Camassia

I am not — just to state this upfront — returning to blogging. I’ve been posting occasional comments on other blogs, but I think my sabbatical was the right choice and I’m not done with it yet. But the other day I stopped by Jesus Creed, and discovered that Scot McKnight is blogging his way through Telford’s new book on the Lord’s Prayer. So far, he’s blogged chapters one, two, three and four. As you can see, the first chapter is of special interest to me because yours truly is in it. Reading Scot’s post reminded me that, yes, I’m a character now in a book being read by Christians all round the country, which is really weird but kind of thrilling. (Other, shorter reviews are here and here.)

I haven’t read the whole book. Telford kindly sent me the first chapter so I could see what he wrote about me before publishing it, but thanks to the glacial pace of book publishing, that was more than three years ago. So I don’t remember it in great detail, but I do remember being surprised by a few things in it. I didn’t realize at the time how much my own questions fit into what he was already thinking. He always seemed so sunny and self-assured, that even though he said that Sept. 11 shook his faith (and wrote an article about it, though it seems not to be on his site any more), I didn’t really see it.

The other surprising thing was the conclusion. From Scot’s description you can’t really tell, but a major point of debate between us was the doctrine of eternal damnation. After a long theological discourse, Telford writes:

Does Camassia really think universalism would be more honoring to God and more appropriate to his loving character? Then let her pray for universal salvation. Let her do what Abraham did for wayward Sodom, what Moses did for the idolatrous Hebrews, what the King of Ninevah did for his clueless city, what the Canaanite woman did for unclean Gentiles, what Jesus did for his petty disciples, and what we do every day for those we love and even those we hate. Let her intercede before our heavenly Father and plead in the name of Christ and the power of the Spirit that no one would be lost. Maybe her secular eyes have seen something our religious ones have missed. Let her make her case — not to me, for it is not mine to grant, let alone teach — but to the One with the power to hear and grant such an audacious request. Who knows? Maybe she is right.

The thing is, while Telford said something vaguely like that once or twice, the rest of the time that we talked about the afterlife he spent insisting that there will be separation of the sheep and the goats on the last day, and explaining why this was just and right. I get the feeling that his own view of the subject inclines toward Wittgenstein’s: “If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with.” And this went on after he wrote the chapter. So suffice to say, I got a pretty mixed message about this.

Telford is a disciple of Newbigin, so he’s not inclined to call something a heresy unless it’s explicitly refuted in the creeds. And he’d rather have me be a universalist Christian than a non-Christian. So I took heart from his advice and pressed on, considering universalism, like pacifism or anti-Constantinianism or some such, to be a respectable minority position in Christian tradition.

I’m not a disciple of Newbigin, however, and one reason is that certain positions are ultimately irreconcilable. I mean, if you think about it, somebody’s going to be in for a big disappointment on Judgment Day. A universalist might end up going, “Gee, God really is as monstrous as people have been saying.” A Wittgensteinian might end up going, “Wow, I guess my life really didn’t have any meaning.” There’s something deeper going on here than a difference of hermeneutical opinion. The problems we have with God mirror the problems we have with each other.

C.S. Lewis believed that everyone has a sort of inborn moral compass, which he called Moral Law, and that Christianity is in the most perfect accord with Moral Law. If only it were that simple. We all use our own moral compass in choosing our religion, all right, especially when it comes to filling a plate from the chaotic buffet that is American Protestantism. But it’s clear enough that people’s compasses point them in wildly different directions sometimes, and so they end up with wildly different images of God. And so, arguments about God’s character can’t help but be about our own characters.

To tell the truth, one reason I haven’t gone back to blogging is that I’ve been having a hard time of it. My boyfriend and I broke up, my small group broke up, my grandfather died and my grandmother will probably follow soon, I’m back in therapy (which I thought, after fifteen years out, would never happen), and, more to the point at hand, my relationship with Telford has deteriorated to practically nothing. The blog just doesn’t seem like the place to share all this suckage.

Reading about the friendship I used to have with Telford really brought me back to … well I wouldn’t say “happier” times, but definitely more exciting times, more expansive and filled with possibilities. Intellectual debate, the kind where you push each other to think harder and better, is a pleasure in itself. But it also reminded me of the fact that the last time we spoke, which was eight or ten months ago, we were arguing about the same damn thing that we were four years earlier. In my last post I said I felt my blog was retreading the same ground over and over, and boy, that problem didn’t end when I stopped blogging. And when you’re stuck in a place like that, intellectual debate just turns into nasty quarrelling.

And under the quarrelling, I think in this case, lies a fear that the argument signals more than an earthly disagreement. Will we end up in the same place at the end of days? Will we want to? What is this deep difference that brings forth such divergent ideas of goodness? It’s unbearable to think that this separation may be permanent; but however much you talk to the Father, he’s not offering reassurances.

Maybe there’s something in the air, but I’m feeling the need to take a break from blogging. I know I’m kind of walking out of the middle of an argument, and I apologize for that. But I a lot of personal things are catching up with me, including the fact that the original reasons I started this blog aren’t really operating any more, the weird schizophrenia of having two different writer personae under two different names, the extent to which all this writing is about ego, the way it helps me put off responsibilities in 3-D life, and the fact that I could never work up the proper enthusiasm for being in The Daily Scribe, which I don’t think is the site fault but just that I’m not in the place for it now. Plus, I’ve been at this for almost four years, my life has changed a great deal, and it seems like it’s time to see what life as a non-blogger is like these days.

My generous hostess says that there’s enough bandwidth to leave the site up here for now. Comments automatically close on posts more than three weeks old. Thanks so much for reading and commenting, everyone, I expect I’ll be back sometime but I don’t know when.

There seems to be a lot of talk about confessions of faith going on lately. Wess writes about his own priorities here, Joe Guada (not a Scribe) prints the credos of Crosswalk America and the World Pantheist Movement, and Daniel Harper discusses Unitarian affirmations. (Whatever you do, don’t call them creeds!)

I have been at the receiving end of both good and bad Christian witness in my life, and I think Holly is correct about what bad witness is and Pernell Goodyear is correct about what good witness is.

Judith Weiss is participating in a project to remember the 9/11 victims one at a time.

Mike Duran recently posted about two hostages who were forced to convert to Islam, and turns it into a broadside against Islam in general:

Even a complicit media cannot disguise the awful truth about Islam. As much as we’d like to embrace the “all-religions-are-equal” mantra, there’s only one religion these days effectively swaying public opinion through shrapnel, suicide bombers and M-16’s.

This is yet another chapter in the long-running debate about whether Islam as a whole is a good religion or a bad one. I’ve seen arguments both pro and con, and don’t really have an opinion about it. But one thing I do have an opinion about is that to Christians, it shouldn’t actually matter.

First of all, the only really relevant question about any religion is whether or not it’s true. If forced conversions actually please God, complaining about them isn’t going to help. I realize that Mike and others are objecting against a certain pluralist theory of religion, but it actually seems to be ceding too much ground to the pluralists to judge religions not by their truth, but by whether you’d want one as your next-door neighbor or not. “Good” believers keep to themselves, abide by the laws and don’t bother anyone; “bad” religions make themselves pains in the butt.

By those standards Christianity may come off better than Islam, but it would certainly come off worse than some other religions, such as Jainism. I say this not only because of the various wrongs that Christians have committed, but also because even nonviolent Christians reserve the right to be pains in the butt on matters of faith (e.g., Martin Luther King, or just your average missionary). Once you start judging religions by some external yardstick like good citizenship, you’ve already bailed on your own truth claims.

Moreover, if Islam at its core is not true, there’s no point in identifying one strain of it as the “true” Islam and more benevolent factions as unrepresentative. If it’s a human creation to begin with, why should one community’s subcreation of it have more validity than others?

Secondly, I don’t see how establishing Islam as a nasty religion would actually change our policy towards it. Churches are supposed to do mission in war or peace, to friends and enemies, not based on whom we’re most afraid of. As for state policy, it violates our own First Amendment for the government to try to deconvert people from their religions. And in fact, governments are never scarier than when they’re trying to annihilate an idea. Recently Christopher Hitchens reviewed a book arguing that the Allies’ bombing of civilians in World War II was morally unjustified. Hitchens basically concedes the arguments, but still isn’t satisfied:

… atheist though I am, I have to invoke something like the biblical. It was important not just that the Hitler system be defeated, but that it be totally and unsentimentally destroyed. The Nazis had claimed to be invincible and invulnerable: Very well, then, they must be visited by utter humiliation. No more nonsense and delusion, as with the German Right after 1918 and its myth of a stab in the back. Here comes a verdict with which you cannot argue.

It’s a nasty business, killing people’s gods. It’s the stuff that Yahweh visited on Egypt to humble their god-king in Exodus. But for human purposes, no reasonable just-war theory allows for what it would take to commit deicide, let alone of a god followed by 600 million people. Even popes have denounced the Crusades by now. (A recent article suggested that Christians might have picked up the idea of holy war from Islam, which would add an almost unbearable degree of irony to the thing.)

I expect the real complaint here is mostly about rhetoric. The critics don’t like seeing Islam called a “religion of peace,” they feel that it’s getting a pass because Muslims are perceived as an oppressed people; they want its sins advertised to the world. But I would point out that from a Christian point of view Muslims are an oppressed people, and were so even at the height of the medieval empires. Like everyone else, they’re oppressed by Satan. And so, is all this denunciation from the editorial pages of far-off climes, all this raising of suspicion of the group as a whole, really helping to liberate them? Is it increasing their trust in Christian authority? Somehow, I don’t think so.

Wess has written a thoughtful three-part series on what to look for when shopping for a church: one, two, and three. Rilina is starting a series on the same subject, since she is looking for a church herself.

I feel like I ought to be able to contribute something here, since I have done a great deal of church hunting in the last few years and have blogged about it extensively. In order, here are reports on: St. Bede’s Episcopal, Lutheran Church of the Master, Church of St. Mark, Venice Baptist Church, Culver-Palms Church of Christ, Bel Air Presbyterian, Pasadena Mennonite Church, Joy of All Who Sorrow Orthodox Mission, The Salvation Army of Santa Monica, Long Beach Friends Church, and All Saints Beverly Hills.

But for all that, I hardly feel like an expert on church shopping. A lot of the time, I felt like I was wandering around not really knowing what I was doing. Certainly, I didn’t take the systematic approach that Wess took. In Wess’ first post some commenters took issue with approaching a new church with such a critical eye, even inspecting what sort of cars were in the parking lot. Actually I do agree that the cars can tell you something about the church, but I also was never quite so left-brained about it all, and am not sure I’d want to be. In fact in one post I said I’d scale back on the detailed blogging of church visits:

I’ve been thinking, actually, that blogging every church I visit so comprehensively may damage the enterprise. If I know I’m going to blog it it’s too easy for me to go into reporter mode while I’m there — making mental notes to myself, thinking how I’m going to describe something, estimating the size of the crowd, and generally doing things I wouldn’t be doing if I weren’t going to write it up. In some ways that makes me pay more attention, but I think overall it keeps me in that reporter’s role: on the edge watching, not actually participating.

The downside with being less analytical and more impressionistic is that a lot of personal things, like my mood and taste in music and whatnot, wound up featuring prominently in my impressions of churches. Looking back at those posts now I cringe at some of the petty things I went off about. Nonetheless, I’ve found in the three churches where I have stayed for some time that my first-day intuitions about them were basically right. What I expected to like I continued to like, and what I thought would probably annoy me continued to annoy me. What changed, if anything, was the relative importance of those things.

So while analysis is good, I still think gut instinct counts for something. I don’t mean necessarily going with the church where you feel most comfortable, because if you feel too comfortable it probably won’t push you enough. But churches definitely have their vibes — there are cheery ones, serious ones, excited ones, indifferent ones. And that can tell you a lot about what’s going on beneath the surface.

I’ve talked with some more people about my reaction to Yoder, and one point where most people seem to disagree with me is the idea that all states are inherently coercive. Or that they are, but coercion isn’t the same as violence. It’s true that the boundaries of “violence” are pretty blurry; on a basic level it can mean any action that causes pain to someone else, which Jesus clearly did not rule out. Limiting it to the physical seems like a meaningless distinction, since there is all sorts of emotional harm that people can inflict on each other.

When I think about it though, the coercion aspect is only part of what’s bothering me. The real issue is one of faith. Living in any state or community requires sacrifices. You sacrifice some of your income to the IRS, you sacrifice your impulses to the law, and sometimes you sacrifice your beliefs about what’s right to the majority vote, or whatever body you see as having legitimate authority. And every sacrifice requires faith. Or at least you hope it does, because the only other reason to make those sacrifices is fear. It doesn’t necessarily mean faith in the supernatural; but it does mean faith in the communal entity, in its laws and norms and authorities. It’s not surprising that the earliest states were essentially theocratic; believing that your ruler was a god, or something near to it, certainly made that faith uncomplicated.

People in social-guardian jobs, like soldier and police officer, make bigger sacrifices than most, and require greater faith than most. Some of them probably just have depressed limbic systems and need to live on the edge of death to feel alive. But the subcultures of those professions seem to build a strong culture of faith and loyalty. Sometimes it takes on a form resembling the old theocratic standard of mystical nationalism: crosses on shields and hung from guns, a messianic sense of your country’s place in the world, and so on. Sometimes it’s a more modest Burkean faith in home, family and community. Sometimes it becomes a faith to the guardian institution itself, as in “the blue religion” of police officers. Such a faith is necessary; the only alternative, really, is that you risk your life because you don’t really care about it.

Most Christians affirm the goodness of the things that the guardians fight for. But what seems out of sync to me is the amount of faith required. The intensity of faith needed for guardian jobs might explain not only why pacifism is a hard sell, but also why the more reasonable constraints of just-war theory often don’t seem to hold in practice. The ambivalent image of the state running from Augustine through Niebuhr — that it’s the best we can do in this sinful, fallen world — is not the stuff that inspires the soldier in the trenches. Recently I talked about the Founding Fathers issue with a man in my church who teaches U.S. history, and he pointed out that while the Fathers were putting together their Enlightenment-inspired tracts about human rights and the consent of the governed, America was full of evangelical and apocalyptic Christians who saw America playing a prophetic role in the Christian drama. It’s a sign of how out of touch Jefferson was that he thought that in the 19th century the whole society would become Unitarian.

What I don’t see Yoder taking into account, in all his high-level theorizing about statecraft, is the extent to which any policy you want to enact depends on the faith of the mass of low-level soldiers and cops. Even if we could somehow have an unarmed police, it would still be a dangerous job — in fact, one would think that in the early stages of disarmament it would be more dangerous than it is now. Lawmakers are depending on the faith that police officers have in the state that they work for, which is necessarily stronger than even the survival instinct. And it really bothers me to think of taking advantage of a faith that we ourselves don’t really share.

I think part of the problem here is that Yoder seems to see violence simply as an indulgence. If you must indulge in violence, he seems to be saying, we can at least try to direct it toward a reasonably good end. But while it’s true that men seem to love war in a primitive way, I think most people who’ve been through it would agree that war is hell, which is why fighting them requires faith. For the families and friends of the fighters, it’s at least as much of a sacrifice.

However, I think the abuse-of-faith issue is a problem even when it doesn’t mean dying. Consider the following thought experiment. Suppose you’re a missionary in the deepest Amazon jungle. You hear through the native grapevine about a nearby tribe that everyone hates because it is so violent. They go headhunting, kidnapping women, abusing captives, etc. So, intrepid soldier of Christ that you are, you head off to try to talk to them.

When you get there, for whatever reason — your appearance, your technology, or some omen — the tribe thinks you’re a god. They kneel and bow before you, and though you try to tell them they’re mistaken, you don’t know their dialect well enough to make yourself understood. And then you realize you have an opportunity. The next time they organize a war party, you could stand up and block their way, and they wouldn’t dare go past you. You can end their violence by fiat. You just have to hope that once you learn their language well enough to explain, they’ll understand your motives were pure.

Of course, you see that there are a lot of problems with this plan. It would be practicing deception — even if you are technically not lying — and encouraging idolatry. The tribe may not be so understanding once they find out, and in fact decide you are totally untrustworthy and not listen to the stuff about Jesus. And they might be harmed by being pacified in some way that you can’t yet see. Maybe their region is especially poor in resources and they raid so they can eat. Maybe a neighboring tribe will take advantage of their quiescence to stage a surprise attack.

But the alternative would be extremely hard. In order to convince them you’re not a god, you have to act as unlike a god as possible, and never use your power. You have to sit by while they launch raiding parties and haul back women to rape. And if something happens in front of your face and you react in a normal human way — say, jumping up and yelling “Stop!” — you will be obeyed for the wrong reasons.

What do you do?

This is all rather far-fetched, of course, but I think it’s the Constantinian temptation in a nutshell. The original sin, according to Yoder and practically every other theologian before the 18th century, was that humans sought to be like gods. And when Constantine declared Christians to be a protected group, most people obeyed him because they were used to thinking of the emperor as a god.

The emperor is an extreme case, but really a great many Christians find themselves with powers that, properly speaking, they should not have. American voters have, in their measure, all the powers of the American imperium, as well as the power of life and death over many of our citizens. And to some extent, using those powers may be unavoidable. Even Paul, when arrested, called upon his special rights as a Roman citizen, although in his letters he denounced any preferential treatment based on nationality.

So I don’t have a precise answer to this, but I do think this is an aspect of Christian political activism that’s been lacking from the discussion.

Are novels becoming a chick thing? Maybe more men should read Steven Riddle.

Marvin Lindsay is back, and he don’t need no stinkin’ comments.

Doug Muder makes a Unitarian defense of martyrdom.

Mike Duran completes his death-penalty trilogy, here and here. Not surprisingly, this gets him into a lot of church-state territory that I’ve been wandering in lately.

Tripp reports that a British community is trying to rehabilitate Pelagius.

Is open communion like an altar call? Chris Tessone and I discuss. (Somehow the analogy of baptism/communion and marriage/sex is looking even stronger to me, but that’s probably a subject for another day.)

I will go on with the church-state blogging when I have time, but first I wanted to address an issue that Dash brought up. She has non-Christian friends who feel that churches are unwelcoming. She wonders if open communion would help.

As I said on her blog, my own experience with churches is that their communion policy has little to do with how welcoming they feel. Truth be told, I haven’t had much of a problem with churches feeling unwelcoming, and I wonder if this is a difference in experience or in expectations. But I have seen variations in hospitality, so I thought I would offer my own highly subjective tips on how to make a church more welcoming.

1) Get out information about yourself that visitors will need. Put the relevant wheres and whens out front, in your phone-book ad (if you have one) and on your answering machine message. A good website helps a lot too, but be sure to update it if things change. I’ve had the experience of showing up for a nonexistent event, and it’s not welcoming.

2) Whatever your communion policy is, make sure people know it, either through announcement or the service leaflet. Much of the difficulty about this issue comes from people not knowing what they’re supposed to do. Sometimes non-Christians commune simply because they’re doing what everybody else is doing, and don’t realize they aren’t supposed to. I’ve also heard from one person who went up to an LCMS altar expecting communion and was passed over, which I’m sure was embarrassing for both parties.

3) This may sound odd, but convey that it’s all right for people to feel awkward. When I visited the Orthodox mission, their attitude was, “We know we do funny things and you probably think we’re weird, but that’s OK, we’re still glad you’re here.” When people have permission to feel uncomfortable, it can paradoxically make them more comfortable.

4)  Don’t get territorial if someone sits in your pew spot. I’ve never actually seen this, but I’ve heard about it, and it’s ridiculous.

5) Organized events especially for newcomers are helpful. At my church, the Sunday lunch has been a really nice way to get to know new people. It provides more depth than the usual small talk over coffee.

6) Don’t start a conversation with, “So, are you going to come back?” Somebody actually did this to me once, and it was followed by a painful silence since I was nowhere near deciding that yet.

Generally speaking, if you’re even worried about being welcoming, you’re probably OK. The most unwelcoming churches are the ones that don’t even think about it. And an open communion is no substitute for thinking.

I received some helpful comments to my last post, including Lee’s link to this paper by John Howard Yoder, which Lee discussed briefly here. By coincidence, my churchmate Kent recently delivered a lecture on Yoder which he posted on his blog, providing a longer summary of the same subject.

As the old-timers around here know, I liked Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus, though it left a number of questions hanging. The paper under discussion, however — called “The Theological Basis of the Christian Witness to the State” — I found more troubling.

Yoder follows the anti-Constantinian line in sharply differentiating church and state, but asserts Christ’s lordship over both. As in TPOJ, he compares Romans 13’s reference to the state as a minister of God’s justice to Old Testament events where God used the violence of some foreign power, such as the Assyrians, to punish the sins of Israel, but in turn punished the foreign powers for their violence. Thus, both church and state have roles in salvation history:

Jesus made it clear that the nationalized hope of Israel had been a misunderstanding, and that God’s true purpose was the creation of a new society, unidentifiable with any of the local, national, or ethnic solidarities of the time. This new body, the church, as aftertaste of God’s loving triumph on the cross and foretaste of His ultimate loving triumph in His Kingdom, has a task within history. History is the framework in which the church evangelizes so that the true meaning of history is the fact that God has chosen it for His framework service. Now the whole vengeance-upon-vengeance mechanism takes on meaning as a subordinate vehicle to the redemptive purpose; it is to maintain peace so that all men may come to knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2). The interplay of violence upon violence, vengeance upon vengeance, whether in international wars such as Isaiah 10 had in mind or in the relatively more regulated processes of the state’s judiciary and police machinery, has the ultimate purpose of preserving the fabric of the human community as the context within which the church’s work can be carried on.

… It need hardly be said that such a set of concepts as the New Testament applies to this problem cannot meaningfully apply except to a fellowship of believers characterized by obedience in nonresistance. A church which is identical with society … cannot be nonresistant, cannot be willing to lose her life to find it, cannot have a fully prophetic function vis-a-vis the state, cannot clearly distinguish between her fate and that of the “powers” she acknowledges.

Here I think Lee’s question is extremely pertinent: “[D]oes the Church’s having an influence on society depend on a prior recognition by the State of the Church’s exalted status as the bearer of God’s new way of life?” I would put that more bluntly: why the hell would anyone in government go along with a narrative that says their main function is to serve a church that they don’t believe in? It sounds a lot like the Muslim concept of “dhimmitude,” only instead of just inconveniencing the infidels with taxes and other minor burdens, it expects the dhimmis to perform dangerous jobs like policing on behalf of the privileged group.

This goes to the heart of the problem with Yoder’s Old Testament analogy: the foreign armies or governments perform the will of God only because they don’t know what they’re doing. If the Assyrians had really known what was going on, they would have put away their swords and evaded God’s wrath. Similarly, if I were to write to President Bush (to get back to the question that started all this) and honestly tell him all this, he either would (most likely) write me off as a crackpot and do what he was going to do anyway, or (less likely) believe me, and feel he’d have to resign the presidency. Either way, we wouldn’t get any closer to peace in Lebanon.

But Yoder (and this really bothers me) doesn’t really favor being honest that way. Instead, he thinks Christians should call on “middle axioms,” certain values that Christians and their predominant culture have in common, and urge leaders to follow them. Yoder goes on to enumerate some of them, saying that they “agree to a large extent with those of a historian like Butterfield, a political analyst like George Kennan or Walter Lippmann, a military analyst like Hanson Baldwin.”

However, the sticking point, which Yoder admits, is that even following this much “already demands an act of faith”:

To ask the western powers to avoid the use of atomic weapons, to stay out of alliances with dictatorships like Franco’s, and to respect human values within their own forces, puts them at a disadvantage against a ruthless enemy who will use any weapon, who will mistreat his prisoners of war, and whose “human wave” tactics show absolutely no concern for the soldier as a man. This disadvantage is the price of relative justice; descending to the level of the enemy in such matters would rob the West of the last semblance of a pretext for survival. … Violence is always, apparently, the shortest and surest way. And in the long run the appearance always deceives. Had the western powers gambled on freedom and justice since 1945, if in Asia they had sought not satellites but the growth of a third camp, and if in trouble spots like Indo-China and Sumatra they had proceeded as in the Philippines, beating the communists to land reform, the shape of our world today would be far better, perhaps even in China itself. But such a strategy would have demanded faith in freedom and justice, which the champions of freedom and justice no longer had.

I would venture to say that fifty years on, the situation has not improved in that regard. Yet Yoder has no solution to this loss of faith, because his theological framework doesn’t allow it. It’s not the church’s job to cultivate faith in anything but God; so if the country loses faith in its own ideals, what can we say?

I also wanted to touch on Yoder’s attitude toward democracy, which he does not go into in the paper but which Kent summarizes thus:

As Christians we know that the “will of the people” does not carry the same authority as the voice of God speaking through Torah, the prophets, and Jesus Messiah. We know that the majority is not often moral. And being “wise as serpents” we also recognize that even democracies—at least those on a large national scale—are always managed by a ruling elite, who make most of the decisions without consulting us ordinary folk. (How many of you were consulted about the free trade agreement between Mexico, the US, and Canada called NAFTA? I know they never gave me a call!) Yet while we remain realistic about the limits of large-scale democracy, we are eager to use the tools of citizenship, consent theory, democratic representation, rights to assembly, free speech, petition, and nonviolent protest to battle the inevitable injustices that arise from inherent concentrations of wealth and power (a central insight of Reinhold Niebuhr’s, by the way.) Our freedom in Christ allows us to use any democratic tools that come to hand on behalf of the peace and prosperity of our neighbors and even our enemies.

“Seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into Exile” God commanded Jeremiah in Babylon, and this word from Yahweh is at the heart of Yoder’s political ethic for Christians through all time and in all nations, Lebanon as well as Israel, Iraq as well as the good ol’ USA. Democracy is to be affirmed, Yoder says, because it offers so many more ways to hold the rich and powerful accountable to the most marginal and weak in our society. Treatment of the “least of these” is the litmus test that separates the sheep from the goats, and democracy can help us advocate for those lost sheep. Yet Yoder also warns about the dangerous and self-righteous arrogance of military crusades that would impose democracy by force on others. This Yoder essay, written in 1984, somehow rings a bell for me today.

It’s true, of course, that power in our country is unequally distributed. But I don’t think this really does credit to the role of the electorate in government. The power of any one voter is vanishingly small, but as a group, we are as much a part of the government as the judicial branch. And in California, where every election brings us a battery of propositions, we are legislators also. The president doesn’t pay attention to our letters because he thinks we’re wise advisors; he pays attention because we can fire him.

If you look at it that way, there really isn’t a whole lot of daylight between Yoder’s position and the Lutheran one. The princes of Luther’s era also “used the tools” that they inherited to do what they thought was right — in their case, the tools being things like armies and judicial fiat. The only real difference seems to be that while Luther felt it was OK for Christians to wield the sword of the state in a just manner, Mennonites apparently feel it’s OK to hire other people to bear the sword according to their direction.

Because make no mistake about it: any time you pass a law, you are backing it up with the sword. Notice that in my first Yoder quote above, he mentions “the state’s judiciary and police machinery” in the same category as international wars. Near the end of the paper he oddly remarks that, “In a highly christianized culture it is an available alternative to have unarmed police and no capital punishment,” and I am totally confused as to whether he means “christianized” in a Constantinian sense or not. But either way, that is clearly not the society we live in now; so every law is backed up with violence.

I think I’m beginning to see why Hauerwas split with Yoder here. I think the Stanmeister is next on the reading list.

Thanks to all those who commented on my post on protest. I’ve been chewing on the subject, and have been further exercised by debating somebody on the Ben Witherington thread and by discussing it with my small group last Thursday. I haven’t got any answers, but the discussion has helped me clarify what my questions are.

I think one factor that I didn’t make clear in the first post, was that the Middle East project wasn’t just an incidental thing that somebody happened to set up. Pastor Jennifer wound up her sermon on James by mentioning it with the clear implication that this was one of those “works” that shows that your faith is alive. So the question wasn’t just whether Christians are permitted to write to politicians, but whether such an activity is actually an appropriate “ministry” for the church to engage in.

The larger problem I realized I was having, though, is that I don’t understand the current Mennonite position on political involvement. The traditional anti-Constantinian line, to which some churches still hew, is that government is part of the old world passing away, and the church itself is the only polity in which Mennonites have much of an interest. In more recent times, many Mennonite churches have become more politically involved, while still hewing to the anti-Constantinian separation of church and state.

The problem I have with this in-between attitude is that it seems to demand political activism without a positive vision of what government ought to be. I believe that it’s just irresponsible heckling to criticize a political leader without offering alternatives. But what is the alternative? Anti-Constantinians, by definition, don’t expect governments to be Christian; and unlike the Old Testament prophets who criticized their leaders, we don’t expect them to be Jewish. Honestly, even though I’ve been going to this church for about 20 months, I still don’t understand what the basic guiding principles for political engagement are.

What I have heard people invoke is “justice,” but it never seems to be defined. In fact, AKMA once again wrote an acute post on this subject, showing that I’m not the only person in the world who’s been wondering about this. He writes:

Indeed, if we rely not on the careful reasoning (or in hymnic context, the literary finesse) but simply on the sense that “of course, we all support justice,” we risk engendering the impression that we’re trying to arm-twist people into accepting social-progressive imperatives for societal behavior by putting the word “justice” into their mouths and ears without inculcating a corresponding understanding of what’s at stake. When we do articulate our convictions about the shape of a just life, though, we necessarily set our case in a context within which it might be controverted by people who envision a different sense for “justice”; I regard that as a good thing, since it encourages participants in theological life to offer their best cases for the Name by which they are called and for the hope that is within them.

I think that sense of arm-twisting was what I was trying, somewhat incoherently, to express in my earlier post. There are necessarily a lot of steps between an abstraction (”justice”) and a particular (”a cease-fire in Lebanon”) and I keep feeling like the church leaps right over them.

I also sometimes hear the compounded phrase “peace and justice,” but that simply doubles the problem. As I implied in the earlier post, to me Christian pacifism is a powerful act of faith precisely because it is so dangerous; so it seems like about the last piece of orthopraxis that you’d want to push on a nonbeliever.  Yet a lot of people at church seem to inform their politics with it.

All this is intra-Mennonite stuff, so I’m probably boring everybody else in the readership. But I’d be interested to know what the Mennos out there think.