‘Peace Discernment’ study points toward pacifism

Tags

Alan F.H. Wisdom, Alan Wisdom, Non-Violence, pacifism, PCUSA, peace discernment, Presbyterian Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), Second Helvetic Confession, war

By Alan Wisdom (@AFHWisdom)

A study process under way in the Presbyterian Church (USA) asks church members to “[s]eek clarity as to God’s call to the church to embrace nonviolence as its fundamental response to the challenges of violence, terror, and war.” The process, initiated by the 2010 PCUSA General Assembly, is expected to yield policy changes proposed by the 2014 assembly and approved by the 2016 assembly. Study materials released so far suggest that the intended result is to move the denomination in the direction of pacifism.

Historically, Presbyterians have not been pacifists. The Westminster Confession of Faith, the doctrinal standard until 1967, states that “[i]t is lawful for Christians to accept and execute the office of a magistrate,” and in that office “they may lawfully, now under the New Testament, wage war upon just and necessary occasions” (6.128).

The Second Helvetic Confession, incorporated into the PCUSA Book of Confessions since 1967,  advises that “if it is necessary to preserve the safety of the people by war, let him [the magistrate] wage war in the name of God; provided he has first sought peace by all means possible, and  cannot save his people in any other way except by war” (5.256). The confession explicitly condemns the pacifist “Anabaptists, who, when they deny that a Christian may hold the office of a magistrate, deny also that a man may be justly put to death by the magistrate, or that the magistrate may wage war” (5.257). Both Westminster and the Second Helvetic base this teaching on Biblical passages such as the Apostle Paul’s affirmation that “the authority does not bear the sword in vain” because it is “the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13:4).

Presbyterians were notable for their willingness to fight in the American Revolution and subsequent U.S. wars. A November 2012 survey conducted by the PCUSA Research Office shows 90 percent of today’s Presbyterians believe war is justified “to protect our country after attack by another country.” Large majorities also support taking up arms to “protect one of our allies,” to “live up to treaties we’ve ratified,” or to “punish known backers of terrorism.” Nevertheless, the denominational structures are now weighing whether to join the Quakers, Mennonites and others who refuse to fight under any circumstances.

Leading questions

The Presbyterian Peacemaking Program has published a “Facilitator’s Guide” for congregations undertaking the new “Peace Discernment Process.” The guide asserts, “[I]f discernment is to be genuine, it cannot have predetermined outcomes; it must be truly open-ended.” Yet that same guide poses leading questions that point study participants toward particular outcomes. For example:

• “Should the PCUSA continue to rely on the ‘just war’ tradition as its basis for restraining war, or have the conditions of modern warfare and the politics and economics of war rendered our historic stance obsolete? Are there new emphases and different Biblical alternatives to consider?” The implications are: that the main purpose of the just war tradition is to “restrain war” (rather than to seek both peace and justice), that modern conditions have rendered it “obsolete,” and that the Bible puts forward a different approach.

• “In what ways does the church today practice (or fail to practice) Jesus’ message of nonviolence?” The implication is that Jesus preached a “message of nonviolence.”

• “How do we respond to the example of Jesus and the nonviolent church of the first three centuries after 17 centuries of trying to restrain violence through just war categories?” The implications are that Jesus and the early Christians were all pacifists, and that acceptance of “just war categories” came only after 300 A.D.

• “Do you, in your own life, see signs of a ‘military-industrial-congressional’ complex supporting our tendency to use force or threat of force?” The implication is that the United States uses force as a result of pressure from a venal “military-industrial-congressional complex”—not because it faces genuine security threats.

• “Is the PCUSA now being called to become a ‘peace church,’ not simply opposing particular wars but affirming nonviolence as a basic orientation toward conflict in our daily lives, in our communities, and in our world?” The implication is that the PCUSA is indeed being called to ascend the putatively higher moral ground of pacifism.

• “How can the PCUSA hasten the day when war and violence are no longer considered acceptable or inevitable means for resolving conflicts?” The implication is that the day to beat all swords into plowshares is fast upon us, and the church has the means to “hasten that day.”

Slanted reflections and prayers

The “Facilitator’s Guide” offers 16 “peace reflections” and nine prayers to direct participants’ thoughts. The authors of these selections — Union Seminary (New York) theologians James Cone and Walter Wink, Yale chaplain and Riverside Church pastor William Sloane Coffin, union leader Cesar Chavez, radical feminist author Mary E. Hunt, “urban monastic” Shane Claiborne — are almost uniformly heroes of the pacifist left. Hunt, for instance, is cited as saying that peace “means thinking the unthinkable, that we might just call a halt, yesterday, to war.”

To balance all the pacifists, there is one “peace reflection” from a presumed supporter of just wars, General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. But Eisenhower is not quoted explaining why it was necessary to resist Hitler in World War II or Stalin during the Cold War. Instead this is the selection drawn from the supreme allied commander: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” One is left with the (false) impression that the general regretted D-Day.

The guide would have study participants recite a “Litany for Peace” that asks God to deliver them from “national vanity that poses as patriotism,” “trusting in the weapons of war and mistrusting the councils of peace,” and “groundless suspicions and fear that stand in the way of reconciliation.” There are no prayers of thanksgiving or intercession for soldiers, sailors and airmen who risk their lives to defend their country.

The recommended “Resources for Further Study” tilt in the same direction. Several dozen champion nonviolence in theory or practice; only one comes from a scholar (James Turner Johnson of Rutgers University) who forthrightly maintains that today’s America can fight and has fought just wars.

Some recalcitrant Presbyterians might still be tempted to answer “no” to the question about whether the PCUSA is “now being called to become a ‘peace church.’” But they would find little information to undergird their position. The just war passages from the Westminster and Second Helvetic Confessions, for example, are not mentioned anywhere in the study materials.

‘Nonviolence’ as ‘central theme of Jesus’ ministry’

The main resource provided to help study participants answer the questions is a “Peace Discernment Interim Report” received by the 2012 General Assembly. “Matters of social and economic justice hold a central place in the Bible,” the report asserts (p. 19). It portrays the abstract, negative concept of “nonviolence” — a 20^th century term that Jesus never used — as “a central theme of Jesus’ public ministry” (19). Jesus lived “a prophetic and nonviolent life that threatened both the Roman and temple authorities,” according to the report (10). Jesus’ claims to be the Son of God with power to forgive sins and grant eternal life go unmentioned.

The “Peace Discernment” report reduces Christ to an exponent of a “third way strategy that—rather than fight evil or flee it—resists evil through nonviolent means, an approach that outflanks and reverses aggression, sometimes by choosing to suffer” (16). It downplays the “violent imagery” in Jesus’ parables and other New Testament passages that show God’s anger and determination to destroy sin. The report excuses Jesus’ attack on the moneychangers in the temple, remarking that “he stopped short of violence against persons” (10). Old Testament instances in which God commanded Israel to wage war are products of a superficial and primitive mentality, it suggests. The report rejects “the myth of redemptive violence” (23). It notably refrains from characterizing Jesus’ death as an atonement for sin.

“The first Christians lived according to a nonviolent code,” the interim report claims. “Indeed, there is no affirmation of killing or war anywhere in the writings of the early church” (11). The document challenges “Christians today who interpret the apostle Paul as giving divine sanction to violence and war” (12) in Romans 13. In the report’s version of history, it was only after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine that “Christians began to take up arms on behalf of the Roman Empire, sometimes with inducements of money, property and power” (12).

This simplistic portrait of early Christians as Gandhian pacifists ignores the work of scholars such as Peter Leithart. In his book Defending Constantine (InterVarsity Press, 2010), Leithart explores the complexity of early Christian attitudes toward war. Long before Constantine, going back to the centurion Cornelius in Acts 10, there were Christians who served in the Roman army and were accepted in the Church. Leithart concludes, “The church was never united in an absolute opposition to Christian participation in war; the opposition that existed was in some measure circumstantial, based on the fact that the Roman army demanded sharing in religious liturgies that Christians refused; and once [after Constantine] military service could be pursued without participating in idolatry, many Christians found military service a legitimate life for a Christian disciple” [emphasis in original].

A key to early Christian attitudes was the distinction between authorized and unauthorized uses of force. Individual Christians were to renounce the right of self-defense, in obedience to Jesus’ instructions in the Sermon on the Mount. Rulers, by contrast, were ordained by God to wield the sword to protect their subjects. But the PCUSA’s “Peace Discernment” study takes no notice of any such distinctions between individual and ruler, Church and State. It lumps all “violence” together. This conflation of categories becomes evident when the interim report asks rhetorically: “As a church and as a society, should we learn to move from violence to nonviolence, from war-making to peacemaking, from a permanent war economy to a sustainable peace economy, from being citizens of an empire to members of God’s peaceable kingdom?” (23) It does not contemplate the possibility that U.S. Presbyterians might simultaneously be devoted members of God’s kingdom and good citizens of the nation in which God placed them.

America as ‘violent and unjust,’ driven by fear of imagined enemies

The report casts doubt upon whether there might be legitimate reasons for war. It refers to “those we call our enemies” (2) — as if the hostility were merely a figment of our imagination. (When Jesus commanded us to “love your enemies,” by contrast, he was assuming that we would have real enemies who mean us ill — as he had real enemies who plotted his death.) The report puts “war on terror” in quotes (15), as if to question the threat from terrorist movements. It speaks of “the fear that drives our [U.S.] military policy.”

The interim report portrays U.S. defense efforts as a base conspiracy of the “congressional-military-industrial complex” (14) bent on preserving profits and power. America’s wealth comes out of the barrel of a gun, in this dark vision: “We maintain our privileged economic position in the world through U.S. military might, as well as through military aid and weapons sales to governments around the world…. Militarization makes corporate-led globalization possible.” (18) The report describes the U.S. as “a national security state” in “an almost permanent state of war” (15). “Without credible threats to the United States itself,” it asks insinuatingly, “have we come to value military power for its own sake?” (14)

This jaundiced view of U.S. military policy fits into a larger leftist critique of America. The authors of the interim report insist, “We thus believe there is an urgent need today for U.S. Presbyterians to question the extent to which violence and injustice pervade our society and dominate our relations with one another and with other nations” (4). They offer a half-dozen anecdotal bits of evidence to prove that “[v]iolence pervades American culture” (17).

There is also the “structural violence” that includes “the patterns of inequality and exclusion called the ‘isms’ of racism, sexism, classism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism, as well as homophobia” (18). The report complains that a “myopic focus” on individual prejudice “stymies people’s understanding of the more insidious institutional and cultural forms of the isms that crush the human spirit and deny people access to adequate food, water, shelter, education, health care and self-determination” (18). It warns: “We are also doing violence to the earth and its creatures, depleting precious natural resources, and causing a massive extinction of species.” (19)

The report fails to note any evidence to that might contradict its grim image. There is no acknowledgment that U.S. violent crime rates have plummeted over the last 20 years, that race relations and environmental conditions have improved markedly over the past half-century, that the U.S. military is shrinking as a proportion of the federal budget and the nation’s economy, or that women and gays have made tremendous gains.

Military force ‘impotent,’ nonviolence ‘successful’ against worst dictatorships

The “Peace Discernment” report affirms “an increasing sense of the impotence of military might” (3). “At the same time,” it boasts, “there is growing recognition that nonviolent direct action can be a powerful, alternative means of responding to conflict, as it has proven successful in struggles for justice, human rights, and self-determination around the world — even overthrowing some of the most brutal dictatorships the world has seen” (3). The report cites several examples to show that “[n]onviolent  people power movements have shown themselves capable of overthrowing dictators, thwarting coups d’etat, defending against invasions and occupations, challenging unjust systems, promoting human rights, and resisting genocide” (22). In this telling, “nonviolent action” is all upside — it’s “Jesus’ third way” (22), it’s the moral high ground, and it’s supposedly the most successful approach — and there is no downside.

The report pays no attention to counter-examples: that nonviolence was not successful in Tienanmen Square in 1989, that it was not successful in Iran in 2009, that it has not been successful against dictatorships such as the Castros in Cuba and the generals in Burma. It was military force that defeated the Axis powers in World War II, that ended genocide in Rwanda and the Balkans, that toppled tyrants in places like Iraq and Libya. In general, nonviolence does not work against “the most brutal dictatorships the world has seen.” It works better against more moderate regimes that have a conscience that restrains them from shedding too much innocent blood.

The interim report presents the current “peace discernment process” as a follow-up to earlier General Assembly statements on war-peace issues. “Peacemaking: The Believer’s Calling” and other statements from the 1980s were sharply critical of the U.S. stance in the Cold War. Resolutions in the last decade condemned the Iraq war as “unwise, illegal, and immoral” and urged withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Summarizing this record of opposition to almost every U.S. military involvement since Vietnam, the report states, “The current position of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), then, tilts strongly toward peace” (9). The new study process appears designed to tilt that position all the way over into pacifism. It remains to be seen whether Presbyterians are willing to take that last step away from the mainstream Christian “just war” tradition that has been their historic heritage.

Originally published at Layman.org.

Peter Storey to Florida Methodists: “No Americanism for You!”

Tags

Activism, anti-Americanism, Barton Gingerich, Caesar, Duke Divinity School, Florida Annual Conference, God, liberal, liberalism, Methodist Church of South Africa, Methodist Federation for Social Action, MFSA, peace, Peter Storey, social action, social gospel, South Africa, theology, UMC, United Methodist, United Methodist Church, war

Peter Storey with Nelson Mandela (Photo Credit: Duke Divinity School)

by Barton Gingerich (@bjgingerich)

During last week’s Florida United Methodist Annual Conference, the unofficial Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA) featured Peter Storey as speaker for its simultaneous events. Storey is the former president of the autonomous Methodist Church of Southern Africa, past president of the South African Council of Churches, and served as the Methodist Bishop of the Johannesburg/Soweto area for 13 years. He garnered fame for courageously fighting against apartheid, authored several books, and taught courses at United Methodism’s Duke Divinity School, where he is professor emeritus. A champion for liberal nonviolence and Social Gospel activism, Storey found a receptive audience with the MFSA and its fellow liberal church activists.

During the MFSA banquet, Professor Storey lectured on “God and Caesar.” “Clearly social action and United Methodism are inseparable,” he concluded, “Truly you can’t talk about being a Methodist without being engaged in social action.”

Storey seemed especially worried about America, claiming that he had great sensitivity to social matters since he endured under “an oppressive totalitarian regime in my own country.” “Those atrocities that occurred on 9/11 did something to the nerve of the church in this country,” he surmised. He mused, “The church did its pastoral duty to a shocked nation. The church held the nation’s hand, but the politicians made up the nation’s mind.” Nevertheless, he excoriated  “a particularly shallow President of the United States” for framing the “theological narrative… It was simple (as you could well suspect): they’re evil and we’re good.” “Sometime after that, questions became treasonous. It somehow became unpatriotic to question this narrative in any way,” Story explained.

The retired bishop thought much dysfunction in the American United Methodist Church springs from a reluctance to choose the right side in national partisan struggles. The UMC “has been trying to straddle a widening political gulf and trying to have a foot on both sides of that gap, and it’s becoming extremely uncomfortable to hold that position.” The members and clergy of the ailing denomination have failed to condemn “capitalism with no limitations on it whatsoever,” “a philosophy of serial war,” and an “attitude of ecological contempt, which is dangerous to planet earth.” The speaker advised, “There is a need to re-evangelize Methodism to its prophetic witness.”

Storey concluded his crusade against any hint of otherworldliness. “I want to say the church is only the church when it’s engaging the world. All the rest is just preparation,” he revealed, to the potential chagrin of any contemplatives. “What would happen if our people decided to wrestle with the massive inequities that divide our world into ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots?” he asked, “What would happen if the church finally confessed that its longest standing disobedience to Jesus is its flirtation with war and the just war theory?” He also thought the issue of sanctuary flags needs “to be wrestled with.” “It is Caesar’s banner; it doesn’t belong in God’s house,” the activist leader urged. “Caesar will always push the boundaries of power. If they can, they will….We need to stop wrapping the church in red, white, and blue.” He also shared, “People are very concerned about removing God from the Pledge of Allegiance. I’m more concerned about whether the Pledge of Allegiance has removed God from many of our hearts.”

Finally, at the end of his evening presentation, Professor Storey hinted support for changes on United Methodist sexuality teaching, which currently disapproves of homosexual and other non-marital sex. Storey, on the other hand, complained, “All means all. It doesn’t mean some…It doesn’t mean if you look like me or love like me.” No doubt the radicals in the MFSA-friendly audience took this to mean agreement with their own very expansive attitude regarding sexual morality.  South African Methodism, especially the strand touted by its white leaders, is often more liberal than Christianity, including Methodism, in the rest of Africa.

Press Release: Religious Left Charges U.S. Drone Policy on Autopilot

Tags

Brethren, Catholic, Drones, Institute on Religion and Democracy, Just War Theory, Mark Tooley, Nuns on a Bus, Nuns on the Bus, pacifism, Quakers, Religious Left, UCC, United Methodist, war, war & peace

(photo credit: washingtonpost.com)

May 31, 2013
Contact: Jeff Walton 202-682-4131

“The pacifist Religious Left is again denouncing drone strikes against terrorists without offering plausible alternatives.”
-IRD President Mark Tooley

Washington, DC—A letter to President Obama from United Methodist, United Church of Christ, Quaker, Brethren, and Christian Reformed officials, plus the head of “Nuns on the Bus,” is expressing “great concern” about drone “targeted killings” of “alleged” al Qaeda militants.

The groups want to repeal the post 9-11 “Authorization for the Use of Military Force” and instead pursue “police actions” that “extend protections consistent with principles of human and civil rights pertaining to the pursuit and apprehension of a criminal suspect, including fair trial in a court of law.”

A full version of the letter can be viewed by clicking here.

IRD President Mark Tooley commented:

“The pacifist Religious Left is again denouncing drone strikes against terrorists without offering plausible alternatives.

“These activists bemoan ‘remote, technical warfare,’ without admitting they, as literal or functional pacifists, oppose all warfare and force. Their appeal illustrates how some church officials, ignoring their own religious teachings about fallen humanity, want desperately to pretend that the world is intrinsically benign and just.

“These religious activists are interested in the ‘root causes of conflicts,’ which they surmise can be addressed by ‘restorative justice practices, and effective economic development programs.’ Their suggestion has merit if Islamist terrorists have legitimate grievances that can be redressed by rational recompense. But what if their mollification entails accommodation to Islamist rule and practice, including the suppression of civil liberties, which the activists profess to champion, and the suppression of non Islamists?

“The liberal Protestants’ letter seems to expect a level of perfection and power that not even the U.S. at its very best can possibly attain.

“Technology and modern scruples have made war and law enforcement more precise than ever before. But churches attuned to the limits of human capacity must understand that states, when defending the innocent from the murderous, must act boldly, stealthily, dangerously, and without guarantee of absolute success. Winston Churchill reputedly said: ‘The maxim ‘Nothing but perfection’ may be spelled ‘Paralysis.’’ High minded theorists may demand moral precision, but no government this side of heaven can guarantee it.”

www.TheIRD.org

###

Shaking Hands with the Devil: The Intersection of Terrorism and Theology

Tags

book, Book review, Foreign Policy, Mark Tooley, neo-anabaptist, pacifism, realism, Review, Shaking Hands with the Devil, Stanley Hauerwas, theologian, theology, war, William Abraham

IRD President Mark Tooley with author and theologian William Abraham

by Mark Tooley (@markdtooley)

Shaking Hands with the Devil: The Intersection of Terrorism and Theology
By William Abraham
(Highland Loch Press, 200 pages, $34.95)

One of United Methodism’s most distinguished theologians has written a powerful new book on terrorism that challenges the unthinking pacifism dominant among many Protestant and evangelical elites.

“If terrorists come knocking down my door, I want to have soldiers and a helicopter nearby,” declares William Abraham of Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in his just published Shaking Hands with the Devil: The Intersection of Terrorism and Theology.

Abraham speaks from some personal experience. He is from Northern Ireland and grew up there during the Irish Republican Army’s war of terror. As a robustly orthodox theologian in a liberal mainline Protestant milieu, Abraham is especially unusual for challenging the reflexively anti-military stance of many peers. Many of his colleagues angrily opposed the George W. Bush Library coming to SMU, largely because of the War on Terror. In his book, Abraham specifically challenges the highly influential neo-Anabaptist ideology of Stanley Hauerwas and others, who insist that Christian faithfulness demands opposition to all violence.

Growing up in Ulster, terrorism was the “bedrock order of the day,” Abraham recounts. He contended with IRA bombs and Protestant paramilitary thugs amid years of murders, funerals, robberies, and intimidations. After becoming an American he thought he had left terrorism behind until 9-11. He says Al Qaeda had noted British impatience with terror in Ireland as evidence of the West’s lack of resolve against persistent foes.

“Terrorism is intrinsically evil,” Abraham declares, and all who excuse it are “morally corrupt.” He regrets this high octane talk discomfits many intellectuals who don’t like moral absolutes. Sadly, terrorism is often aligned with religion. In his youth Abraham converted from atheism to Methodism, which he observes arrived late in Christian history so never was tied to power or violence. Methodists were always “inescapably nice people,” and were never numerous enough in Ireland to threaten anyone.

As a boy Abraham imbibed the Northern Irish melding of Protestantism and British democratic order. This perspective rejected terrorism but assumed the state’s vocation for rightful force. Services and parades commemorating the world wars were frequent. Quakers in Ireland existed but were respected oddities. In his Methodist youth group Abraham once tried to defend pacifism but failed. He recalls that neither IRA nor Protestant para militarists typically linked faith to their terror, which was purely political. The specifically religious motives of al Qaeda on 9-11 were very different. These killers relied not on nationalism but a passionate theology.

Politicians who hail Islam as a religion of peace do so understandably in an appeal for calm, Abraham grants. But plain talk requires admitting that Islamist terror speaks for a significant historic stream within Islam that embraces specifically religious violence. He compares this strain somewhat to medieval Christian crusaders or the radical Reformation. And he describes it as thankfully a minority strain within Islam. Even the Koranic text urging death to idolaters warns against killing innocents. Abraham extends good wishes to Muslim reformers trying to liberalize their faith, who contrast with Christian liberals in not giving “away the store” and having more modest but important goals. Yet he’s not overly optimistic about their long-term project, citing liberal Christianity’s ultimate failure. Traditional revivalists for both Islam and Christianity seem more robust than liberal revisionists. On a trip to Nepal Abraham found a radical Islamic polemic with ties to Osama bin Laden available in English and was later surprised it was taught at a Dallas-area mosque. Traditionally the West has had a “filtering system to keep out toxic material.” He wonders if that system will function against radical Islam, or even the theocratic claims of mainstream Islam. Yet he also pleads: “We should not get our underwear in a twist simply because a new religion has arrived in the neighborhood.” And he warns against “intellectual paranoia.”

Abraham describes “A Common Word Between Us and You,” a 2007 public appeal from Muslim clerics to Western church leaders that excited approval from many U.S. liberals, as essentially a call for Christians to convert. He derides it as a “sophisticated exercise in irrelevance” that avoids the deep issues, which include religious freedom, the right to convert, pluralism, sharia, boundaries between state and religion, and Israel’s existence.

The most fascinating part of Abraham’s book is his chapter on just war. He recounts a radical Irish nationalist who was shot in her home by Protestant terrorists in 1983, and whose life was saved by the British military, for which she was utterly ungrateful. He observes: “The first line of defense of anyone threatened by terrorists is the state, even for those who are resolutely opposed to the existence of the state.”

Abraham admits that pacifism superficially offers moral arguments against terrorism, but its medicine is worse than the disease by disallowing defense of the innocent. He opines: “It requires a very special kind of intellectual malfunction and self-deception to sustain pacifism over time.” And he specifically challenges the particularly fashionable form of “pragmatic pacifism” espoused now by Glen Stassen of Fuller Seminary as “just peacemaking,” which he decries for failing to address terrorism seriously. Its pseudo-scientific claims he calls “bogus and misleading.” Although maybe offering occasionally useful “partisan” policy proposals, just peacemaking ultimately aims to shut down the case for force, can offer “false hope,” and ultimately may only fuel further terrorism.

More adamant religious pacifists like Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University who root their argument not in pragmatics but in divine revelation assert their willingness to accept suffering and death, just as Jesus Christ did. Hauerwas goes even further, Abraham writes, insisting the “truth about war and politics can only be known inside his world of divine revelation.” He claims his “exclusively privileged access” comes through the church but fails fully to identify this true church. Even more egregiously, Abraham complains, Hauerwas conflates terrorism with war, incapable of “distinguishing in this instance truth from propaganda.” His special claim to revelation shows “intellectual corruption,” and illustrates that truth sometimes better arrives through common grace than through the ostensible prism of any church, whose truth claims always have both “weeds as well as tares.”

Both radical Islamists and Hauerwas-style pacifists claim that “reason can only operate inside their chosen world of revelation,” leaving no recourse to discussion, Abraham notices. And like radical Islamists when they claim to speak for their faith, the Hauerwasians actually offer only a “minority report.” Abraham offers this searing critique:

Christian pacifists have taken isolated elements in the teaching of Jesus, say, in the Beatitudes, that are meant to apply between persons, and extended them to apply between state and state, or between states and their citizens. They fail to see that the anger of God in judgment is the anger of love not hate. They sin the sin of refusing the God-given vocation to exercise the office of arrest and judgment. They cannot see that love in public relations “takes the form of mutual respect, of law, justice, liberty, and even help—especially to the weak.” As a consequence of these mistakes Christian pacifists are bereft of positive illumination when it comes to the right ordering of our political life together. In reality they either opt out of political life altogether, or they fall back upon the platitudes of pragmatic pacifism, or they buy into negative stereotypes of the state and nation that correlate conveniently with their ideological commitments.

According to Abraham, there are few, if any, viable pacifist political policy proposals even on the table. Their options of disbanding the Defense Department or disarming police “represent political lalaland,” revealing pacifists as “freeloaders within the current social and political arrangements.”

Abraham hails the just war tradition for morally justifying the defense of the innocent from terrorists and other aggressors. He questions the “maximalist” view of just war that potentially applies suffocating “moral straightjackets” especially inadequate against an unconventional enemy. The “minimalist” stance relies more on “informed judgment” and more adequately understands just war teaching not as a stringent code but an evolving tradition. “Dealing appropriately” with terrorism requires adopting the minimalist view “without apology.” It must not “cut military and political action loose from morality” but understand the “world is shot through with evil and sin; people deliberately and systematically reject the full resources of grace in their private and public lives; the default position in human life is war not peace.”

The church’s role in public counsel over war and peace is “modest,” Abraham writes. At its best, he suggests, the church “bears witness to a World that stands above our political realities; and that World calls us to a judgment that puts all our temporal interests in their proper place in the life of eternity.”

Shaking Hands with the Devil offers an unusually authentic Christian realism for addressing war and peace from a broadly classical orthodoxy. Irish Methodists are not often renowned for their influence on America Christian thought. But hopefully this particular one at Southern Methodist University will make a plucky splash with his challenge to sloppy thinking about the War on Terror.

This review appeared in the American Spectator and was republished with permission.

2012: A Very Good Year

Tags

Battle Hymn of the Republic, Communist, Episcopal, Franklin Roosevelt, Nazi, peace, prosperity, thanks, war, Winston Churchill

Really? 2012?

“The Spectator” of Great Britain argued so a couple weeks ago.

“It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world,” an editorial insisted. “Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age.”

Politicians argue otherwise, the editorial noted. But most advances for mankind come from “ordinary people,” not politicians. Outside of government, global progress has been “spectacular.” The UN’s Millennium Development Goals for poverty reduction targeting 2015 were met already in 2008. Global inequality is also down, lower than ever in modern times. “Globalisation means the world’s not just getting richer, but fairer too,” said “The Spectator.”

Rich nations are using less fossil fuel thanks to increased efficiency. And new gas and oil discoveries, accompanied by new technologies for retrieval, are unlocking vast new storehouses of energy. People are living longer and healthier globally. In Africa, life expectancy increased 5 years, or 10 percent, over the last 10 years. AIDS and malaria deaths are down dramatically. Deaths from natural disasters are declining as nations grow wealthier and better able to adapt. There have also been fewer war deaths in the last decade than any time in the last century. “The Spectator” noted that in Britain, life expectancy is now hitting 81, up 3 years from a decade ago.

And “The Spectator” concluded: “As we celebrate the arrival of Light into the world, it’s worth remembering that, in spite of all our problems, the forces of peace, progress and prosperity are prevailing.” What a wonderfully counterintuitive and counter cultural assertion! Conservatives and liberals, with many in between, love to complain otherwise. And even Christians, although supposedly hopeful about God’s plans, like to grouse as though they live in the worst times ever.

Of course it is true that our world remains dreadfully fallen and opposed to God’s purposes in horribly countless ways. Much evil stalks the earth, amid disease, conflict, famine, persecution, injustice and countless individual tragedies, all fueled by the accumulated transgressions of over 7 billion of us sinners. Yet God’s grace also abounds, and He has given us an era and a time of impressive temporal improvements surpassing any previous generation ever to have walked the earth. There is also the astonishing growth of the global church. Shouldn’t we give thanks as we bring in this New Year?

Seventy one years ago, the world was wracked by war that would kill ultimately over 50 million, accompanied by an unparalleled genocide against the Jews and others. Much of the world was captive under the police state apparatus of Nazism, Fascism, Japanese militarism, Communism, or affiliated depotisms. There was no guarantee that the Anglo democracies could prevail, and their survival, much less victory, depended on alliance with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, which had practiced its own genocidal mass murders. Lives, even in the free, wealthy countries, were shorter, sicker, and far less comfortable than today. America, the world’s greatest democracy, still practiced racial segregation. Most of the great Protestant denominations in America and the West had already succumbed to theological heterodoxy. More egregiously, many churches in occupied Europe openly defended Nazism and Fascism. More courageous Christians were martyred by the many thousands in Europe and in Asia.

On New Year’s Day 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt and visiting British Prime Minister Winston Churchill attended a special service at historic Christ Church of Alexandria, Virginia, sitting in the pew where George and Martha Washington had often worshipped. The Episcopal priest preached: “The spirit of Christ alone stands in the way of successful Nazi world domination, for it alone can inspire a successful will to resist and provide sufficient power to achieve victory.” And he lamented of America’s late entry into the war: “We have wanted other nations to pay the supreme price for liberty while we gave them dollar credits!” He insisted Americans must become Christ-like and “accept our cross, too.” In atonement for its fear of conflict, America must be “purged and cleansed” of its “evil.” The congregation sang: “God of Our Fathers,” written for America’s centennial in 1876, “Once To Every Man and Nation” by New England abolitionist James Russell Lowell, and Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Churchill wept upon hearing the latter, which became a favorite, and which he instructed be played at his funeral 23 years later, which it was. In his sermon, the priest quoted Howe’s hymn, insisting that America would not withhold “its terrible swift sword” from its enemies.

Stirring, terrifying times. And thank God they are behind us, in a world that is today, with several major, terrible exceptions, largely at peace and increasingly prosperous. Great, renewed horrors may face our world again in the future. And each of us individually has crosses to bear even in good times. But let’s give thanks for where God has placed us now as we enter 2013. Happy New Year!