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other countries around the globe are hosting U.S.
military troops and private military contractors (PMCs) as part of the war on terror. This
global reach is assumed by many to be a necessity and a responsibility. At the root of this
justification, however, is something other than the faith which truthfully says, “In God we
trust.” We need not take a political partisan approach to these issues since that approach
2
John Howard Yoder, “Civil Religion in America,” in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984): 173.
5
still directs itself at the question of what is best for America or what America really is.
The political partisan approach—attacking the political right while standing on the left or
vice versa—remains rooted in the notion that human beings can and must save
themselves. Our inevitable growth and advances in technology, etc. will enable us to heal
all our woes.
The approach I am taking in this paper is an ecclesiological one rooted in
Anabaptist convictions. At its core, the church of Jesus Christ is called to bear prophetic
witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to the kingdom of God. A revitalized
commitment to the orthodox Christianity which undergirds such an ecclesiastical identity
provides the church with a much needed corrective to the American deformation of the
Gospel into a civil religion which promotes national unity and security; this deformation
minimizes the social ethic of Jesus Christ, marginalizes the church, and diffuses its
witness.
Chapter one argues that America has its own gospel which is in conflict with the
gospel of Christ. The American gospel uses the language of Christ’s gospel and distorts
its meaning. This confused deformation of Christianity is not capable of resisting the
violence of the state, including the cooperation of Christians in that violence, even when
that state is a democratic one like the United States of America. This violence is not only
6
a moral issue—although it is that. It is an inevitable piece of a false gospel which is
competing with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Chapter two is a critique of First Things editorinchief Richard John Neuhaus’
justification for the war on terror. His neoconservative approach to theology is evident in
various writings and projects of his which give a high priority to a particular
understanding of freedom and justice. The careful language he uses to present his
viewpoint is not enough to prevent the formation of a theology which underwrites
American imperialism.
In chapter three, I argue that the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans presents a
gospel which is both personal and political. With Jesus Christ as the revelation of God’s
purposes for his people, in particular, his crucifixion and resurrection, Paul wants
Christians to live in such a way that Caesar’s authority is diminished by their
thoroughgoing obedience to Christ. This new community does not participate in violence,
except to suffer it, nor does it fear for its survival, since its source of life is the Spirit of
God, not human flesh or national identity.
I conclude by restating my main theological point drawing especially on chapter
two of Stanley Hauerwas’ After Christendom?—“Why There Is No Salvation Outside the
Church”—and Yoder’s lecture “To Serve Our God and to Rule the World.” The
understanding that God’s people rule the world in a way that the world does not yet
7
understand is needed so that they do not yield to the temptation to rule the world through
violence.
Chapter One:
A False Imitation of the Gospel
“Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”1
Henry Kissinger
In a 1975 interview with staff of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select
Committee on Intelligence, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger responded to a
question about the role of the United States in promising to help arm Iraqi Kurds for a
rebellion against the Baathist Iraqi government with the above quote. Kissinger had
reneged on the promise to help the Kurds, and the Kurdish forces were decimated and
hundreds of their leaders executed. The failed rebellion left 200,000 Kurdish refugees in
Iran, 40,000 of whom were later forcibly returned to Iraq. Neither the Shah of Iran, the
instigator of the plan, nor the United States gave the Kurds any humanitarian aid, and the
U.S. refused to grant political asylum to any refugees.2 It is not the purpose of this chapter
to dissect Kissinger’s statement but rather to explore, in part, how the very thing that he
1
William Safire, New York Times, 12 February 1976, p. 31, quoted in William Blum, Killing Hope:
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2004),
244.
2
Blum, Killing Hope, 242244. The Select Committee on Intelligence was also known as the Pike
Committee, named after its chairman, Rep. Otis G. Pike.
8
9
so cynically denied has in fact taken place. In other words, I will show that covert action
in the name of American interests and missionary work in the saving souls have been
confused as part of the greater confusion between the gospel of the American way of life
and the gospel of Jesus Christ.
In spite of Kissinger’s disavowal, the United States government is engaged in
proclaiming a “gospel.” While it might seem strange to make this statement—the
establishment clause prohibits a state religion—there is certainly evidence to support the
claim. The original headquarters building of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in
Langley, Virginia has etched on the wall of its main lobby the scripture, “And ye shall
know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” This verse was chosen as their motto
by Director Allen Dulles in the 1950’s. The CIA’s website describes this as “a biblical
verse which ... characterizes the intelligence mission in a free society.”3 This
interpretation of freedom as “a free society” begs the question of biblical exegesis and
hermeneutics. There is a great ontological gap between the truth obtained through spying,
wiretapping, other forms of electronic surveillance, etc. and the truth known through
Jesus Christ. The point here though is not to comment on the biblical scholarship of the
CIA’s exegetes. To the CIA, knowing what foreign governments don’t want the U.S.
3
CIA Factbook on Intelligence, CIA.gov Homepage,
<http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/facttell/hq_buildings.html> (3 May 2006).
10
government to know is the key to maintaining American freedom. What is important and
dangerous about the CIA’s usage of John 8:32 is that it maps Jesus’ words onto concepts
which are a distortion of his intended meaning and therefore proclaims a gospel other
than the one which he proclaimed. This other gospel does not announce and reveal the
nature of the kingdom of God; it announces and reveals the nature of the American “way
of life.”
William Cavanaugh refers to the nationstate’s attempts to secure freedom for its
citizens and rescue them from violence as a “soteriology of the state.”4 The state asserts
itself in this way by claiming that it has the monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
Through this monopoly on force, the state also makes itself the locus of unity. As
Cavanaugh puts it,
Internally, such force is necessary to keep the mass of individuals from
interfering with each other’s rights. Externally, the violence of war is necessary
to provide some unity—albeit a false one—to a society lacking in any truly social
process.... In a word, violence becomes the state’s religio, its habitual discipline
for binding us one to another.5
Since freedom is such an important concept in America, it seems appropriate to examine
it as part of “state soteriology” or America’s gospel.
4
William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an
Age of Global Consumerism (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2002), 2 passim.
5
Ibid., 4546.
11
The American account of freedom (as well as truth) is a product of the
Enlightenment with its emphasis on reason, individual liberty, and private property. The
evolution of these principles into absolutes has generated an account of freedom which
necessitates violence in order to ensure its survival, and when that freedom takes on an
“evangelistic” bent in the form of “the spread of democracy,” the violence becomes more
necessary and indiscriminate.6 The CIA, of course, provides its intelligence (what they
would see as “truth”) to the U.S. President for the assessment of threats to the interests of
the United States. The CIA also has its own internal division—the Directorate of
Operations—which is used for espionage and clandestine, paramilitary activity.
This freedom protected and promoted through violence requires a somewhat
ironic construal. American freedom is traditionally seen as antiimperialist, but Michael
Northcott points out that “[t]he American account of freedom is imperial when it requires
6
Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 129130. For a positive view of “participatory democracy,” see Ted Grimsrud,
“Anabaptist Faith and American Democracy,” Mennonite Quarterly Review no. 78 (July 2004): 341363.
Grimsrud seeks to separate the violent “Empire Story” from the good “Democracy Story” in order to
encourage Anabaptist participation in public affairs in the hopes that democratic processes can be used to
resist the violence of the Empire. I have serious questions about the ability to perform such a separation in
a way that can be sustained. While I affirm the usefulness of the democratic process, I do not believe it
should distract Christians from proclaiming and embodying God’s kingdom. Many nonpacifist Christians
would agree with the view that Christians should participate in democratic processes, but they might come
out opposed to a nonviolent Anabaptist position. American democracy was birthed in violence and, we are
constantly reminded, “needs” to be defended with violence. For a fairly thorough discussion of why
participatory democracy needs to be relativized and subordinated to Christian witness (and witness would
include trying to convince nonpacifist Christians that pacifism is Christian) and practice (repentance,
forgiveness, reconciliation), see William T. Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the
NationState is Not the Keeper of the Common Good,” Modern Theology 20, no. 2 (April 2004): 24374,
and Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, chapter 2.
12
that Christians submit their bodies to the imperative of the flag, and allow their children’s
blood to be spilt in America’s wars.”7 That Christians would give over control of their
bodies to the nationstate and its values is a sign that America itself is a powerful and
compelling religion. Indeed, this is the thrust of Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle’s
essay “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion.”8
American Freedom and Sacrifice
Just as the American account of freedom differs greatly from the biblical account
of freedom, so the corresponding ways of spreading their respective freedoms are
different.9 In the former, extremely violent and unseemly measures are undertaken but
hidden or clouded under a veil of secrecy. All of this is thought to be necessary since the
commodity being protected is worth the price. Alfred McCoy shows that the CIA adopted
“a radical pragmatism [when] its agents made alliances with any group, drug merchants
included, useful in the fight against Communism.”10 For instance, in the United States’
eagerness to see the Soviet Union defeated in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, military support
7
Ibid., 130.
8
Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion,”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 767780.
9
For a discussion of the apostle Paul’s account of freedom in the Epistle to the Romans, see below,
chapter 3, pp. 6669.
10
Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Afghanistan,
Southeast Asia, Central America, Colombia, 2nd rev. ed. (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003), 14.
13
was given to a group which became known as the Mujaheddin or “holy warriors.” Any
antiSoviet leaders were wooed and united with the promise of U.S. covert aid. Islamist
militants from Southwest and Central Asia went to Afghanistan to join in the jihad
against the Soviet invaders. Many of these warriors engaged in tactics which were
something other than “holy.” One of the more prominent leaders was Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose practice of throwing acid in the
faces of women who did not wear the veil shocked even the CIA officials who were
supporting him with weapons and training.11 Hekmatyar and his guerrilla fighters
received more than half of the CIA’s covert aid, and he used his fighting force “to become
one of Afghanistan’s leading drug lords.”12 Afghan warlord involvement in the drug trade
was not an impediment in their relationship with the CIA. At a time when “Afghanistan
had become the world’s secondlargest opium grower,” and “the PakistanAfghan border
was the leading source of heroin for Europe and America,”13 “[t]he Afghan Mujaheddin
were to become the USbacked, antiSoviet shock troops,”14 and their tactics included
“setting off bicycle bombs and camel bombs and car bombs.”15 After the Soviets left
11
Blum, Killing Hope, 338339. See also Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm, 3133.
12
McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 475.
13
Ibid., 470.
14
Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale
Nota Bene, 2001), 13.
15
George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress
and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times (New York: Grove Press, 2003), 488.
14
Afghanistan, there emerged “a second generation of Mujaheddin who called themselves
Taliban (or the students of Islam).”16 A quote from Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy
Carter’s former national security adviser and originator of the idea to give the Soviet
Union “their Vietnam War,” captures the intensity of the antiSoviet agenda. When asked
by an interviewer if there were any misgivings about the U.S. “operation’s legacy of guns,
drugs, and militant Islam,”17 he replied,
What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse
of the Soviet empire? Some stirredup Moslems or the liberation of Central
Europe and the end of the cold war?18
The characterization of the Mujaheddin as “freedom fighters,” popularized by President
Ronald Reagan, served to subordinate and obscure their extreme methods of fighting and
funding the war against the Soviet occupiers under the supreme goal of striking a blow
against communism. For America, what was sacrificed was not the blood of its own but
the righteousness and purity of its Protestant “cleanliving” and antidrug ideal, and it
was done in secret.
The above vignette challenges the common characterization of U.S. assistance to
the Afghan fighters as “humanitarian.” Ted Grimsrud is right to question the notion
promoted by some pacifists that there are wars that might need to be considered
16
Ibid.
17
McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 486.
18
Olivier Roy, Afghanistan: From Holy War to Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1995), quoted in Rashid, 130.
15
necessary from a pragmatic and humanitarian point of view.19 Whenever a military action
is presented as a necessity, questions must be asked about the history of the conflict and
which parties benefit from the action. Christians need not rely on faith alone in opposing
violence under the assumption that reality is against them. Humanitarianism is yet
another ideal which might have different definitions depending on one’s perspective.
American anticommunist ideology claims to oppose ideologies which are
dictatorial or totalitarian in nature. The evidence suggests that it is not that simple.
During the Cold War, foreign threats to American political and economic interests were
construed by the CIA and American policy makers as signs of communist infiltration.
When some of those threats were addressed by U.S. intervention, either overt or covert,
the effects were frequently new levels of bloodshed and the presence of a dictatorial
regime which was much worse than the democratic one removed.20 Many times the leader
of the new regime was chosen ahead of time by the CIA and shortly thereafter would
initiate economic policies which directly benefited U.S. corporations.
The Guatemalan coup of 1954 is a simple and clear example of the importance of
economic interests in American uses of military force.21 Guatemalan President Jacobo
19
Grimsrud, “Anabaptist Faith and American Democracy,” 357358.
20
Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm, 2728. See also Blum, Killing Hope. Iran (1953), Guatemala
(1954), Iraq (1963 and 1968), Chile (1973), Nicaragua (1978), and Grenada (1984) are a few varied
examples.
21
Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 10.
16
Arbenz Guzman was planning to nationalize unused portions of land in his country which
were owned by the Bostonbased United Fruit Company and redistribute it to landless
farmers. The price Arbenz offered United Fruit was based on the company’s own
valuation which was already being used to determine the amount of tax they were paying
on the land and so was technically fair. United Fruit didn’t see it that way. CIA Director
Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles both had personal and business
connections to United Fruit,22 and the brothers, along with other concerned parties,
convinced President Eisenhower to use the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected
Arbenz government. The process began when U.S. officials publicly expressed concern
that Guatemala had “gone communist,” and in June of 1954, the coup successfully took
place and installed a rightwing, proAmerican government which led to decades of “non
communist” repression in which an estimated 80,000 Guatemalans “were murdered and
tortured to death by CIAadvised security forces, Green Berettrained army troops, and
nightstalking death squads.”23 How this particular episode and others like it fit into the
American gospel of freedom can readily be understood if the freedom is that of free
market capitalism secured at the expense of civil liberties such as dissent and the ability
to form unions. The domestic freedom is the freedom of a U.S.based, politically
See Blum, Killing Hope, 75 for a list of the political connections of the United Fruit Company.
22
Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennet, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson
23
Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 809.
17
connected corporation to operate with the least amount of government constraint as
possible.
In addition to Islamic fundamentalists and Protestant businessconnected
politicians, Christian citizenpatriots have lent their direct support to the militant
purposes of American anticommunism in Southeast and Central Asia and Latin
America. Some Christian aid workers in Laos helped the CIA provide support for Hmong
hill tribes through the International Voluntary Services (IVS),24 both in the form of
supplying humanitarian aid and helping the tribes “improve ... techniques for planting and
cultivating opium. ‘If you’re gonna grow it, grow it good,’ [IVS agricultural volunteer
Edgar] Buell told the Hmong, ‘but don’t let anybody smoke the stuff.’”25 Buell’s task also
involved finding recruits for the CIA’s Hmong mercenary force which fought against
Vietnamese and later Chinese communists. Because of the high casualty rate in the
Hmong army, he eventually began recruiting boys as young as ten years old.26
24
See Paul A. Rodell, “International Voluntary Services in Vietnam: War and the Birth of Activism,
19581967,” Peace and Change 27, no. 2 (April 2002): 225244. “IVS was founded in 1953 by the
Mennonite, Brethren, and Quaker churches in response to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ call for
the Point Four program [a U.S. government foreign aid project] to link itself with programs run by private
voluntary agencies” (226).
25
McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 308. For more on CIA involvement in illicit drug activity, see Peter
Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003), and Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the
Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999).
26
Ibid., 321. Buell reported to a New Yorker correspondent, “A short time ago we rounded up three
hundred fresh recruits. Thirty percent were fourteen years old or less, and ten of them were only ten years
old. Another thirty percent were fifteen or sixteen. The remaining forty percent were fortyfive or over.
Where were the ones in between? I’ll tell you—they’re all dead.”
18
Religious connections to the anticommunist movement have been fostered by
numerous organizations which overtly claim to defend democracy through providing
humanitarian aid to groups like the Mujaheddin and Hmong. The Minutemen (and their
auxiliary the Minutewomen), the World AntiCommunist League (now the World League
for Freedom and Democracy), and the John Birch Society were a few of the anti
communist organizations which merged zealous devotion to their cause with a rightwing
form of Christianity.27 Joanne Herring, an original financial and political backer of the
Mujaheddin’s cause, stated that it was with the Minutewomen that she decided to
“dedicate [her] life to making the freeenterprise society survive for [her] children.”28 In
the battle against the “global communist conspiracy,” Herring “saw an apocalyptic
struggle in which she and [Texas Congressman] Charlie [Wilson] had become
instruments of Jesus.”29
These anticommunist passions have a long history in Christian patriot circles.
They had their most strident expression in the fundamentalist political organizations
formed to combat communism and other modernist threats in the 1920’s. Premillenialist
teaching was that “the final battle of Armageddon would involve the Russian armies
27
The Minutemen were a paramilitary group which had some membership overlap with the John
Birch Society (JBS). In the early 1960’s, the JBS had an estimated membership of 60,000 to 100,000. They
do not make their current membership figures public. See <http://www.jbs.org>. The World League for
Freedom and Democracy does not publish its membership numbers either.
28
Quoted in Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War, 66.
29
Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War, 188.
19
fighting against the army of Christ.”30 This Manichean view was also firmly entrenched in
the liberal wing of Protestantism. The rhetoric of Presbyterian layman John Foster Dulles
was quite blunt: “The world is divided into two groups of people: Christian anti
communists, and the others.”31 Dulles would become Eisenhower’s secretary of state, but
before that, “he got the Federal Council of Churches [later the National Council of
Churches] to set up a Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, headed
it, and wrote a report that applied Christian principles to historical realities.”32—Christian
peacemaking through anticommunist realpolitik.
As seen in the cases noted above, the American gospel of freedom is not only
propagated from a standpoint of secular capitalism and political ideology. Many
evangelical Christians have become convinced of the righteousness of the American way
of life and the subsequent need to spread it through means other than pure persuasion.
Gerard Colby’s exhaustive account in Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon:
Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil underscores the interconnectedness
of capitalism, anticommunist fear, and Protestant missionary zeal from the 1920’s
30
Clyde Wilcox, “Popular Backing for the Old Christian Right: Explaining Support for the Christian
AntiCommunism Crusade,” Journal of Social History 21, no. 1 (Fall 1987): 117. It might also be said that
communism really is godless in the sense that it does not have the “invisible hand” of the free market as its
god.
31
Quoted in Steve Brouwer, Paul Gifford, and Susan D. Rose, Exporting the American Gospel:
Global Christian Fundamentalism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 17.
32
John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, Arlington National Cemetery Website,
<http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/jfdulles.htm> (12 May 2006).
20
through the early 1990’s.33 The book focuses on the mixture of zeal for sharing the gospel
with unreached peoples, exemplified by Wycliffe Bible Translators, and the zeal for
spreading capitalism, exemplified by the Rockefeller family. In the 1920’s, John D.
Rockefeller, Jr. became “a major funder of the movement ‘to Christianize the world’ as an
antidote to [communist] revolutions like the ... one in Russia.”34 The Rockefellers also
desired a check on communism, particularly in countries where they had business
interests, because of its threat to free market economies.35 The family’s expanding
businesses had found that necessary raw materials were frequently located in places
occupied by native populations, and the most efficient ways to extract those resources
required the pacification and sometimes the removal of that population. Wycliffe
missionaries, working as language translators for the Summer Institute for Linguistics
(SIL),36 were used by rightwing governments and U.S. intelligence and economic
agencies to open the way for resource extraction by American businesses.37 SIL’s
development programs sought to bring the benefits of modernization mainly to
33
Colby and Dennet, Thy Will Be Done. See also David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant:
The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
34
Colby and Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, back matter.
35
Ibid., 212.
36
In the United States, Wycliffe goes by the name “Wycliffe Bible Translators,” but internationally or
“in the field,” it goes by the name “Summer Institute for Linguistics.”
37
Wycliffe/SIL denies direct collaboration with the CIA. See for example Deann Alford, “The CIA
Myth: Mission Agencies Still Fight 50yearold Accusations,” Christianity Today, January 2006, 5859.
The CIA, for its part, has never been willing to rule out the use of missionaries in its work. See for
example Colby and Dennet, Thy Will Be Done, 565, 744746.
21
indigenous Latin American tribes. In this way, the gospel could be shared with them in
the hopes of avoiding the backlash of antioutsider sentiment. The efforts of Wycliffe’s
founder, William Cameron Townsend, had benefited greatly from Rockefeller
philanthropy, and Rockefeller businesses and political connections eventually received a
kind of reciprocation from Wycliffe. Some of the favors included the denial that the
native peoples of Brazil and Guatemala were being slaughtered by the military regimes of
their countries; allowing its base in the Ecuadoran Amazon to be used by U.S. Green
Berets who were combing the Western Amazon for signs of armed insurgency; and
assisting the Peruvian air force which had dropped napalm on the Mayoruna and Campa
Indians.
The level of secretive cooperation between mission workers and American policy
interests varies greatly from situation to situation, but such collaboration itself shows that,
for those Christian workers who were amenable to a relationship with the U.S.
intelligence community, the temptation was great enough to lure them into taking part in
something similar to what Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle refer to as a taboo—“the
tension between the violent sacrificial mechanism that sustains enduring groups and the
reluctance of group members to accept responsibility for enacting it.”38 What is sacrificial
in the above mentioned accounts is not only bloodshed, but also the participation in
38
Marvin and Ingle “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion,” 772.
22
activities which would normally be considered illegal or even unthinkable; they require
the loss of innocence. The impact of the sacrifice is doubled due to the confluence of the
taboo activity with the higher purpose of Christian evangelism. The taboo activity
becomes even more sacred. Furthermore, in the same way that the blood sacrifice of “our
own” creates unity in the American nation, unity within a secretive, elite group is created
through the secrecy of the unholybutnecessary activity and amongst the masses through
the knowledge that there is an unspeakable secret.39
Both of these unities are critical—so the thinking goes—for the survival of the
nation. The more that Americans are killed in either military action—both overt and
covert—or terrorist attacks, the more that America is unified by those deaths.40 Those
deaths must also be constantly remembered and memorialized. “Remember the Alamo”
and “Remember the Maine” are slogans which remind Americans of past deaths which,
in order to be rectified, required the further sacrifice of human bodies.41 More recently,
“Pearl Harbor” and “9/11” have become powerful symbols of the need for ongoing
sacrifice. We don’t even need to be told to “remember” them. Their high level of
39
See Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Knopf,
1974).
40
Ibid.
Even though the Mexican army attacked the Alamo as part of the war begun when the United States
41
invaded disputed territory in Mexico in 1846, and the Maine was blown up by accident, not a Spanish plot,
in 1898.
23
catastrophe carries with it the power to evoke the emotional response needed for
Americans to take part in the sacrifice, so simply naming them is sufficient.
The collaboration between parachurch groups and U.S. agencies might be
described best by John Howard Yoder’s term “neoneoConstantinianism.”42 As a form of
Constantinianism, it retains the “moral identification” of the Christian faith with the state
while maintaining formal separation between the “church and state as institutions.”
Once the separation of church and state is seen as theologically desirable, a
society where this separation is achieved is not a pagan society but a nation
structured according to the will of God. American patriotism remains highly
religious. For nearly two centuries, in fact, the language of American public
discourse was not only religious, not only Christian, but specifically Protestant.
Moral identification of church with nation remains despite institutional
separation. In fact, forms of institutional interlocking develop which partly deny
the theory of separation (chaplaincies, tax exemptions).43
To Yoder’s examples of “institutional interlocking,” we should add the type of covert
cooperation described above. Yoder points out that the sense of “rightness” in this
arrangement blinds Christians “to the fact that the basic structural error [of, for instance,
Medieval Christendom], the identification of a civil authority as bearer of God’s cause,
has not been overcome but only transposed into a new key.”44
42
John Howard Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics,” in The Priestly
Kingdom, 142.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid., 143.
24
Justification: Theologizing the Unholy
Of course the secret ways of America must be justified theologically since it is
“structured according to the will of God.” Whether the secrecy is the necessity for the
blood sacrifice of its own or the special dispensations granted to anticommunist
evangelical fervor, government secrecy is taken as a given in the American “free society”
in spite of the cognitive dissonance between secrecy and freedom.
In an article titled “Secret Intelligence in a Democracy: Some Niebuhrian
Considerations” in the journal Religion and Life, D. Don Welch, Jr. turns to the Niebuhr
brothers for help in balancing “between two wellestablished needs: the need for secrecy
as an instrument in protecting our national security and the need for openness in
government as an essential element in democratic control of that government.”45 That the
two needs are “wellestablished” for Welch shows the platform on which he is standing—
the priority of the nationstate. This attempt to draw support from a theological source is
laudable, but it is firmly rooted in a neoneoConstantinian orientation. If one accepts the
notion that national causes such as liberty, equality, and justice a priori require “our
fidelity”46 then Welch’s approach makes perfect sense. But abstracted from a concrete
45
D. Don Welch, Jr., “Secret Intelligence in a Democracy: Some Niebuhrian Considerations,”
Religion in Life 49, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 436.
46
Ibid., 445.
25
ecclesiological context, the overall effort disallows the direct impact of the gospel of
Jesus Christ as a social ethic since theology is brought into the direct service of the state
rather than the church.
While Welch makes an attempt to justify secrecy from a Christian perspective,
other significant political thinkers have not. Leo Strauss is one such thinker whose
thought, according to Peter Singer, is influential in the current U.S. administration.47
Strauss wrote much “on the thought of philosophers like Plato, Maimonides, Machiavelli,
and Hobbes,” and through this writing and teaching at the University of Chicago attracted
a loyal following. In Strauss, freedom and secrecy are no longer dissonant since freedom
is seen as a necessary charade. Singer writes:
Central to all his writings is the doctrine that there is one kind of truth for the
masses, and another for the philosophers—that is, for those in the know. Strauss
claimed that all great philosophers wrote in a kind of code, so that the masses
could read them in a way that would not disturb necessary social conventions,
while the philosophers could grasp the more radical meaning hidden in their
texts. One of these nottoberevealedtothemasses truths is that the existence of
God is, at best, unprovable in any rational, scientific view of the world.... But this
truth should not be revealed ... because religion “breeds deference to the ruling
class,” and without that, the masses may rise up and destroy the higher culture
that is at the apex of Straussian values. Thomas Fleming, editor of the rightwing
journal Chronicles, puts it more bluntly. Straussians, he says, “believe that
religion may be a useful thing to take in the suckers with.” Something similar is
true, in Fleming’s view, of the attitude of the Straussian inner circle to democracy
and liberty. They don’t themselves believe in them, but they teach others to
Peter Singer, The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush (New York: Plume,
47
2004), 220223. Though Singer is an ethicist with whom I would disagree on many things, his book offers
an important and wellresearched perspective on the ethics of President Bush.
26
believe in them. The conservative Robert Locke, who counts himself as a
Straussian, would add equality to this list: “Civic equality may be salutary for the
functioning of society, but men are not truly equal in value.”48
Such views would seriously undermine popular notions that freedom is all about liberty,
equality, and justice. Freedom for the masses would simply be a ruse meant to gain
popular support while constraining what many would consider to be freedom.49 One has
to ask what Straussians mean when they use the word freedom in their speech. Strauss
also believed “that it was a fundamental error to view the political ends and capacities of
the modern nationstate in moral terms.”50 This would apparently allow for the kind of
deception at the government level described by the Straussians cited by Singer.
Religion, construed as “deference to the ruling class,” is important in the
Straussian worldview, and Michael Ledeen, like Strauss, encourages its use and shaping
for the purposes of virtuous and effective political leadership. Both of these men wrote
books praising the leadership precepts of Machiavelli. In recounting Machiavelli’s
thought, Ledeen writes that Machiavelli wanted “a tougher, more virile version of the
[Roman Catholic] faith, which will inspire men to fight for the glory of their country.”51
Decrying the “indolence” of a Christianity which makes people “‘more disposed to
48
Ibid., 220221.
49
But economic freedom of the neoliberal sort might be more solid. Milton Friedman, a colleague of
Strauss at the University of Chicago, promoted this vision. See Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm, 82.
50
Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm, 81.
51
Michael A. Ledeen, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules are as
Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago (New York: Truman Talley Books, 1999), xx.
27
endure injuries than to avenge them,’”52 Ledeen argues for “more aggressive readings of
the New Testament,” which allow for the defense of one’s country.53 Since defending
one’s country “is the highest good, [it] is one of those extreme situations in which a
leader is justified in committing evil.”54 Ledeen is able to circle back around and show
how “Christian” behavior might need to be unholy in the name of the nation. He gives no
contemporary examples of what this evil might be.
Such necessary and unholy actions, done either in Straussian secrecy or the
secrecy of Marvin and Ingle’s blood sacrifice taboo, can be seen as rituals which,
successful or not, have the effect of reconstituting the “American nationgroup.”
After enough bloodletting, the slate of internal hostilities is wiped clean. The
group begins again. The external threat is met. Our bad feelings toward one
another are purged. Time begins anew, space is reconsecrated. The group basks
for a while in the unanimity of its effort, until internal hostilities accumulate once
more, and the entire cycle must be repeated.55
For blood sacrifice to be successful, enough blood must be shed, and it must “touch or
seem to touch every member of the group.” The sacrifice related to secret unholiness is
different in that since it is ongoing—American covert activity never stops—its continuity
generates unity for those who know the secret and for the rest who know that there is a
52
Ibid., 116.
53
Ibid., 117.
54
Ibid.
55
Marvin and Ingle “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion,” 775.
28
secret. If those who know that there is a secret begin to uncover it, the consequences can
be severe.56
The President’s Use of Biblical Language and Straussian Advisors
President Bush has used biblical language in order to explain his vision of
America and, more specifically, his understanding of the September 11, 2001 attacks and
the U.S. military response to them. In his remarks the following day, he spoke of the
attacks in terms of good versus evil:
America is united. The freedomloving nations of the world stand by our side.
This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil. But good will prevail.57
Stephen Mansfield, author of The Faith of George W. Bush, writes of that speech, “He
was applying the moral vision that had so transformed his personal life to his nation’s
collective nightmare. He was beginning to see the challenge clearly now. We are good.
Our attackers are evil. To arms. And, he gave hope: ‘Good will prevail.’”58 The
characterization of good America versus evil terrorism has been used boldly by President
56
Since the enactment of the National Security Act of 1947, it has been a federal crime to reveal the
identity of a U.S. covert agent. See U.S. Code vol. 50, sec. 421, Protection of identities of certain United
States undercover intelligence officers, agents, informants, and sources.
57
Remarks by the President In Photo Opportunity with the National Security Team, The White House,
12 September 2001, <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/200109124.html> (25 July 2006).
58
Stephen Mansfield, The Faith of George W. Bush (Lake Mary, Florida: Charisma House, 2003),
134.
29
Bush to the point of asserting that America has a responsibility to “rid the world of
evil.”59 As much as Mansfield stresses the personal nature of the president’s faith
elsewhere in his book, it is striking that this faith of the heart can take shape publicly as a
nationalist, warrior spirit which places America at the pinnacle of history instead of
Christ and the church. The definitive equation of America with “good” and anyone
against America as “evil” is especially dramatic when the good nation also has the most
powerful military in the world.
While President Bush cites the Bible in his speeches to underwrite an
understanding of America as the fulfillment of history and the protector of Christian
values, many within his administration are Straussian neoconservatives who share a
vision of the world dominated by American military and economic power, and their
position statements are less infused with biblical references than the President’s.60 The
combination of the biblical with the Straussian makes strange bedfellows. The President
has spoken of the importance of humility in American foreign policy yet is influenced by
59
Ibid., 135.
60
See for example the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) website
<http://www.newamericancentury.org/>. This “educational” organization is dedicated to the
“fundamentals” that “American leadership is good both for America and for the world; and that such
leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle.” The
organization has released statements and sent letters to congress with signatories including Jeb Bush (the
President’s brother), Dick Cheney, I. Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard L.
Armitage, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Dov S. Zakheim—all persons (except Jeb Bush) appointed to
positions in the U.S. Department of State or Department of Defense by President Bush. There is much
overlap in personnel between the PNAC and the American Enterprise Institute.
30
thinktanks with scholars, such as “Bush Doctrine” expert Joshua Muravchik of the
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), who believe that “there is no higher authority than
America.”61 The AEI can boast of having twenty of its scholars in positions of influence
in the Bush administration.62 Michael Northcott notes that Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz and former Attorney General John Ashcroft were students of Strauss at
the University of Chicago.63 Michael Ledeen is a Straussian who is regularly consulted by
White House advisor Karl Rove64 and also a Freedom Scholar at the AEI.65
President Bush’s references to his faith in his speeches can sound reassuring to
those listeners who are looking for a Christian influence in public policy, and certainly an
electorate jaded from the moral lapses of the Clinton administration would be more open
to hearing a greater level of “God talk” from politicians. But the president’s way of
referencing faith in conjunction with America’s destiny is pronounced in such a way that
it does not conflict with the neoconservative foreign policies of many in his
61
Joshua Muravchik, American Enterprise Institute, quoted in Peter Singer, The President of Good
and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush (New York: Plume, 2004), 194.
62
President Discusses the Future of Iraq, The White House, 26 February 2003,
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/2003022611.html> (4 July 2006).
63
Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm, 81.
64
Jim Lobe, “Veteran Neocon Advisor Moves on Iran,” Asia Times Online, 26 June 2003,
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EF26Ak03.html> (17 May 2006).
65
AEI Scholars & Fellows, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research,
<http://www.aei.org/scholars/scholarID.35,filter.all/scholar.asp> (4 July 2006).
31
administration. Northcott, for instance, in describing a speech given to U.S. troops in
Florida sees that
Bush [is] ... explicit in his account of the sacred role of America’s military: ‘The
freedom you defend is the right of every person and the future of every nation.
The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to
humanity.’ The meaning is unambiguous: America and American military power
are the servants of God’s purposes in history not just for America but for the
world.66
The convergence of America’s purposes with God’s are outlined by the president’s
assertion that America defends God’s liberty in the world through the sacrifice of its own.
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is another neoconservative
organization which has influence in the current administration. As with the AEI, many of
its signatories work in the Bush administration. Many of its recommendations, made
largely by Straussians, have been put into action by the President’s foreign policy
decisions and military engagements.67 One of its key goals is to remind Americans of the
“need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an
international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”68
Northcott finds a rough paraphrase of this statement in the National Security Strategy
which the administration published shortly after September 11, 2001. “The document
66
Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm, 78.
67
See Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm, 7779.
68
Statement of Principles, Project for the New American Century,
<http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm> (5 July 2006).
32
announced that America under Bush will use its unique strength and influence in every
region of the world to pursue ‘a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the
union of our values and our national interests.’”69 The important point here is that neither
the PNAC nor the AEI present themselves or their imperialist positions as “Christian,”
but their ideology seems to have a great influence on a president who is praised for his
faith and who is apparently not afraid to bring that faith to bear on public policies—in his
own way.
For the goals of the Straussinfluenced Bush administration to be accomplished,
sacrifices must be made. The shapers of those policies have not made clear what theirs
are, but they and everyone else know that many will be American lives lost in battle.
While the position papers produced by PNAC and AEI are not sprinkled with religious
references or overtones like President Bush’s speech is, there is no doubt that sacrifices
are required. Furthermore, that even a democratic nationstate requires sacrifice to
achieve its goals is obvious from the ubiquity of sacrificial slogans in the popular
imagination. Car bumpers and windows are regularly adorned with stickers reading
“Freedom is not free” or “If you love your freedom, thank a vet.” The sacrifice of military
men and women is praised in political speeches. Clarke Cochran writes that, according to
Hobbes in Leviathan, “successful political order requires readiness to die,” and only
69
Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm, 78.
33
religious belief provides the needed motivation for that.70 It is not at all surprising—
indeed, it is necessary—that sacrifice to the nation becomes Christianized and the idea
gets mixed up with the Christian conception of sacrifice. We know that sacrifice is a part
of the Christian vocabulary and that Jesus’ sacrifice was done on behalf of all humanity.
The ensuing confusion rests upon the foggy notion that American freedom and freedom
in Christ are the same thing and that sacrifice to America is the same as Christian
sacrifice.
It is imperative for Christians to see the distinction between the form of
Christianity corrupted by American exceptionalism and the Christianity of the New
Testament. In the next chapter, I will argue that the political theology of Richard John
Neuhaus does not sufficiently distinguish between them but rather helps to perpetuate a
corruption of Christianity and a theology of American imperialism.
70
Clarke E. Cochran, Religion in Public and Private Life (New York: Routledge, 1990), 155.
Chapter Two:
Which Things Are First at First Things?
A considerable amount of work has been done in political theology which has
served to underwrite much of the U.S. military action launched in recent decades—at
least those undertaken by Republican administrations1—and the viewpoint taken in that
work must be engaged in terms of its theological assumptions and its remarkable
congruity with current U.S. foreign policy. The perspective engaged in this chapter is the
one put forth by Richard John Neuhaus, founder of the religious journal First Things: A
Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life and its current editorinchief. Narrowing in
on Neuhaus helps to keep the engagement more manageable, and in addition, he is
important in the discussion for his writings on religion and politics and his closeness to
neoconservatives in the Bush administration. His editorial in December 2001, co
authored with James A. Nuechterlein titled “In a Time of War” serves as an entry point
into this engagement.2
1
See Richard John Neuhaus, “The Public Square: The Clinton Era, At Home and Abroad,” First
Things 93 (May 1999): 7879, for his negative views of the Clinton administration’s military ventures (with
which I might agree). No such negative views are shared by Neuhaus for the military ventures of Republican
administrations since 1981.
2
Richard John Neuhaus and James A. Nuechterlein, “In a Time of War,” First Things 118 (December
2001): 1117.
34
35
In addition to being the editorinchief of First Things, Richard John Neuhaus is
the president of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the organization which
publishes the journal. He is also on the board of directors for the Institute on Religion and
Democracy, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Foundation for Community and
FaithCentered Enterprise. In the late 1960’s, he was involved in the Civil Rights
movement and the antiwar group, Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam.
However, in the mid1970’s, he became disillusioned with leftleaning politics and began
to work and write for institutes in the emerging neoconservative movement such as the
American Enterprise Institute, mainly on the topics of religion, politics, democracy, and
capitalism. He has held presidential appointments in the Carter, Reagan, and first Bush
administrations. He is an ordained Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of New York and
has authored many wellknown books. The magazine U.S. News and World Report named
him one of their 32 “most influential intellectuals in America.”3
In the First Things editorial “In a Time of War,” Richard John Neuhaus and James
A. Nuechterlein stake out a position of virtually complete agreement with the president’s
statements and policies regarding the war on terror and ideologically set themselves
against any serious consideration of Christian pacifism: “[T]hose who in principle oppose
3
Richard John Neuhaus, Right Web Profile, IRC Right Web (Silver City, New Mexico: International
Relations Center, March 2005), <http://rightweb.irconline.org/profile/1307> (6 July 2006). This website is
clearly critical of neoconservatism, but its information is welldocumented and confirmed by other sources.
36
the use of military force have no legitimate part in the discussion on how military force
should be used. They only make themselves and their cause appear frivolous by claiming
that military force is immoral and futile, and, at the same time, wanting to have a political
say in how much force is to be employed.”4 Two months later, Stanley Hauerwas, a First
Things editorial board member, replied that, given his pacifist convictions and opposition
to the war, he felt the editorial amounted to his being “silenced,” but he didn’t stay silent
and contended that the editors’ “gross and distorted characterization of pacifism, as well
as the defense of the American response to September 11, [2001] requires a response.”5
Hauerwas certainly did respond, and First Things chose to print the response—albeit with
a closing reply from the editors. Eventually in May of 2002, he chose to resign from his
position on the editorial board of the journal.
Outside observers might see this skirmish among theologians as a debate between
differing foreign policy visions, but at its heart it is a fundamental division regarding
what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ in the world’s only remaining superpower.
Or perhaps more sharply put, the disagreement is between a vision primarily concerned
with the maintenance of a “Christian America”—something important to Neuhaus—and
one primarily concerned with the universal Christian call to faithfulness. One wants
4
Neuhaus and Nuechterlein, “In a Time of War,” 14.
5
Stanley Hauerwas, “In a Time of War: An Exchange,” First Things 120 (February 2002): 11.
37
American Christians to understand that America has been given a “burden of power” and
must use it to affect world history for the better. The other calls for American Christians
to see that their primary burden is that of bearing the cross of Christ in service for the
world.
“If Your Eye is Healthy...”
The way in which thinkers approach the world shapes how they see that world. A
frequently used metaphor for this phenomenon refers to the color or shape of the “glasses
that we all wear.” Jesus seems to have taken this as a given when he said, “The eye is the
lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if
your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is
darkness, how great is the darkness!” (Matt. 6:2223).6 While not intending to say that
Hauerwas is “full of light” and Neuhaus is “full of darkness,” I use the metaphor here to
point out the importance of “the way we see things” and its impact on theological
outcomes.
The First Things editorial certainly comes out of a particular context and set of
assumptions. The first premises of those who want a Christian justification of war are not
always spelled out in easytounderstand terms, but fortunately Neuhaus has made a
6
All biblical citations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted.
38
relatively clear statement in his book The Naked Public Square: “On balance and
considering the alternatives, the influence of the United States is a force for good in the
world.”7 Neuhaus seeks to assure his audience that America should not be understood
exclusively through the debacle of the Vietnam War (and implicitly any other military or
political debacle in its history). When the book was written in 1986, the only other
alternative, according to Neuhaus, was the influence of the Soviet Union.
That the statement is important for Neuhaus is evident in the fact that it is
italicized and then repeated on the same page. He considers it to be “a carefully nuanced
proposition.” Whether or not one can assert that something is “a force for good in the
world” in a nuanced way is highly debatable, but the ability to do so is assumed by
Neuhaus in order to make a claim about America which is basic and central in his
thought. The terms he uses beg certain questions though. How does one define “good” in
such a way that it means the same thing for the peoples of Southeast Asia, Latin America,
and Southwest Asia as it does for Americans?8 If the “good” is democracy, then is it
extremely better, mostly better, slightly better, or marginally better than the alternatives?
Is it possible for an American to make such a universal claim without being influenced by
their exceptionalist biases? The claim seems to be rooted in a “Cold War” reading of
7
Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, 2nd ed.
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 72.
8
I pick these regions because, for many of the inhabitants, U.S. force there has brought mostly death
and suffering. See chapter one for only a few examples.
39
world history. The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union provides the
lenses for understanding political activity and upheaval throughout the rest of the world.
In spite of Neuhaus’ careful and qualified language, it is virtually impossible to
keep the statement “On balance and considering the alternatives, the influence of the
United States is a force for good in the world” from slipping over into something less
wordy and less nuanced like “the United States is good.” The latter is much easier to
remember than the former. Furthermore, the “critical patriotism” he calls for wants to
acknowledge the right ordering of loyalties in a “nation under God,” but it still puts the
emphasis on (American) patriotism over critique. In the same way, his careful disavowal
of absolute loyalty to America is quite reasonable but ignores the fact that America does
not need to be overtly worshiped or defended as spotless for it to become an overriding
priority in moral and theological discourse.
The attacks on September 11, 2001 have removed some of the nuance from
Neuhaus’ propositions. In affirming the message of President Bush in the First Things
editorial, Neuhaus and Nuechterlein quote with approval from his address to Congress on
September 20, 2001:
The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and
fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war. And we know that God is not
40
neutral between them. We will meet violence with patient justice, assured of the
rightness of our cause and confident of the victories to come.9
In these sentences, the President all but places God and America on the side of freedom
and justice, and the enemy on the side of fear and cruelty. Michael Baxter notices that this
absolutizing perspective ignores “the possibility that neither the United States nor al
Qaeda may be on the side of freedom and justice (properly understood) or that both may
be given to spreading cruelty and fear.”10 The further problem with their equation is that
while it is true, as Neuhaus argues, that God is not neutral when it comes to
freedom and justice, it is also true that God’s purposes may well be aligned with
a form of freedom and justice that is represented neither by the United States nor
by alQaeda, but rather by some other political entity or body or by the church
itself.11
The editors do not show that their operative definitions of “freedom” and “justice”
are sufficiently based on a biblical account of freedom and justice. In fact, their
definitions seem more influenced by Enlightenment philosophy but with a “hope” that
their definition agrees with the biblical one. They come close to tipping their hands with
this statement: “Recognizing the danger that the motto ‘For God and country’ can express
an idolatrous identity of allegiances, most Americans act in the hope that it represents a
9
Neuhaus and Nuechterlein, “In a Time of War,” 1112. For the full text of the speech, see Address to a
Joint Session of Congress and the American People, The White House, 20 September 2001,
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/200109208.html> (26 July 2006).
10
Michael J. Baxter, “God Is Not American: Or, Why Christians Should Not Pledge Allegiance to ‘One
Nation Under God,’” in God Is Not...: Religious, Nice, “One of Us,” An American, A Capitalist, ed. D.
Brent Laytham (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004): 5960.
11
Ibid., 60.
41
convergence of duties” (emphasis mine).12 The editors can only “hope” for a
“convergence” between duties to God and duties to America, but their lack of certainty
does not stop them from reasoning on the basis that they are one and the same. The
editors write that “[a]ll Americans, whatever the ultimate beliefs, have reason to hope that
reality is not neutral in this war against the evil of terrorism.”13 Baxter intuits the editors’
attempt to be pluralist in their call to a unified patriotism. For those who reject the “God”
which America is under, “reality” is there to support the righteousness of America’s
cause. “All of which is to say that the god Neuhaus invokes is the god of American civil
religion, a god of and for the United States.”14
They do acknowledge that “[p]lanted in the beginnings of Christianity is a
distinction that its adherents will probably never get just exactly right: ‘Render to Caesar
what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s’” and agree “that the emphasis falls on the
second injunction—do not render to Caesar what is God’s,”15 but they fail to give an
account of how this emphasis can actually be practiced in relation to the military
response. They aren’t quite sure of how much should be withheld from Caesar. And again
their nod toward humility with the claim that Christians will never really get the balance
“just exactly right” should not excuse them from wrestling further with Jesus’ statement
12
Neuhaus and Nuechterlein, “In a Time of War,” 12.
13
Ibid.
14
Baxter, “God Is Not American,” 61.
15
Neuhaus and Nuechterlein, “In a Time of War,” 12.
42
and exploring some of the actual boundaries between Caesar and God. Do we know what
belongs to Caesar? Do we know what love of God and loyalty to God look like? The
editors write the rest of the editorial as if they have already answered these questions to
their own satisfaction, but they don’t allow that they might have made any mistakes.
When it comes to justifying patriotism “in a time of war,” they seem quite certain that
patriotism is owed to Caesar, but they don’t deal with the issue of when patriotism
changes into idolatry. Furthermore, it should not be overlooked that in previous times—
specifically during the Clinton administration—and on other topics—specifically
abortion, the editors (specifically Nuechterlein) have been quite adamant that the
government was in some way overstepping sacred boundaries.16
The editors’ assertion that “reality is not neutral in this war” might be understood
as an appeal to something beyond God. Do they believe that an understanding of the facts
is also an assurance that war on terror is justified? There are many facts available. Which
ones do the editors choose to incorporate and which ones are deemed irrelevant? What
color or shape are their glasses? It seems fair to look at how the editors have approached
the facts on which they rely to support the war on terror as a just war.
16
James A. Nuechterlein, “The End of Democracy?: The Judicial Usurpation of Politics,” First Things
67 (November 1996): 1820. The U.S. government is repeatedly labeled a “regime,” but more striking is this
statement: “America is not and, please God, will never become Nazi Germany, but it is only blind hubris
that denies it can happen here and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here.”
43
In their editorial, Neuhaus and Nuechterlein give a quick and helpful summary of
the just war criteria in its two categories of jus ad bellum and jus in bello.17 If we pick out
the criterion of last resort and examine it with a little more intensity than they do, we
might not so easily agree with their leapoffaith conclusion that “the decision of the
United States to wage war against terrorism is amply justified.”18 They state: “A just war
is a last resort, undertaken when it is reasonably determined that there are not alternative
ways to resolve the conflict, and when there is a reasonable probability of success in
achieving the aims of the war.”19 The editors do not trace the events which took place
between President Bush’s speech on September 20, 2001 and the beginning of the attack
on Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. It would seem logical to look there to show that other
alternatives were pursued in a genuine way. In the president’s speech, he listed the
demands that the U.S. was making on the Taliban government as follows:
Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of al Qaeda who hide in your
land. Release all foreign nationals, including American citizens, you have
unjustly imprisoned. Protect foreign journalists, diplomats and aid workers in
your country. Close immediately and permanently every terrorist training camp
in Afghanistan, and hand over every terrorist, and every person in their support
structure, to appropriate authorities. Give the United States full access to terrorist
training camps, so we can make sure they are no longer operating. These
demands are not open to negotiation or discussion.20
17
Neuhaus and Nuechterlein, “In a Time of War,” 1213.
18
Ibid., 12.
19
Ibid.
20
George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, 20 September
2001. Duane Shank analyzes the “just war doctrine as it applies to the U.S. war against Afghanistan” in the
44
There was no deadline given, but the effective deadline turned out to be October 7, only
seventeen days after the president’s speech. It is questionable that all of the demands
could have been met to the satisfaction of the U.S. within seventeen days. The editors do
not refer to this section of the president’s speech in their editorial, but apparently assume
that the demands were reasonable. It should also be pointed out that the Taliban did
refuse to turn Osama bin Laden over to the United States, but they did respond with a
counteroffer which does not seem totally unreasonable. This is summarized in an
editorial in the Jesuit magazine America:
Although the Taliban had refused to turn Osama bin Laden over to the United
States, it had offered 1) to negotiate, 2) to put him on trial in an Islamic court and
3) to turn him over to a third country if the United States provided evidence of his
guilt. These offers were rejected out of hand by the Bush administration as
nothing more than delaying tactics. Since the terrorist attacks took place in the
United States, Osama bin Laden should be tried in the United States, our
government argued. In addition, the United States wants the entire Al Qaeda
organization eliminated, not just its leader, Osama bin Laden.21
The U.S. rejection of the offer made the military option inevitable, but the Taliban request
to provide evidence of bin Laden’s guilt was not at all unreasonable. Proof that he was
responsible should have been forthcoming whether the attacks were seen as an act of
essay “War in Afghanistan: Was It Just?” Mennonite Life (Online) 57 no. 1 (March 2002)
<http://www.bethelks.edu/mennonitelife/2002mar/shank.php> (31 May 2006). Shank’s essay was helpful in
pointing to the news sources used here.
21
“Editorial: War in Afghanistan,” America 185, 28 October 2001,
<http://www.americamagazine.org/editorial.cfm?articletypeid=3&textID=1174&issueID=348> (27 July
2006).
45
mass murder or as an act of war since the Bush administration was quite certain of his
guilt.22 The production of sufficient concrete evidence should not have been a difficult
task, but the editors at First Things do not use up any ink in order to evaluate how the last
resort criterion of the just war theory applies to the actual events. Neither do they give
any space to elaborate on the demands made by the president in his speech nor to the
response of the Taliban government. One is tempted to surmise that they are simply
accepting the U.S. administration’s attitude of rejectionism; nothing the Taliban could do
or say would stave off a U.S.led invasion. Duane Shank writes:
As the bombing campaign began, it was clear that it was the only response that
had been considered. A Los Angeles Times story reported: “Bush advisors say the
president decided from the start he wanted to launch a largescale military
response to the attacks, and at every step along the way refined—but did not
change—that initial choice. Asked whether Bush ever considered an option that
did not include military action, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
replied firmly: ‘No.’”23
The editors might have tried hauling out the slogan that “you can’t negotiate with
terrorists,” and with a simplistic equivalence dump the Taliban into the same category as
al Qaeda, but even so, the Taliban, when they were known as the Mujaheddin, had many
years of dealing with the CIA when they were acquiring weapons to fight the Soviets.
That inconvenient fact is largely absent from discussion following the September 11
22
Although Osama bin Laden is still not wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in connection to
the September 11, 2001 attacks. See <http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/terbinladen.htm> (18 June 2006).
23
Shank, “War in Afghanistan: Was It Just?”
46
attacks.24 Suraya Sadeed, founder of the organization Help the Afghan Children, has said
flatly, “The Taliban is the product of the United States. It was not created overnight. The
seed for it was planted in the early 1980’s.”25 Deborah Ellis writes that the group is “not a
spontaneous movement propelled along by the will of the people. They are a carefully,
calculatedly, created force, nurtured and encouraged by Pakistan’s Inter Services
Intelligence Division (ISI),”26 an organization with close ties to the CIA.27 The editors
rather conveniently ignore these complicating factors in justifying their support for the
invasion of Afghanistan. Perhaps they must, given that any research into the dealings and
connections of the Pakistani ISI would turn up information showing that it is an
24
But in November 1996, Neuhaus (“The Public Square: While We’re At It,” First Things 67
(November 1996)) recommended a book titled The Rise and Fall of the Communist Revolution by Warren H.
Carroll (Front Royal, Virginia: Christendom Press, 1996) which contains the following quote: “The
hundreds of millions conquered or victimized by communism were thus abandoned to an eternity of slavery.
Only to God could they now cry; and to God they did cry. God heard them—and raised up as rescuers
humble men who still believed in Him: Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, Father Gleb Yakunin and his like,
and the holy warriors of Afghanistan” (emphasis mine). The “rescuers,” “humble men,” and “holy warriors
of Afghanistan” within five years became “terrorists” and “enemies.” In September of 1996, the Taliban had
captured Kabul, and by then the Taliban had been repressing Afghan women for four years. See Deborah
Ellis, Women of the Afghan War (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2000), xix.
25
Quoted in Ellis, Women of the Afghan War, 203. In 2002 at a talk, Ms. Sadeed gave at Mennonite
Central Committee headquarters in Akron, PA, I had the chance to ask her directly what she meant by that
statement. After smiling a slightly embarrassed smile, she explained that the idea for the creation of a
militant Islamic fighting force came from the United States with financing coming from Saudi Arabia and
land (for madrasas—Islamic religious schools) coming from Pakistan with the goal being the removal of
Soviet influence from Afghanistan.
26
Ellis, Women of the Afghan War, 60.
27
“CIA’s new boss met former ISI chief on 9/11: Officials,” DawnThe Internet Edition, 14 August
2004 <http://www.dawn.com/2004/08/14/int2.htm> (18 June 2006).
47
organization with deeply conflicted and compromised loyalties.28 This is especially
relevant given the Pakistani government’s status as an American ally in the war on terror.
These facts have been screened out of their discussion. They cannot say that they gave
“due diligence” to understanding the recent and contemporary historical record before
endorsing the military response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
All of this is not to say that if the editors would look at all of the right facts, they
would of necessity come to the right theological conclusion about how American
Christians should view and respond to acts of violence, but it does raise the question of
what prior commitments have been made before the facts are discussed, not to mention
which facts are deemed relevant to the discussion and which ones are conveniently
ignored.
Categorization is a fundamental step for proponents of the war on terror, and the
editors do this according to their own prior commitments. In any time of war, this task of
categorization is aided by the telling of stories about who “we” are and who “they” are. In
Baxter’s response to the First Things editorial, he rightly points out that the “notion of a
‘Christian America’ is usually presented in the form of a story about how the nation was
founded.”29 The desired effect of this story is that America is understood as Christian and
28
See for example Rashid, Taliban, 137. Accounts of the corruption of the ISI and its support of
individuals and groups engaged in terrorism were readily available in September 2001.
29
Baxter, “God Is Not American,” 64.
48
good and on the side of right. The story of “them” must also be told, and it must be told
in such a way that allows for them to be categorized as “other.” The “them” in regards to
the war on terror has ranged from all militant adherents of Islam to all adherents of Islam
to all those who are not “with America,” but at the core of “them” is a strange religion
not fully understood by “us.” Characteristic of the interpreters of Islam for the First
Things editors is Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University. He is called “one of
the most astute students of Islam.”30 The editors cite his explanation that part of the
Muslim world is now going through a stage of antiWestern rage.
Lewis is certainly an influential scholar with a large body of work to his credit
written over the last 60 years. He has been consulted by politicians seeking advice on
Western relations with Islamic nations. Vice President Dick Cheney remarked that “in
this new century, his wisdom is sought daily by policymakers, diplomats, fellow
academics, and the news media” at a luncheon given in Lewis’ honor.31 It was in his essay
“The Roots of Muslim Rage” that the phrase “clash of civilizations” was coined.32 But
Lewis’ ideas—which put antiWestern frustration in the mainstream of Islam—have been
30
Neuhaus and Nuechterlein, “In a Time of War,” 16.
31
Remarks by Vice President Cheney at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia Luncheon Honoring
Professor Bernard Lewis, The White House, 1 May 2006
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/05/200605013.html> (13 June 2006).
32
Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic Monthly 266 no. 3 (September 1990): 4757.
This article is certainly worth reading. It does appear to lean towards a monolithic view of Islam without
giving enough recognition to its various and sometimes competing streams such as Shi’a, Sunni, and Sufi.
49
criticized in general for oversimplifying the grand “Islam versus Christendom” struggle,
and specifically for promoting a foreign policy doctrine which seems to be failing in both
Afghanistan and Iraq—the imposition by force of Westernstyle, secularized democracy
on Islamic cultures.33
When Lewis’ narrative of Islam is relied on it is difficult to arrive at a view of
Islamic peoples which is anything but fearful and suspicious. The nuances of Islam’s
resistance to and incorporation of Western as well as Soviet ideas do not come through in
the analysis which the editors present. Furthermore, the complication of militant Saudi
Wahhabism and its relationships with the Saudi royal family, coupled with the factor of
SaudiU.S. relations related to oil and security, is not broached.34 The account of Islam
which the editors present is incomplete to the degree that important parts of the story are
filtered out. “We” can’t be so pure if, in Afghanistan, we were willing to use militant
religious fanatics for our own advantage and leave their country in ruins in the name of
33
Michael Hirsch, “Bernard Lewis Revisited,” Washington Monthly, November 2004
<http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0411.hirsh.html> (13 June 2006).
34
For an account which includes these nuances, see Ahmed Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam
in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Rashid does not overlook the distinction between
Shi’a and Sunni Islam, nor the two streams from which most militant fundamentalism emerges—Saudi
Wahhabism and Pakistani Deobandism. Another important book is Stephen C. Pelletière, Iraq and the
International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Gulf (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2001).
He is a former CIA chief Iraq analyst and currently a professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S.
Army War College in Carlisle, PA.
50
anticommunism, nor if our reliance on Arabian oil might have compromised the image
we wish to project in the region.
The Prior Commitment to America
It would seem that the editors want to show that America has the best principles
in the world and is the best “carrier” of Christianity. To say that democracy is a good or
even great idea is one thing, but Neuhaus has said that he believes “that God wills the
democratic idea as part of his purpose in the unfolding of history.”35 In the editors’
project to support America, the church plays only a supporting role. Baxter’s critique of
“In a Time of War” points this out well. He affirms the editors’ eschatological warning
that America is not the revelation of God’s kingdom and does not deserve idolatrous
allegiance.36 But Baxter argues that this warning is not “effective without an
accompanying ecclesiological proviso, without a positive and substantive account of the
church.”37 To be sure, Neuhaus elsewhere has been quite clear about the importance of the
church and its imperative to be the church. In “Christianity and Democracy: A Statement
of the Institute on Religion and Democracy,” he writes with passion that
35
Mike Yaconelli, ed., [Interview with Richard John Neuhaus] in The Door Interviews (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan Publishing House, 1989), 271.
36
Baxter, “God Is Not American,” 70.
37
Ibid., 7071.
51
Christians must proclaim and demonstrate the Gospel to all people, embracing
them in a sustaining community of faith and discipline under the Lordship of
Christ. In obedience to this biblical mandate, Christians have a special care for all
who are in need, especially the poor, the oppressed, the despised and the
marginal. The Church is called to be a community of diversity, including people
of every race, nation, class, and political viewpoint. As a universal community,
the Church witnesses to the limits of the national and ideological loyalties that
divide mankind. Communal allegiance to Christ and his Kingdom is the
indispensable check upon pretensions of the modern state. Because Christ is
Lord, Caesar is not Lord. By humbling all secular claims to sovereignty, the
Church makes its most important political contribution by being, fully and
unapologetically, the Church.38
Furthermore in The Naked Public Square, he writes: “For Christians the normative story
and explanation [of the world] is of course the biblical story centered in the gospel of
Jesus the Christ.”39 Clearly, there is the understanding that not all of the advances of the
Enlightenment are to the benefit of Christian life and witness, and his claims to that effect
are wellstated. But in “Christianity and Democracy,” he goes beyond the essential nature
of the church and proposes to “illuminate the relationship between Christian faith and
democracy.”40 This entails a debate “between those who do believe and those who do not
believe that there is a necessary linkage between Christian faith and human freedom.”41 It
might be fair to say that most Christians would agree that there is such a linkage, but just
38
Richard John Neuhaus, “Christianity and Democracy: A Statement of the Institute on Religion and
Democracy,” Institute on Religion and Democracy, p. 1, <http://www.irdrenew.org/atf/cf/%7B8548C466
7ECE4AF1B84449C289CE5165%7D/Christianity_and_Democracy.pdf> (7 July 2006). For a full
critique, see Stanley Hauerwas, “The Reality of the Church: Even a Democratic State is not the Kingdom,”
in Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985).
39
Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square, 13.
40
Neuhaus, “Christianity and Democracy,” 5.
41
Ibid., 6.
52
as we turn to the scriptures and the church for an understanding of Christian faith, we
must do the same for an understanding of “human freedom.” Neuhaus does not
distinguish between a biblical understanding of freedom and an American/Enlightenment
understanding of freedom but seems to sacralize the latter.42 His “freedom” is “an end in
itself.”
I am not saying that human freedom as most Americans understand it is bad thing,
but one of the potential problems with it becomes clear when differing parties want it and
do not agree on how to get it or what it means. This is evident in Neuhaus’ and the IRD’s
support of the Nicaraguan Contras—the CIAarmed and funded former National
Guardsmen for deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle whose abuses and violent
repression are wellknown. In the early 1980’s, the IRD “helped the Reagan
administration design a propaganda campaign around ‘religious persecution’ under the
Sandinistas and funneled moneys to [antiSandinista] Archbishop Miguel Obando y
Bravo.”43 Neuhaus’ take on the Reagan administration’s policy is evident in the following
quote:
Washington believes that Nicaragua must serve as a warning to the rest of Central
America to never challenge U.S. hegemony, because of the enormous economic
42
The argument about the meaning of American freedom is still going on between the left and the
right. Freedom might mean one thing to an American who wants to carry a concealed handgun but
something else to another American who wants abortion to be legal.
43
William I. Robinson, A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and
American Foreign Policy in the PostCold War Era (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1992), 118.
53
and political costs. It’s too bad that the [Nicaraguan] poor must suffer, but
historically the poor have always suffered. Nicaragua must be a lesson to others.44
Perhaps Neuhaus has been caught in a moment of candor in that he appears to be
uncritically echoing Washington policy. While he has rightly criticized some Christians
for giving unquestioning support to the Sandinista revolutionaries, he has no criticism for
the documented abuses of the Somoza regime or the Contras, instead focusing on
Sandinista persecution of Christians.45 His above quote certainly sounds more Kissinger
like than Christlike, and it lends credence to the position that the first premise in his
moral reasoning is America—U.S. hegemony can never be challenged; America stands
for freedom and also reserves the right to define that freedom.
Peter Dula has criticized the “eyeglasses” of Neuhaus (and First Things
contributor George Weigel) in his essay “The War in Iraq: How the Catholic
Conservatives Got It Wrong.”46 One of Dula’s critiques focuses on the First Things’ “faith
in the competency of the Bush administration and their contempt for religious leaders
44
Original citation in Penny Lernoux, “The Struggle for Nicaragua’s Soul: A Church for Revolution
and War,” Sojourners, 14 May 1989, quoted in Robinson, A Faustian Bargain, 147.
45
Robinson, A Faustian Bargain, 151152. Neuhaus does not acknowledge that Nicaraguan suspicion of
evangelical American Christians might be related to the reality that some of their missionaries were actively
supporting the Contras. He twice quotes Mark Tooley of the IRD for his condemnations of the Sandinistas.
Daniel Ortega is an “antiAmerican despot” in the same league with Brezhnev, Castro, and Kim Il Sung
(Richard John Neuhaus, “The Public Square: While We’re At It,” First Things 125 (August/September
2002): 100) and a “Sandinista honcho” who inspired “mystical reverence” from “leftwing American
clerics” (Richard John Neuhaus, “On The Square,” First Things, 19 May 2006,
<http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=261> (8 July 2006)).
46
Peter Dula, “The War in Iraq: How Catholic Conservatives Got It Wrong,” Commonweal 131 no. 21
(3 December 2004): 1221.
54
who disagreed with them” about the justice of the war. He argues that these factors
should be seen as “an attachment to a particular brand of neoconservatism overwhelming
their attachment to the justwar tradition.”47 His further critique of First Things is for their
“moral muteness” on the war in Iraq during the time between the summer of 2003 and
October 2004. The abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison finally brought Neuhaus and First
Things out of their silence, but as Dula points out, these abuses don’t “constitute the sort
of evidence needed to counter American claims to be ‘the champion of human rights and
dignity’” for Neuhaus.48 Dula asks, “What would constitute such evidence?” and notes
Neuhaus’ acknowledgment that “the Justice Department’s own Office of Legal Counsel
[led by the current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales] was trying to find loopholes in
the prohibition against torture as early as 2002.” Apparently, for Neuhaus, things would
have to get very ugly before the claim would come under more scrutiny.
Still, Neuhaus does soundly condemn torture—even of terrorists—in his October
2004 column “The Public Square,” insisting that “every human being, no matter how
radically he has debased himself, is a child of God, created in His image and likeness.”49
It would seem a fair question to ask where this generosity was when “In a Time of War”
was being written. The conviction in that affirmation was needed at a time when anti
47
Ibid., 15.
48
Ibid., 20.
49
Richard John Neuhaus, “The Public Square: Drawing the Line Against Torture,” First Things 146
(October 2004): 7681.
55
Muslim sentiment was rising and leading to violent attacks in the U.S. after September
11, 2001. The language of the earlier essay was quite clear: “Call them militant Muslims,
radical Muslims, monistic Muslims, or even fanatical Muslims. They call themselves
faithful Muslims. They are other.”50 Such language could have only helped stir up further
feelings of revenge and hatred prior to the military response eventually undertaken by the
Bush administration. The First Things editors should know that it is harder to justify an
attack on “a child of God” than it is on a militant and fanatical “other.”
In all of this backandforth on the issue of war and morality, the shadow of
Reinhold Niebuhr looms large.51 The majority of writers in First Things tend to speak
from the Niebuhrian perspective. In their writing, Niebuhr is discernible as a consistent
voice of “clarity” in confronting the evils of his times, both Nazism and Communism,
and they imply he would agree with their support for the war on terror. Interestingly
enough, late in his life Reinhold Niebuhr himself would become skeptical of the excesses
of the “anti” of his time—anticommunism: “I must admit that our wealth makes our
religious anticommunism particularly odious. Perhaps there is not much to choose
between communist and anticommunist fanaticism, particularly when the latter,
combined with our wealth, has caused us to stumble into the most pointless, costly and
50
Neuhaus and Nuechterlein, “In a Time of War,” 16.
51
See for example Hauerwas, “In a Time of War: An Exchange,” 1112.
56
bloody war in our history.”52 Although Neuhaus notes Niebuhr’s eventual opposition to
the Vietnam War,53 Niebuhr’s statement stands in contrast with Neuhaus’ righteous stance
of Cold War anticommunism. In the IRD statement, Neuhaus reaffirms its place in his
theology: “Anticommunism, to be sure, is not a sufficient political philosophy. But it has
been, and remains, an indispensable component in discerning the signs of these times.”54
Neuhaus has not been as willing as Niebuhr to admit to “anticommunist fanaticism” in
the pages of First Things. He might also be unwilling to admit to the possibility of a
contemporary incarnation of “anticommunist fanaticism” such as “antiterrorist
fanaticism.”
All of this is to say that the justwaragainstterror intellectual argues from the
wrong theological first premise. While enmeshed in institutions which shape and promote
neoconservative ideologies, Neuhaus then justifies those ideologies in his theological
writings without any corresponding transparency, creating a kind of ideological conflict
of interest. Is Neuhaus mostly a Christian theologian or mostly a neoconservative
ideologue?
52
Original citation in Richard Reinitz, Irony and Consciousness: American Historiography and
Reinhold Niebuhr’s Vision (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 120, quoted in Jace
Weaver, “Original Simplicities and Present Complexities: Reinhold Niebuhr, Eurocentrism, and the Myth of
American Exceptionalism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63 no. 2 (Summer 1995): 243.
53
Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square, 185.
54
Neuhaus, “Christianity and Democracy,” 2.
57
To be sure, there is a Christian “influence” in the theologizing he does, and the
principles he cherishes do have a somewhat biblical basis. But this Christian influence
doesn’t make the final product Christian. If that were the case, then we should call all of
the derivatives of Christianity “Christian.” The early church would have called them
heresy.
If Neuhaus were to argue from a different starting point, that of the body of
Christ, he might be more concerned with its integrity rather than with the ideals of
democracy and human rights. He might need to make his theology of war more
Christological than it currently is. As Baxter argues, such a theology might be primarily
concerned with “one church under God” rather than “one nation under God.” This is
certainly a difficult thing to do when the nationstate claims to be founded on Christian
principles, but that makes understanding these distinctions all the more important. The
church is the body which has been called to live out these Christian principles, not as
standalone ideals but in the life of God’s Spirit and community. No nation other than the
church has the spiritual resources to live as God’s people. The possibility of the church
fulfilling this calling would be greatly enhanced if more theologians would make the
body of Christ their starting point for doing theology rather than America.
In the next chapter, I will argue that the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans
presents a gospel which is both personal and political. With Jesus Christ as the revelation
58
of God’s purposes for his people, in particular, his crucifixion and resurrection, Paul
wants Christians to live in such a way that Caesar’s authority is diminished (but not
ignored) by their thoroughgoing obedience to Christ. This new community does not
participate in violence, except to suffer it, nor does it fear for its survival, since its source
of life is the Spirit of God, not human flesh or national identity.
Chapter Three:
Political Bodies in the Epistle to the Romans
In many discussions about church and state, and Christianity and violence, the
apologist for Christian support of state violence will cite passages from Paul’s Epistle to
the Romans, especially chapter 13, for justification. This appeal to Paul is sometimes
meant to counter the pacifist appeal to Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. But a
careful study of Paul’s theology of political bodies in Romans reveals that the Christian
faith he preached was not simply an “inner faith.” It was one which the Roman audience
would have understood to have both a religious and political message. Paul’s gospel
speaks of a new identity under the lordship of Jesus Christ which rejects the violence and
domination of empires.
The Christian faith as portrayed in the Epistle to the Romans is something which
compels the faithful person to take an action with their body in a public way. When Paul
refers to the faithfulness and righteousness of Abraham (4:125), it must be remembered
that Abraham’s faith compelled him to “[g]o from [his] country and [his] kindred and
[his] father’s house to the land that” the Lord would show him (Genesis 12:1). Faith, a
59
60
word which Paul uses synonymously with “trust in God” in Romans 4:3 and 4:9,1 was
embodied by Abraham in his obedience to God’s command and involved moving his body
accordingly. In Romans 10:16, Paul equates obedience to the good news with trust in the
Lord. Abraham’s faith was made evident by his trusting response to God’s promises.
In Romans 12, Paul follows his appeal to the Roman house churches that they
“present [their] bodies as a living sacrifice” (12:1) with a brief description of how the
body of Christ and its members function as a corporate body (12:38). This is followed by
the ethical discourse of 12:915:6 which appropriately begins, “Let love be genuine...”
(12:9) and continues with exhortations concerning relationships between church members
and with those outside of the church. The appeals are certainly rooted in obedient hearts
(6:17) and renewed minds which can discern the “will of God—what is good and
acceptable and perfect” (12:2), but also bear fruit in what Michael Gorman calls
cruciformity—being conformed to the crucified Christ in thought, speech, and action.2
The importance of the words body, flesh, and spirit for Paul cannot be overstated.
Ben Witherington notes that “[f]or Paul as both Pharisee and Christian, the body was an
essential part of human personality and would be part of who Christians were in the
1
In 4:3 and 4:9, Paul quotes Genesis 15:6 which, speaking of Abram, reads, “And he believed the LORD;
and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness.” In 4:3, Paul renders it as “Abraham believed God, and it
was reckoned to him as righteousness,” but in 4:9, it becomes “Faith was reckoned to Abraham as
righteousness.”
2
Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2001).
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world to come.”3 The body of the believer functions in relation to the Spirit of God which
not only comforts but also advocates. It motivates the body to act according to the will of
God. Without the Spirit, people are motivated by the flesh, and true life in the flesh
without the Spirit is an impossibility for Paul when people live in the Spirit of Christ.
The word flesh will receive attention in this chapter primarily in its usage and
understanding as ethnicity or national identity. While it is not Paul’s exclusive usage, I
wish to examine those instances where Paul wants to convey, in comparison with life in
the Spirit, the inability of ethnicity or national heritage to force God’s salvation. The
word body will be treated as the individual human body, as the crucified and resurrected
body of Christ, and as the community of Christ’s body, all tightly related to each other.
The body that is motivated by the Spirit of God rather than the flesh is moved to
behaviors which are consistent with the way of Christ. Its politics will be shaped by its
members’ relationship to Christ and to each other which will in turn be its witness to the
watching world, and its way of life will be a challenge to the destructive ways of life
which the world offers.
3
Ben Witherington III, The Paul Quest: The Renewed Search for the Jew of Tarsus (Downers Grove,
Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 18.
62
Slavery: Subjugation of the Body to a Master
William Cavanaugh has written about the assumption in the postEnlightenment
age that souls are under the care of the church, and bodies are under the care of the state.4
In this line of thinking, the church sees to the salvation, nurture, and piety of individual
souls. While the church is busy in that arena, the state is busy policing transactions of a
public nature. If one person violates another and therefore violates a public law, society
turns to the state to resolve the conflict. In addition through Selective Service, the U.S.
government may assume the authority to conscript persons to perform military service.
Once a person has entered the military, either voluntarily or through conscription, their
body is under the control of the ones who command them. They are servants of the state
in a very strong sense.5 Their bodies are, as we saw in the previous chapters, offered as
potential sacrifices to the nationstate for the preservation and spread of American
4
See Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination and “God Is Not Religious.” in God Is Not...: Religious,
Nice, “One of Us,” An American, A Capitalist.
5
Dorothy Jean Weaver has shared an unpublished essay with me in which she reflects on a trip to
Israel. At one point she attempted to take the picture of an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldier who was
detaining a Palestinian man. Upon taking a picture of the encounter, the soldier turned to her and, among
other things, informed her that taking pictures of IDF soldiers was illegal because they “are the property of
the IDF” (“A ‘Warmness’ Tour Around the Institute; The Property of the IDF: Palestinian Posting #6,” 13
February 2003, unpublished essay). While I do not know if the U.S. military considers its personnel to be
“property,” swearing to the following oath is required for all who serve in it: “I, (person’s name), do
solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all
enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the
orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to
regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God,” U.S. Code sec. 502.
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freedom. The church has no such legal conscription mechanism at its disposal, but it does
have the call to follow Jesus.
When Paul uses the word slave or servant,6 he is referring to the bodily
relationship between a servant and a master. Understanding the context of this
relationship in ancient Rome helps us to understand Paul’s usage and intentions for these
words. J. Albert Harrill writes that while Roman slavery did construe slaves as “property
objects,” its most important aspect was its
dynamic process of total domination, an absolute kind of mastery that denies the
slave access to autonomous relations outside the master’s sphere of influence—in
effect, reducing the slave to an alienated outsider, socially “dead” to the free
population. Slavery is defined as social death.7
When a person became enslaved, he or she “lost all legal ties of birth with respect to both
one’s forebears and one’s offspring.”8 The slave took on a new identity due to the loss of
social and legal status in the Roman order. The primary motivating force in a slave’s
existence, therefore, is the will of the master. The life of a slave is an extension of the life
of the master.
6
The Greek word (doulos) is translated “servant” in the KJV, NIV and NRSV, but it could also
be translated “slave.”
7
J. Albert Harrill, “Paul and Slavery,” in Paul in the GrecoRoman World: A Handbook, ed. J. Paul
Sampley (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2003): 577.
8
Michael Joseph Brown, “Paul’s Use of in Romans 1:1,” Journal of Biblical
Literature 120, no. 4 (2001): 728.
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Slavery as an institution in ancient Rome was not seen as a moral problem. While
it was thought to be against the natural order of the universe, it was nevertheless seen as
“legitimate, proper, and morally right.”9 The situation in which slaves lived was simply
their “fate.” Estimates of the size of the slave population range from 16.6 to 33 percent.10
Its acceptance and ubiquity gave Paul a useful metaphor for understanding life as a
baptized believer in service to a Lord other than Caesar.
Paul’s selfdesignation as “a servant of Jesus Christ” (1:1) reveals his self
understanding as one whose mind and body are devoted to Christ by being “called” and
“set apart.” Michael Joseph Brown argues that Paul’s use of the word slave in this verse
allows him to communicate effectively with the slaves in the Roman house churches
whom he was addressing. Rather than referring to himself first as an apostle, he places
himself in the same social situation as his addressees and invokes “a model by which
believers could understand their incorporation into this new community.”11 Paul states
that he has been sent “to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles” (1:5),
faith (belief, trust, faithfulness) and obedience (submission, compliance) being
inextricably linked. He “serves” God with his “spirit by announcing the gospel of his
Son” (1:6). The connection must be made here between Paul’s spirit and his body; his
9
Harrill, “Paul and Slavery,” 576.
10
Ibid., 579.
11
Brown, “Paul’s Use of in Romans 1:1,” 729.
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mouth is the organ which does the announcing of the gospel in the way that imperial
household slaves made their proclamations on behalf of the emperors.
In 1:1832, Paul traces out the negative side of the connection between
“suppressing the truth” (1:18) in the mind (1:21) and the “degrading of ... bodies” (1:24).
The persons who did this knew what the truth of God was since it was revealed “through
the things he has made” (1:1920). But because of their wickedness, “they did not honor
[God] as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their
senseless minds were darkened” (1:21). In their foolishness, they stopped worshiping “the
immortal God”—the One who is Spirit—and started worshiping images of “mortal”
beings of flesh (1:2223). They “worshiped and served the creature rather than the
Creator” (1:25). Their “service” to “the creature” led to the degrading sexual practices
Paul describes in 1:2627.
A. Katherine Grieb notes that Paul’s language recalls the creation account in
Genesis 13:
First, he uses the expression “images in the likeness of” creatures (Rom. 1:25),
echoing Genesis 1:26, which recalls humanity made in the image and likeness of
God. Then he speaks of “serving the creature rather than the One who created it”
(Rom. 1:25), an allusion to the serpent in Genesis 3. God intended that Adam and
Eve should image God for the world, reflecting God’s glory through their
obedience to God, but instead they reflected the lesser glory of creation back to
itself.12
12
A. Katherine Grieb, The Story of Romans: A Narrative Defense of God’s Righteousness (Louisville:
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The serpent promised Adam and Eve that they would become like God, but instead
humanity became more like the beasts, enslaved to the powers of sin and death.
In chapter 6, Paul puts forth baptism as the point at which enslavement to sin ends
(6:6) and enslavement to God begins (6:22). Recalling the image of slavery as social
death, this passage is Paul’s clearest usage of the slavery metaphor in Romans. Rather
than drawing on legal manumission as a model for freedom from the dominion of sin, he
holds up baptism—being united with Christ in crucifixion and resurrection (6:5). Just as
a person received a new identity—a social and legal “death”—when becoming a slave,
persons baptized into Christ receive a new identity through resurrection. They move from
one slavery to another. The life of obedience to sin and death is “crucified,” and the life
of obedience to God is “resurrected.” This resurrection is what enables the person to
“walk in newness of life” (6:4). The power (or “dominion”) of sin over their bodies is no
longer a reality, so their behaviors are motivated by communion with Christ and other
believers in this new life. They “must consider themselves dead to sin and alive to God in
Christ Jesus” (6:11).
Commenting on 6:1214, Grieb writes that Paul is thinking of the physical body as
“disputed territory” that will be exclusively occupied either by sin or by Christ.13 Since
Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 2728.
13
Grieb, The Story of Romans, 67.
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the body of sin has been destroyed (6:6), the believer no longer serves its power, so Paul
urges them not to put their “mortal bodies” and “members” at the service of sin anymore
(6:1213). When believers, as slaves, “present” their whole physical bodies to God, they
devote themselves—including minds, mouths, arms, legs, etc.—to God, offering these
“members” as “instruments [or weapons] of righteousness” (6:13) ready to serve. Every
part of the human body is made available for service to and use by God in the same way a
sacrifice would be offered up on the altar. That their members are “instruments of
righteousness” shows that they are part of Christ’s work of making relationships right.
Their sacrifice is a living one, not a burnt up one (cf. 12:1), which continues to take part
in God’s initiative of “bringing about the obedience of faith” (1:5; 16:26).
Paul mixes the sacrificial metaphor with the slavery metaphor. For those baptized
into Christ, their sacrifice is not physically destroyed and consumed. It continues on in
their obedience and slavery to Christ. In 6:1516, Paul reminds the believers that freedom
from sin is not freedom to sin. Freedom comes from obedience. They must continually
“present themselves ... as obedient slaves” of “obedience, which leads to righteousness”
(6:16). Their obedience does not come from being afraid of their master, as it did when
they were slaves “to the flesh” (cf. 8:1215). Their obedience now comes “from the heart”
and is to “the form of teaching to which they were entrusted” (6:17). James D. G. Dunn
translates “entrusted” as “handed over” which evokes the imagery “of a slave being
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‘handed over’ to a new master.”14 The “form of teaching” is most likely the tradition of
Jesus’ life and ministry which is put forth as a pattern for living (cf. Colossians 2:16).15 In
this interpretation, Paul is saying that the believers’ enslavement to righteousness (6:18) is
a way of living which looks like the life and ministry of their new Lord, and just as their
prior enslavement to “impurity and to greater and greater iniquity” (6:19) would have led
them to death (6:21, 23), so their enslavement “to righteousness for sanctification” (6:19)
leads them to “eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (6:23).
Paul continues to use the metaphor of slavery for the believers’ old relationship
with the law, sin, and the flesh (7:6, 25). Conversely, he also references the believers’ new
relationship with Christ. The ones who “walk in love” (14:15) “serve Christ” and are
“acceptable to God” (14:18). Being “acceptable to God” also describes bodies presented
as a living sacrifice (12:1). Again Paul combines sacrificial imagery with the slavery
metaphor to show that the sacrifice believers offer is one of continually relating to each
other in the way of Jesus through obedience to him. They sacrifice pleasure for
themselves in order to please their neighbor since that is what Christ their Master did
(15:13).
James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 195 n. 67.
14
Ibid., 195.
15
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Paul’s understanding of Christian freedom is actually slavery to Christ. The
believer’s freedom did not necessarily mean individual rights and of course in the ancient
world did not mean free market capitalism as it does for many Westerners today. Their
freedom came through sacrifice, but it was a living selfsacrifice to God rather than a
sacrifice of soldiers and enemies to a god of empire and death. For the Christian slaves in
the Roman house churches, that meant that their identity came from Christ their master.
On the weighty topic of the Christian relationship to the state, something must be
said about Paul’s use of the slavery metaphor in light of his exhortations in 13:17. Simply
put, it is striking that he does not use the language of slavery in describing the Roman
believers’ relationship to “governing authorities.” Rather, they must “be subject” (13:1, 5)
and not “resist” (13:2). It should be quite clear from the above discussion that Paul
intends that selfsacrificial slavery to the Lord be the way of living for believers. The
relationship of the believers to the governing authorities is not to be seen through the lens
of selfsacrificial slavery, but through being subject and by giving taxes, revenue, respect,
and honor to those to whom these things are owed (13:7). On the one hand, this rules out
lawless behavior and Zealotlike rebellion and revolution (13:24); that activity does not
witness to Christ’s way. On the other hand, it implies that there are indeed limits on what
is owed to authorities. In 13:7, Paul’s list of what is owed is not allencompassing and
does come to an end. For example, being subject to the governing authorities does not
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entail “presenting bodies as a living sacrifice” (12:1) to them, and this becomes important
when those authorities ask for bodies willing to enact violence on their behalf.
Enslavement to Christ is a relationship which is never “set aside” by the one who is in
Christ, no matter what temporal duties or vocation the believer might be performing.
Legitimate questions might still be raised about the withholding of war taxes. Should
believers today pay the telephone company tax when it is clear that it is used to fund the
U.S. military? In addition, the meanings and limits of the words “respect” and “honor”
are topics for further discernment (it is clear that they are something less than worship),
but those questions should be addressed firmly within the scope of Paul’s understanding
and usage of those words.
John Howard Yoder points out that the imperative in 13:1—“be subject”—is
not literally one of obedience. The Greek language has good words to denote
obedience, in the sense, of completely bending one’s will and one’s actions to the
desires of another [like a slave would to a master]. What Paul calls for, however,
is subordination. This verb is based upon the same root as the ordering of the
powers of God. Subordination is significantly different from obedience.16
The distinction between the two kinds of subjection—one to God, the other to the
governing authorities—must be stated clearly so that Paul is not cast as an apologist for
everything authorities might do, including abusing their authority to punish believers who
act in selfsacrificial service to their Lord. Paul’s choices of language and metaphor ought
16
John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1994), 208209.
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to be seen as deliberate, careful, and even Spiritinspired rather than simply as rough
instruments for his purposes. If Paul meant to promote a theology which exhorts
consistent obedience to governing authorities, then it is strange that he did not turn to the
readily understandable metaphor of slavery for help. Such a theology would create a
tension or contradiction between this text and the teachings of Jesus, something which
Paul is not attempting to do.17
“Flesh” as National Identity
James Dunn lists eight variations on the way Paul uses the word flesh in his
writings.18 Together they outline a continuum of usages rather than pointing toward eight
distinct definitions. Briefly, the first is “a more or less neutral usage, denoting the
physical body, or physical relationship or kinship.” The second usage “embraces the
typically Hebraic thought of weakness” or physical perishability and mortality. The third
usage, which according to Dunn does not appear in Romans, adds “a further overtone of
inadequacy in contrast to a superior realm or mode of being.” The fourth usage “gains a
[negative] moral connotation.” The fifth usage characterizes flesh as “the sphere of sin’s
operations.” The sixth usage sets it in opposition to the Spirit. The seventh usage
17
Ibid., 210.
18
Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 6466.
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characterizes it “as a source of corruption and hostility to God.” The eighth usage is
characterized by Paul’s phrase “according to the flesh” pointing to physical kinship but
sometimes used in contrast with Spirit. These meanings range from being neutral and
empirically descriptive to the negative usage in which Paul is conveying the danger of
reliance on the flesh for salvation. Whether the usage is neutral or negative, flesh is
always seen as something which must receive life from the Spirit of God through
obedience to the Spirit in order to be saved.
Once one is willing to set aside the popular contemporary interpretation of flesh
as sexual lust to the exclusion of other nuances, the meaning of “physical kinship” is
easily recognizable in numerous usages in Paul’s epistle. The phrase “according to the
flesh” can certainly be understood as relating to Jewish ancestry or ethnicity, whether it is
the kinship between Jesus and David (1:3), between the Jews and Abraham (4:1), between
the Jews and Paul (9:3), or between the Jews and the Messiah (9:5). Chapter 8 contains
most of the occurrences of flesh. There Paul uses the phrase “according to the flesh” in
8:4, 5, 12, 13, but its meaning is not as selfevident as it is in the previously listed verses.
Even so there are numerous clues regarding what the flesh does. Flesh has
weakened the law (8:3). It provides a place for sin to dwell (8:3; cf. 7:17, 23). God’s Son
came “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (8:3). Persons can “walk” (8:4) and “live according
to the flesh” (8:5) as well as “set their minds on the things of the flesh” (8:5). These
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things lead to death and hostility toward God (8:6, 7). Flesh does not and cannot “submit
to God’s law” (8:7), and it prevents those “in the flesh” from pleasing God (8:8).
The most important clue relating to ethnicity in 8:18 is the phrase which
describes Christ as being sent “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (8:3). Vincent P. Branick
identifies two nuances in this usage of flesh. “The first meaning is that of solidarity.” For
Paul, the word
expresses [ethnic] kinship and unity with other human beings.... Exactly the
opposite from being a principle of individuation, “flesh” for Paul is a basis of
union and participation with others. The “sinful flesh” of Christ thus expresses
the solidarity of Christ with humanity.
The second meaning or nuance ... is that of a power or power sphere. For Paul
[sarx/flesh] is a reality in which people exist (Rom 7:5; 8:8); it makes
demands and places others in its debt (Rom 8:12)....19
We do not need to suspend the idea from Dunn’s continuum that flesh can be understood
as weakness in order to see that it can be a power. The power of the flesh is a negative
power to destroy a person’s life through false promises. In terms of the ability to please
God (8:8), it is inadequate and weak. Considering Branick’s meanings sidebyside, we
might entertain the phrase “the power of ethnic pride” as one way, among others, to
understand flesh. This would encompass Jewish pride in their being “chosen,” in being
given the law of Moses, and in circumcision (another nuanced meaning for flesh; see
Vincent P. Branick, “The Sinful Flesh of the Son of God (Rom 8:3): A Key Image of Pauline
19
Theology,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 47, no. 2 (1985): 251.
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2:28).20 N. T. Wright points out that when Jews reject Jesus as the Messiah, they “are
thereby embracing instead an identity marked out by blood and soil, by ancestry and
territory, in other words, by the ‘flesh.’”21 The rejection of Jesus as the Messiah is a
rejection of the Spirit’s ability to bring and sustain the life of God’s people and a sign of
faith in ethnicity and other outward markers.
Daniel Boyarin points out that sex is also a large part of the meaning of flesh, not
in the sense of sexual desire, but as essential for the progeny needed to maintain and
expand the people of Israel (see 4:1819; 9:713). “Flesh is the penis and physical kinship;
it is the site of sexuality, wherein lies the origin of sin; it is also the site of genealogy,
wherein lies the ethnocentrism of Judaism as Paul encountered it.”22 For Paul, the Jewish
misunderstanding of the promise to Abraham was that their ethnicity made them God’s
people and that expanding God’s people required having Jewish babies. This led them to
20
It must be stated here that I believe the problem is with pride in being chosen, etc., and not in being
chosen, etc., per se.
21
N. T. Wright, “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire,” in Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium,
Interpretation, ed. Richard A. Horsley (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2000): 176.
22
Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkley: University of California
Press, 1994), 68. While Boyarin certainly overgeneralizes Paul’s criticism of ethnocentrism into a criticism
of Judaism as inherently ethnocentric, I think Boyarin’s understanding of flesh is a helpful one as long as
one keeps in mind that for Boyarin, Paul is a liberal who wants to make the unity of humanity possible
through the erasure of physical and practical differences bringing “sameness through faith in Christ.” For a
critique of Boyarin’s book, see Judith GundryVolf and Miroslav Volf, Review of A Radical Jew: Paul and
the Politics of Identity, by Daniel Boyarin, Books and Culture 3 (July/August 1997): 1618. For a more
general critique of the “liberal Paul” including Boyarin’s view, see Douglas Harink, Paul Among the
Postliberals: Pauline Theology Beyond Christendom and Modernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2003),
9195.
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“boast of their relation to God” (2:17) and also boast in the law (3:21, 27), circumcision
being a sign of the law. Boyarin writes that “the Law ... literally—that is, carnally—
insisted on the priority and importance of the flesh, of procreation and kinship.”23
If one’s ethnicity, nation, and religious observance are wrapped up in the idea of
flesh, what are we to learn from what Paul tells us about it? First, we must remember
Dunn’s continuum, specifically the neutral connotation that flesh can have in some
usages. It is not always bad. Many times it is simply stated as a matter of fact that human
beings come from a set of parents and are related to each other—they have an ethnicity
and a kinship through that ethnicity (1:3; 4:1; 9:3, 5). On its own, flesh is not evil.
But flesh does not remain simply dormant and neutral. As Brown notes, it is a
“power or sphere of power” which makes demands on human beings and seeks to place
them in its debt (8:12). In the way that an attractive person’s “good looks” are morally
neutral but can readily become a source of arrogance and pride which excludes those who
are “plain” or “ugly,” flesh can readily become a source of arrogance and pride, leading
to boasting in a salvation under the control of human beings, rather than in a miraculous
and merciful work of God. According to Boyarin, Paul uses the phrase “in the flesh” to
denote the time “when [Jews] considered membership in the literal Israel according to
the flesh ... as decisive for salvation and propagation of the race as a central value and
23
Ibid., 6869.
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also when [they] were alive in [their] fleshly bodies and subject to the Law, before [they]
died to the Law.”24 Flesh is the way in which the Jews tried to sustain themselves as a
people and their integrity as a nation. With respect to justification and righteousness, Paul
diminishes the value of flesh to neutral at best and antithetical to the Spirit at worst.
For Paul it is the Spirit of God which provides the true ancestry for believers, and
the story of the Spirit’s actions is their history. They owe nothing to ethnic, national
heritage (8:12). What makes them children of God is the Spirit, not the flesh (8:14).
When believers become children of God, it is through “adoption” (8:15), not through
lineage. They are not enslaved to the old ways of the flesh which come from the fear that
they will be abandoned or come to an end as God’s people. They “hope for what [they] do
not see” and “wait for it with patience” (8:25). Katherine Grieb points out that the Exodus
story is behind Paul’s language in 8:1217.25 God’s power is what brought the Israelites
out of slavery and into freedom. It was not their own power by which they were freed and
given the law and an inheritance after suffering in Egypt, and it is the same for those who
patiently endure suffering with Christ and forego attempts to save their nation through
their own power and wit. In Egypt, the Israelites knew that they were completely unable
to save themselves without God’s direct intervention on their behalf (Exodus 46).
24
Ibid., 170.
25
Grieb, The Story of Romans, 79.
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Paul’s story of the beginning of Israel’s history in 9:6b16 underscores the
necessity of God’s action and initiative, over and against humaninspired efforts, in the
formation of the nation. Paul writes, “not all Israelites truly belong to Israel, and not all of
Abraham’s children are his true descendants” (9:6b7). “It is not the children of the flesh
who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as descendants”
(9:8). In explaining this truth, Paul shows that the traditional ways of raising up a people
are inadequate for God’s purposes so that everyone may know that God is the author of
this nation. It is not built through human tradition or ingenuity. The barrenness of Sarah,
rather than preventing fulfillment of the promise of a son, is used to show God’s power
and mercy. The choice of the younger Jacob over the oldest son Esau goes against the
norms of inheritance. “So it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who
shows mercy” (9:16).
The word flesh interpreted either as national, ethnic, or legalreligious privilege
opens up a more fullorbed way of understanding Paul’s contrast of flesh and Spirit.
Patriotism is seen by many American Christians as a virtue because of the nation’s so
called “Godly heritage,” a debatable assumption which frequently underwrites the idea
that such a nation must be defended. In contrast, an understanding of flesh as a form of
pride in identity takes nationalism and patriotism out of the category of adiaphora and
challenges modernist assumptions about a Christian faith which is willing to do
78
significantly more than “be subject” to the state. When Christianity is turned into a
patriotic civil religion, it teaches Christians that they can live, survive, and be saved
“according to the flesh” rather than that they “put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no
provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (13:14).
Political Bodies Which Live and Walk by the Spirit of God
Bodies are very important in Paul’s theology. One of the ideas he was working
against was the overreaching influence of the Platonic idea that the material world was
inevitably corrupt and “regarded as much inferior to the imperishable world of the
mind.”26 For the Platonist, “[i]t was but a step for the physical to be despised, the material
to be regarded as a burden and a downward drag, and salvation to be understood as an
escape from materiality.”27
While Paul does use the word body in a negative sense (6:6; 7:24; 8:10, 13) and
also in a more neutral sense (1:24; 4:19), the body is worthy of redemption along with the
whole creation (8:1923). Just as it is important that the believers become slaves of Jesus
Christ, it is also important that they embody that relationship in what they do. Salvation is
not merely knowledge about God, Christ, and the Spirit; it involves believers’ “presenting
26
Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 39.
27
Ibid.
79
their bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is ... spiritual
worship” (12:1). The many, individual bodies become one in an ongoing sacrifice to God.
Rather than degrading their bodies through impurity (1:24) and letting “sin exercise
dominion in their mortal bodies” (6:12), they put their bodies in a position of availability
and readiness. Grieb notices here “the military metaphor of putting the members of one’s
body at the disposal of one’s lord.”28 Dunn sees cultic sacrificial language. The Greek
words for present, sacrifice, and worship in 12:1 are normally used in the Septuagint in
reference to the specific Jewish practices of sacrifice and worship.29 The ongoing and
total nature of this worship is evident in 12:115:13. This sacrificial worship takes place
outside of the confines of the temple in everyday relationships. “It is a consistent feature
of Paul’s ecclesiology that he takes cultic language out of its context of sacred place and
sacred person and uses it of ‘ordinary’ individuals in their daily obligations in service of
the gospel.”30
For Paul, these practices are both religious and political. “His gospel, we might
say, is a theopolitical gospel. It announces an event that has to do with God’s intervention
in history, something that must be both a ‘theological’ and a ‘political’ event.”31 In
28
Grieb, The Story of Romans, 118.
29
Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 544.
30
Ibid., 545.
31
Michael J. Gorman, Apostle of the Crucified Lord: A Theological Introduction to Paul and His
Letters (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 108.
80
contrast with contemporary theologies which make the gospel apolitical, or conversely,
assume divine preference for an existing political order, Michael Gorman shows how
Paul, like Jesus, “was announcing a new, divinely established political order.”32 That
political order is manifested in the people—the bodies—that make it up and live
according to its ways, making up “a cruciform countercultural (i.e., ‘holy’) community.”33
The body of the individual believer is “united” with Christ’s body. The act of
baptism unites believers with Christ in his death and resurrection (6:5). Unity in his
resurrection means that believers “present themselves to God as those who have been
brought from death to life,” that is, as Jesus did. Believers’ bodily actions are animated by
God’s Spirit because they have been raised through baptism so they “might walk in
newness of life” (6:4). This “walking in newness of life” is spelled out in more detail in
chapters 1215. The fact that these chapters have scattered echoes of Jesus’ teaching in
them solidifies the point that Paul is exhorting the believers to continue Christ’s speech
and actions in their bodies on this earth. They “become a sort of Christ to others.”34
Paul elaborates the appeal he began in 12:1. As believers offer their bodies, they
are also not to be “conformed to this world [or age]” (12:2). The prevailing “spirit of the
times” is not their motivating, lifegiving Spirit. Instead of looking to the world for
32
Gorman, Apostle of the Crucified Lord, 109.
33
Ibid., 390.
34
Gorman, Cruciformity, 400.
81
inspiration, they are to “be transformed by the renewing of their minds” (12:2). They will
be “metamorphosed” or “transfigured” through renewed minds. The renewal that is
enacted begins in the new life of Christ’s resurrection. Gorman writes: “Fundamental to
this renewing of the mind ... is the adopting of the mind of Christ, a mind of cruciform
love.”35 Christ made up his mind to submit to the crucifixion of his own body for the
salvation of the world. This is the model Paul is pointing toward in 12:2. The body and
the mind are not placed in opposition as in Platonic thought but are transformed—since
the body is worthy of redemption—and renewed—since the human mind as such is
inadequate.
Paul’s other usage of body, aside from individuals and Christ’s physical body,
refers to all those who “are one body in Christ” (12:5). It is the community of those who
are “in Christ.” Indeed, the language of believers being “in Christ” (6:11, 23; 8:1, 2, 39;
12:5; 15:17; 16:3, 7, 9, 10) or “in the Lord” (16:8, 11, 12, 13) occurs more frequently than
the language of Christ being in the believers (8:10) by a count of fifteen to one.36 Even in
the one instance—“if Christ is in you”—the word you is plural.37 Paul sees the believers
not as individuals who have a private relationship with Jesus Christ, but as individuals
35
Ibid., 247.
36
See Gorman, Cruciformity, 3643. Gorman asserts that Paul’s usage of “in Christ” and “in the Lord”
throughout his letters is more spatial than mystical. Gorman writes, “to be ‘in Christ’ principally means to
be under the influence of Christ’s power, especially the power to be conformed to him and his cross, by
participation in the life of a community that acknowledges his lordship” (36).
37
This case is similar for Spirit. Believers are in the Spirit more than the Spirit is in each one of them.
82
who “are members one of another” in one body and in Christ (12:5). Paul’s theology is
such that Christ lives in believers and—more importantly, according to Paul—believers
live in Christ. This body is political in that it is in itself a social entity, and it does not
defer to existing political boundaries. Those boundaries and old divisions—and for Paul
the big one is the one between Jews and Greeks—have been superseded. They are not
erased, but stripped of their power to divide by the power of reconciliation. The body in
which this takes place is a new creation, a new political identity.
One of Paul’s points in 12:38 is that individual believers truly need other
believers for the church to embody Christ for the world. To do this, they must be humble
as a slave is humble.38 But this humility is not selfdebasing; the believer “thinks with
sober judgment” (12:3) and knows when she has been given a gift from God for the body
of believers. The fact that there are a number of different gifts (12:68) underscores the
importance of the many individual contributions to the integrity of the whole body.
What follows, beginning in 12:9, is the ethic or politics of Christ’s body. Christ
practiced and taught these things, and those who have been transformed into the “one
body in Christ” will live differently than when they were “conformed to this world.” In
particular, the exhortations of 12:921 are nothing if not exhortations to live as Christ
lived. Contrary to some interpretations which limit their application to intrachurch
38
Gorman, Cruciformity, 249, n. 46.
83
relationships, Gorman asserts that these exhortations are intended to address “life within
the community and proper treatment of those outside it.”39 In that context, the calls to
suffering and nonretaliation are certainly politically charged. Persecution could certainly
come from governing authorities, but in any instance, justice for the believers is
understood to come from God as they live in the faithfulness to which Paul urges them.
The following exhortations that believers “be subject” to the authorities (13:1, 5) also
recall Christ’s subjection and submission to the Roman and Jewish authorities who were
responsible for the unjust crucifixion of his body.
Paul appeals to the eschatological nature of this body in 13:1114 to help them
understand the importance of their place in time. Since they “know what time it is”
(13:11), they are to live “honorably as in the day” (13:13), even though the day has not yet
fully arrived. The kingdom has not yet come in fullness, but their behavior is to
concretely anticipate that arrival by living as though it had—“the day is near” (13:12).
This entails leaving behind their “prekingdom” ways such as “reveling and drunkenness,
... debauchery and licentiousness, ... quarreling and jealousy” (13:13). The believers are
encouraged to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to
gratify its desires” (13:14). Gorman writes, “They are to live out their community story
freed from the deeds of the flesh, guided by the Spirit, and clothed in the narrative of
39
Gorman, Apostle of the Crucified Lord, 391.
84
cruciform love found in Christ.”40 This eschatological understanding sets the time frame
for the ethics in 12:921 (which echo themes in the Sermon on the Mount) to now.
Richard John Neuhaus’ claim in “In a Time of War” that Christian pacifists are “proleptic
outposts of the Peaceable Kingdom that is not yet”41 needs to be challenged if “the night
is far gone,” and “the day is near.” The whole Christian community (not just the group
labeled “pacifist”) is indeed an anticipation of the Peaceable Kingdom, but it is also the
concrete embodiment of it in the midst of a violent world. This is especially important for
the church in the United States.
Christ’s resurrection by God’s Spirit and the believers’ baptismal participation in
his death and resurrection are what enable and give life to the believers’ deeds and words.
Their ongoing sacrifice witnesses to the truth and authority of Christ’s deeds through
their own actions and speech. The loyalty of this community to Christ is a totalizing one
because it shapes their behaviors and their identity. This loyalty challenges other
competing claims on Christians with their accompanying nationalism and calls to
violence.
Paul’s comprehensive use of the “body” metaphor indicates his understanding of
the gospel as both personoriented and communityoriented. The body that lives
Ibid., 397.
40
Neuhaus and Nuechterlein, “In a Time of War,” 14.
41
85
“according to the Spirit” is also a member with others in Christ’s body. There is no room
in Paul’s theology for an overpersonalized faith between “me and Jesus,” nor for a
triumphalist one of “God and country.” In using the language of slavery, he connects with
his audience’s knowledge of a relationship which is centered on the total commitment of
one’s body to a master. It is total in the way that a sacrifice is total. In his usage of flesh,
he emphasizes the fact that salvation is a work of God’s Spirit. Human efforts to save lead
to death and work against the Spirit. The aspect of flesh which can be described as
nationalism is not a good thing in relation to life in the Spirit. It is characterized by pride,
fear of death, and violent survivalism rather than by humility and hope in the
resurrection.
Recalling William Cavanaugh’s image of “souls to the church; bodies to the state,”
the dichotomy seems nonsensical in light of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. One can almost
hear him crying, “By no means!” The relationship between the believer and Christ is like
that between the slave and the master, and it is furthermore bound up in relationships
with other believers across all boundaries. The body of Christ—a polity, a community
united by more than opinion and idea—is made up of real physical bodies which do the
will of God as discerned by a mind renewed by God’s Spirit. Christians find their identity
in this body, and this identity subordinates all other claims on the allegiances of the
individuals and the group. It offers true freedom through enslavement and sacrifice to
86
Christ. Paul’s metaphors are certainly complex and interwoven with each other, but their
genius is only meaningful when they gain a grip on the imagination of the church,
transform its witness, and allow it to challenge the violence of nationalism and patriotism.
Conclusion:
The True Gospel
The Christian church is God’s agent in the world chosen to embody and proclaim
the good news of the Kingdom. This is not a radical claim. Ever since John and Jesus first
came with the message to “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt. 3:2;
4:17), those who are “in Christ” have seen themselves as the carriers of this apocalyptic
message. Christians don’t expect people who haven’t believed this message to undertake
evangelization as their task. Christians expect that they have the primary function of
sharing this revelation with the world and rely on the scriptures for the content and form
of that revelation.
As I have argued in preceding pages, the civil religion of America is a distortion
of the faith of Jesus Christ. While using some of the same language and idioms,
America’s message comes not from those who are primarily “in Christ” but those who
are “in America.” Of course, we are in America geographically, but if we accept that
Jesus is the true embodiment of God’s politics, then we are “in Christ” politically. That is
the good news. But the other account of “good news”—which has as its “ends” the
87
88
abstract ideals of freedom, democracy, and justice—is just that—another account, another
“gospel.” The apostle Paul is quite adamant in warning the Galatians about other gospels:
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the
grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another
gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel
of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a
gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! As we
have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to
what you received, let that one be accursed! (Gal. 1:69)
This is strong language, but it shows that for Paul, the integrity of the gospel is something
that warrants such language. Paul is certain of one thing—that the gospel he preaches was
revealed to him by Jesus Christ and no other. It didn’t base itself on Roman ideals of
justice or Greek ideals of democracy or philosophy. For him, the political ethic of Jesus is
enough.
It seems that a great deal of the confusion between America’s gospel and the
gospel of Jesus Christ has to do with language. It has already been mentioned that words
such as “freedom,” “justice,” and “sacrifice” are important concepts in both but that their
usage in the language of American civil religion is outside of the context of the biblical
story. The context of being “in America” gives them a different meaning. In the case of
Christian freedom, justice, and sacrifice, we discover their meaning from the story of
God’s act of saving humanity through the gospel embodied in Jesus Christ and lived out
in his church. Rather than understanding them through the lenses of the American
89
Revolution, “inalienable rights,” or the “ultimate sacrifice” of American soldiers, the
story we know by being “in Christ” reveals their meaning for the kingdom of God. As
John Howard Yoder has stated,
The church precedes the world epistemologically. We know more fully from
Jesus Christ and in the context of the confessed faith than we know in other ways.
The meaning and validity and limits of concepts like “nature” or of “science” are
best seen not when looked at alone but in the light of the confession of the
lordship of Christ. The church precedes the world as well axiologically, in that
the lordship of Christ is the center which must guide critical value choices, so
that we may be called to subordinate or even to reject those values which
contradict Jesus.1
Only when we grasp this priority of the church, can we begin to truly question the
necessarily violent American renditions of freedom, justice, and sacrifice and, most
importantly, to participate in and offer the church as a true alternative. Furthermore, the
perception that the American account of freedom, etc. is interchangeable with the biblical
account renders the biblical account unintelligible. The New Testament writers clearly
saw a way for the enslaved and oppressed to participate in God’s freedom and justice
without necessarily being literally freed from enslavement or oppression. That way
required trust in God to fulfill the promises and the ability to practice nonviolent, self
sacrificial love. This way is contrary to the CIA’s misinterpretation of John 8:32; Jesus is
the truth which sets us free, not wiretaps, spying, or the PATRIOT Act.
1
John Howard Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics,” 135147.
90
Stanley Hauerwas makes the bold assertion that “there is no salvation outside the
church.” In his terms, “salvation is a political alternative that the world cannot know apart
from the existence of a concrete people called the church. Put more dramatically, you
cannot even know you need saving without the church’s being a political alternative.”2
Salvation—which indeed entails the securing of freedom through sacrifice—is political
because it is enacted through a body of people, that is, the church.
Hauerwas recounts how the preConstantinian Christians
saw themselves confronted by hostile powers that were personified in those who
persecuted the church. Salvation, Christians assumed, was about rescue from, as
well as the defeat of, those powers. Indeed these ... Christians knew those powers
were already defeated, which made possible their confident and joyful challenge
to the pretentious power of Rome.3
In their trust in God’s salvation, they could submit to martyrdom at the hands of the
powers with the confidence that their deaths were not the end—either of their individual
existence or of the church’s. They did not allow Rome to give meaning to their deaths.
Rather, meaning came from the church’s claim “to be the triumphant political community
that knows the truth of our existence better than Rome. The church—exactly because it
2
Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom: How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a
Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), 35.
3
Ibid., 36. Hauerwas relies on Denny Weaver, “Atonement for the Nonconstantinian Church,” Modern
Theology 6 (July 1990): 307323, for this account of the church’s shift in relation to Rome.
91
does not seek to rule through violence, though it necessarily manifests God’s rule—
triumphs by remembering the victory of the lamb through the witness of the martyrs.”4
But, Hauerwas cautions, Rome did triumph in the fourth century when it offered
the church the opportunity to rule through violence. At the same time, he doesn’t want us
to be too hard on the church of the Constantinian era since the power they acquired was
one which to them looked like the rule of God—a rule which “subordinates all other
narratives and their corresponding polities.”5 We might say that the church knew that it
was to dominate the world in the name of God, but they forgot how to dominate—that is,
in the way of the crucified and resurrected Lord. This recalls the thrust of John Howard
Yoder’s lecture “To Serve Our God and to Rule the World.”6 Taking the title from the
hymn in Revelation 5:910 which celebrates the worthiness of the slain Lamb to take the
scroll and open its seals, Yoder wants Christians to “see history doxologically” or through
this hymn, or in other words, to see that their way of ruling is made evident in the
triumph of the slain Lamb. This
4
Ibid., 38.
5
Ibid.
6
John Howard Yoder, “To Serve Our God and to Rule the World,” The Annual of the Society of
Christian Ethics (1988): 314.
92
meant for John’s addressees that their primordial role within the geopolitics of
the Pax Romana was neither to usurp the throne of Nero or Vespasian, Domitian
or Trajan, nor to pastor Caesar prophetically, but to persevere in celebrating the
Lamb’s lordship and in building the community shaped by that celebration. They
were participating in God’s rule over the cosmos, whatever else they were or
were not allowed by the civil powers to do.7
Yoder wants us to see that this vision was not a future event contingent on something yet
to be revealed or put in place by force. It was meant “to be taken as a statement about
their own time,” and it was from this posture that John’s addressees would have
understood it because “For them, to say ‘Jesus Christ is kyrios’ was a statement neither
about their subjective psychic disposition (as pietism would say) nor about their sectarian
belief system (as scholasticism would assume) but about the cosmos, the way the world
really is.”8 Similarly, Hauerwas says that “When that witness is suppressed, salvation
cannot help becoming anemic accounts of individual salvation, of ‘beliefs about this or
that,’ and the church condemned to be but another community of togetherness,” and the
violent politics of the world becomes the tool to bring about salvation.9
It must be said that if Christians reject the power struggles of contemporary
partisan politics, that does not indicate a sectarian withdrawal from “public affairs.” If
salvation was really an “individual thing,” that might be true, but the designations of
7
Ibid., 5.
8
Ibid., 6.
9
Hauerwas, After Christendom, 39.
93
Jesus’ followers as the “city on a hill” and the “salt of the earth” prevent withdrawal. As
ministers of the gospel, Christians are missionaries who love their neighbors even when
they are enemies. That love is a reflection of God’s love which entered the world and
overcame it nonviolently in Jesus Christ. The mission and relief work done in Christ’s
name is evidence that Christianity is not disengaged in the world. Part of the tragedy
though is that America is seen less as a mission field and more as a keeper and protector
of sacred values.
A commitment to see the world through John’s vision enables the church to be
free “from the selfcontradictory but still widely practiced worldliness of those who,
when the trends go against their tastes, decry them, yet when the trends go ‘the right
way,’ claim them as validation.”10 The perceived inevitability of communism/socialism as
reversal and capitalism as advance does not force the hands of Christians concerned about
seeing God’s salvation in the world. As Yoder puts it, “The agent of moral discernment in
the doxological community is not a theologian, a bishop, or a pollster, but the Holy Spirit,
discerned as the unity of the entire body.”11 We should add “a politician, a TV evangelist,
or a newscaster.”
10
Yoder, “To Serve Our God and to Rule the World,” 12.
11
Ibid.
94
In the process of “moral discernment,” the people led by God’s Spirit will reject
attempts to substitute the American gospel for the gospel of Jesus Christ. Words like
“freedom” and “sacrifice” will be understood through the witness of the Scriptures rather
than through capitalist think tanks and political speeches. The church needs theologians
who have found ways to contextualize the gospel in American culture without engaging in
syncretism with it. Richard John Neuhaus’ amalgamation of Christianity with democracy
and capitalism seems to require the violence that comes with the latter ideologies, so I
suggest that another approach be taken. A church that witnesses to the truth of Jesus
Christ, cares for the poor, and loves its enemies might be a good place to start. It should
be impossible to do those things in a private sphere, and so a new kind of quasiChristian,
democratic presence in “the public square” would not be necessary.
Michael Northcott rightly refers to the American gospel as a “subversion of true
Christianity.”12 The characterization of this subversion as a gospel which competes with
the Christian gospel is important in distinguishing the critique given here from other
more politicallybased critiques. These other critiques attack political conservatism or
religious fundamentalism for their readiness to support and engage in war but still hold
out hope that America can preserve its “way of life” and continue on its course without
resorting to war. They still desire the American dream, but they assume that the
12
Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm, 112.
95
environment for that dream can be maintained nonviolently. America has never been non
expansionist, and its expansionism has frequently involved injustice and war.
“Tweaking” the American project, when seen as the ultimate solution, is not the
way Christians “rule” the world. To discuss competing gospels then is to pit the violent
politics of the world (and America, the Right, the Left, etc.) against the peaceable politics
of Jesus. The CIA has not protected the American “free society” without resorting to
hideous violence and deceit. That type of power stands in conflict with the kingdom of
Jesus Christ, the ultimate rule of which, as William Cavanaugh puts it, every other rule is
but a false copy.13
13
Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 46.
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