On Second Thought . . .

The Case for Christian Incivility

Are We Suffering a Paucity of Civility, or of Outrage?

Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine, has called for a "Covenant of Civility" in contemporary politics (see www.civilitycovenant.org). He's right to observe that the rhetoric of rage and ridicule on the right has degraded and debased what is left of the public square (or at least the considerable bandwidth under Rupert Murdoch's control). But the problem isn't a lack of manners. Rather, as Jonathan Schell wrote in The Nation during George W. Bush's administration, the public square is currently the operating theater for a direct assault on reason as such.

"If someone states to the world that he has a black dog when he does not, he is lying," Schell wrote. "But what do you call it if, in full sight of all, he says he has a black dog while pointing to a white dog?" (The parable was pointed at Bush's mendacious claim to know that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in the absence of any evidence--the cause for a long and disastrous war there.) What you call it, Schell answered, "is cognitive torture. Just as hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, a lie is the tribute that vice pays to truth: The element of concealment pays respect to the hearer's demand to be told what is true. But if the 'lie' is out in the open--if any fool can see that the dog is white--then truth itself is disrespected."

Contempt for rationality remains the order of the day over at Fox News (to pull a name from the airwaves), and under the circumstance, keeping a civil tongue is not the first priority for those who still care about truth. So Brian Terrell's plea over at www.JesusRadicals.com for a "covenant of outrage" has prima facie appeal.

With Jim Wallis, I agree that those who care about truth will necessarily be committed to the sort of discourse that respects the open-minded. But that doesn't mean we won't raise our voices, and it doesn't mean we'll smile and nod when we're being fed pathos-laced bullshit from highly paid wordmongers like Glenn Beck and say, "well, you're entitled to your opinion."

"Each and every strategem of the principalities," William Stringfellow wrote (during the presidency of Richard Nixon), "seeks the death of the specific faculties of rational and moral comprehension that specially distinguish human beings from all other creatures. . . . Demonic aggression always aims at the immobilization or surrender or destruction of the mind and at the neutralization or abandonment or demoralization of the conscience" (An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land [Dallas: Word, 1973; Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2004], 97).

How should those who care about truth engage such demonic assault? "Civility" may be a tactical option, but it would not be one's first impulse on realizing one's neighbor's house was on fire. Eugene McCarraher, who teaches humanities at Villanova and writes for Commonweal, held out another option as the more appropriate response to the world order offered by George W. Bush's National Security Strategy of the United States  (2003): namely, "skepticism--unyielding, uncivil, and corrosive":

Wht a harsh and dreadful love, we must disparage the martial and pecuniary faith that animates history's richest, most well-arm3ed, and parochial superpower. . . . [Un]embedded intellectuals must assault the winter palaces of embedded ideology, revitalize and enlarge the political community called church, and rekindle the political imagination called theology. Against the totems and sacraments of empire we must hurl the most intolerable and virtuous of insults" ("'The Most Intolerable of Insults': Remarks to Christian Infidels in the American Empire," in Wes Avram, ed., Anxious about Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities [Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004],  104).

As Thomas Frank observes in Harpers, there have been times in U.S. history when reasonable people took to the streets in angry waves to call a halt to injustice and the plundering of the common good. Now we get wacko vigilantes who want more tax breaks for billionaires.

Each new presidential shrug--each preemptive sigh and slump of the shoulders telling us there's just nothing that can be done in Palestine or Iraq or Haiti or Detroit because, well, the people whose interests really matter wouldn't like it--is one more mark in the elaborate cartography of denial and obfuscation. It is also a dare to us to say loudly and clearly that we know better.

(Some of these thoughts appeared first in "A Famine of the Word: A Stringfellowian Reflection on the American Church Today," in The Bible in the Public Square: Reading the Signs of the Times, ed. C. B. Kittredge, E. B. Aitken, and J. A. Draper [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008], 185-96.)

What Does It Mean for Christians to Be "Just War People"?

Part 1 of a Review of Daniel M. Bell Jr., Just War as Christian Discipleship: Recentering the Tradition in the Church Rather than the State (Brazos, 2009).

 

As soon as my eyes fell on Daniel Bell's new book at the Brazos exhibit at the SBL Annual Meeting, I decided to buy it. It's not just that I've been engaged in thinking, writing, and teaching about the so-called "just war" tradition (hereafter JWT) myself and thought this might be another useful resource. More than that: some of the lines used on the book cover sound themes that I've argued need to be front and center in the Church's life.

In this and succeeding posts I will engage the book as I read it. I make no pretense of being disengaged or "objective" about the topic.

Judging a Book by Its Cover

Bell's title certainly makes the point: If the JWT is part of "Christian discipleship," then it's not optional; it's not to be relegated to those individuals who want to ride their own pro-war or anti-war hobby-horse. Understanding and applying the tradition should be central to who we are as the Church.

Similarly, the subtitle seems to throw down the gauntlet. The JWT is a theological tradition and thus belongs to the Church and has its first and appropriate home in the Church's thinking about war. We--and when I use the first-person pronoun, I always mean "we the Church" (an issue to which I will return below)--should own the JWT. But one is more likely to find courses on JWT taught at military academies than at seminaries. As Bell knows (and as others have made the point before him), the JWT has largely been coopted today by military planners and the policymakers who want to "sell" their latest war by dressing it up as "just." The "most common way of dealing" with the JWT today is as "a list of criteria meant to guide public policy with regard to war" (p. 20). The cynical calculation behind such use of the JWT is that Christians can be encouraged to acquiesce in another war--if not positively to cheerlead from the pulpit and run interference against pacifists, both useful contributions to the warmaking aim--if they can be lulled into trusting the military planners to give the war a churchy-sounding stamp of approval.

So far so good; so far I'm on board with Bell's agenda. 

The cover also smacks the reader in the face with a very different prospect, however. The cover image appears to be a U.S. Naval battle map from the war in the Pacific (1944); the cover announces a Foreword by a military chaplain. I would like to think the good people at Brazos intended the jarring mixed message the cover sends: I would hate to think it passed, so to speak, beneath their radar. If this is a book about "recentering the tradition in the Church rather than the State," why does the argument depend in part on the approval of a military chaplain? It's that incongruity that provoked me to buy the book (perhaps the publisher's intention!) but that also set my theological Spidey sense tingling. Bell may occasionally set Church and state in opposition, but is this more than lip service? Will he actually sustain that tension in any theologically credible way?

A Rough Start

Asking a military chaplain to offer the Foreword (whether that was the author's idea or the publisher's) inevitably sets the tone for the book. (Immediate, arguably irrelevant disclaimers: I don't know Chaplain Lt. Col. Scott A. Sterling; I have counted military chaplains among my friends, including George Metcalf, the supervisor of military chaplains in Patton's army upon whom Patton called to pronounce a prayer for favorable weather for U.S. bombers against German troops hunkered down in the Ardennes in 1944.)

Though Bell seeks to achieve a moral high ground by promising not to pontificate about one war or another (because that would prove a "distraction," p. 15), Sterling's first sentence in the Foreword evokes the (second) Iraq War (depending, of course, on how one numbers wars: given the tremendous civilian death toll of President Clinton's economic sanctions against Iraq, I argue that there has been one single, long, unrelenting war in Iraq for twenty years, and counting).

Sterling is honest about his audience: they are "soldiers who wanted to talk about and resolve the moral and ethical dimensions of the war we were fighting in Iraq" (7). Sterling understands his responsibility (and those of other military chaplains in Iraq) to be "to assist our soldiers in coming to terms with the moral implications of their unique and terrible jobs." And what are those jobs? "As in every war, the soldiers' task was simple and horrifying: find and kill enemy warriors, which often resulted in the destruction of homes and infrastructure and taking the lives of innocents along with enemy soldiers" (ibid.)

The phrases I've italicized (not in original) speak volumes about the discipline of military training. The Christian soldier, if he or she is enlisted in the U.S. military, is not encouraged to ask, in every battlefield engagement, "why am I here?" or "am I justified in throwing this grenade" or "firing this M4?" The soldier's job, the chaplain says, is to find and kill. It happens--"often," says the chaplain--that doing their job means innocent people get killed, right away; the reference to destruction of homes and infrastructure, an incident of commendable honesty, points to the reality that other innocent people will die later as a "result" of what U.S. soldiers have done. (We need not assume that the commanding officer intended the deaths of innocent people; to fall back into the impersonal construction of Army-speak, it just "often happens.") 

One might stop, right here, and ask: "Should a Christian accept a job assignment that will reliably and often result in the deaths of innocent people?" In such stark terms most Christians would readily answer, "no." I submit--and this is my bias going into this book--that the tremendous effort the U.S. military spends in recruiting and training officers and enlisted men and women and the massive cultural representations of military service beamed into our heads daily have as their primary function to plant a different answer: "No, unless there's a military reason to do something else that has the inevitable, expected, but unintended consequence of killing innocent people. Then it's okay." 

I suspect at the outset that Bell will exert his considerable erudition to get us, 240 pages later, to nod in agreement. It will of course be a sophisticated argument, but from the start the gravitational pull of this book is toward the battlefield, toward those sincere U.S. soldiers agonizing over the last mission or the next mission.

Why? Why does the U.S. soldier trump all other identifications, locations, sympathies in a book about Christian theology? In what way is Christian formation the presumption at the center of this book and in what way has the presumption of military necessity already inserted itself as a theological consideration?

Pronoun Trouble

Chaplain Sterling is "amazed" that Bell can speak so eloquently and directly to the concerns of enlisted U.S. soldiers without having served in the military himself (p. 8). For Lt. Col. Sterling, this is the great benefit of the book. He knows that "our military" will be involved in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, "and humanitarian crises throughout the world" (a characterization that he doesn't blush to use), for years to come. If the Church embraces Bell's book, he concludes, "we can all feel more confident that our nation will strive to maintain the moral high ground in its military endeavors and beyond."

This, in the foreword to a book presented as Christian theology. Sterling explicitly invokes an identity as U.S. citizens who identify with "our" troops and care above all that "our nation" maintain the alleged "moral high ground" in its military endeavors. In what way are these Christian theological concerns? Are these presumptions to remain unquestioned throughout an ostensibly Christian book? 

And who, at last, are "we" as we read? For Sterling, "we" are Americans who presumptively identify with our nation's righteous cause, the "moral high ground" (details be damned). One can't help wondering if this book might sound a bit different if written from Sandinista Nicaragua, where Christians perceived their nation to be under unwarranted and brutal military and economic attack from the United States. Is it even possible for Bell to disentangle his nationalism from his Christianity? Or will he plead that his "situation" as an American constitutes a dumb responsibility to give the most powerful and the most destructive military in world history presumed standing in matters of Christian theology? 

Paul Wasn't Talking about Homosexuality in Romans 1

(Or: What Rob Gagnon Doesn't Know Might Hurt You)

Years ago I presented, in my book Liberating Paul,[1] the argument that what Paul says in Romans 1:24-27 should not be read as a theological indictment of homosexuals or as a theological analysis of “the homosexual condition.” The argument didn’t get much attention from other scholars (in fact, I’ve never seen any discussion of that part of the book). I’ve now repeated much the same argument, with greater detail, in The Arrogance of Nations,[2] and have received enthusiastic words of approval from three different scholars (to quote them: “I think you’re right”; “you convinced everyone in my graduate seminar on Romans”; “you blew my socks off”). But no one has given sustained attention to the argument in either book.

Which means that Robert Gagnon’s online critique of my argument—or at least of the condensed, more popular version of the argument that I posted several years ago at The Witness online—remains the most attention my argument has received. That also means that anyone wanting to find out what my argument is (for example, if they’d seen it referred to in Newsweek) and Googling my name would reach Gagnon’s critique before they struck on my original argument.

That is, I think, unfortunate, mainly because Rob misrepresents my argument in several important ways. I don’t know whether that’s because he simply doesn’t understand it (which I doubt—Rob is a bright enough guy) or because given his own assumptions, my argument just doesn’t make sense to him (a possibility I explore below). I think his assumptions are wrong. Or, put another way, we disagree because I don’t know as much as Rob thinks he knows. But then, I don't think he does, either.

In what follows I won't repeat my larger argument; it's available in fuller form in the two books mentioned above (and summarized in the Witness piece). I do want to address Rob's criticisms, however, as fairly as I can.

Off to a Bad Start 

Rob begins by summarizing my argument--badly. He sees it as my attempt at reductionism: that I read what Paul says as applying "only" to Roman emperors. (He repeats this allegation in a number of rhetorical questions throughout his essay, but because he's misrepresented my argument, they're all off the mark.) So, he alleges, I contend that "Paul in Rom 1:18-32 was thinking only of the emperor Nero and a predecessor, Gaius 'Caligula' . . ." But I never wrote "only." My argument is that Nero and Caligula are splendid examples, "Exhibit A and B," of the arrogance, immorality, and injustice that Paul excoriates, but the whole point--I argue--is that they are examples of a larger immorality especially exemplified in the Roman imperial house. This has nothing to do with individuals, it has everything to do with the morally corrosive effect of power.

So I don't for a minute think that this is a question of just how extensive emperor worship was, or whether Caligula might have settled down and been acceptable to Paul if he'd just met the right guy. For their surface cleverness, those really are rather dumb objections that have nothing to do with my argument but do show that Rob is obsessed with this text being about homosexuality. 

Rob continues, "Elliott believes that his new reading makes sense of Paul’s argument [in Romans 1--3]—an argument that otherwise 'disintegrates' into the 'incoherence' of 'prejudiced exaggeration,' 'stereotype,' and 'caricature.'" That's right, I do contend that, but it's worth noting that I'm not making up those characterizations. Scholars wiser than me have pointed to the rhetorical and logical problems in Romans 1--3: E. P. Sanders, Ernst Käsemann, Heikki Räisänen, among others (full footnotes in my books). Rob may not want to deal with the problems they've identified--they are, after all, remarkably inconvenient to traditional Reformed theology's appropriation of Romans--but ignoring the problems doesn't make them go away, and it certainly doesn't make them figments of my imagination. For Rob to ignore the problems just reflects Rob's prior commitments.  

Rob believes he already knows something that I don't know. As he writes, "Neil creates a problem of his own making and then attempts to solve it with a proposal that does not speak to the concerns of Scripture." Well, as I've just suggested, the "problem" isn't of my own making; this is a set of problems widely recognized by Romans scholars--the sort of problem that theologically minded interpreters actually have to work hard to get around, as Rob ought to know if he's done his homework. But the larger point here is that Rob writes as though he already knows what "the concerns of Scripture" are, so mere details like the troublesome text of Romans needn't bother him.  

What I Don't Know about the Bible (and Rob Doesn't, Either)

What Rob thinks he knows, specifically (and this is the part that can hurt you if you happen to be the sort of person who loves another person of your own gender), is that "the critique of same-sex intercourse is not limited to Paul but extends to the whole canon of Scripture, to say nothing of the univocal perspective against all same-sex intercourse that existed in the Judaisms of the Second Temple and rabbinic periods."

Wow. That's a lot of ground to cover. It's the sort of sweeping generalization you might make if you believed that the Bible was a single, theologically coherent fabric, coming in effect from a single author, so that what appears in one place (say, Leviticus 19) applies to every other writing and to the "whole canon," whether other parts of the Bible (say, the Gospels) mention it or (as a matter of fact) don't.

That's a lot to know. Or rather, it's a lot to believe: it's a theological assumption Rob makes about the Bible. Fundamentalists (and I use the term to describe a way of interpreting the Bible, whether or not Rob chooses to use the term for himself) like to imagine that they're just recognizing "what the Bible says" about itself (in places like 2 Tim. 3:16) when they make this sort of claim. But the Bible is not a self-explaining text. The historical record is clear that this collection of books (ta biblia in Greek, plural) was assembled over time. Of course some people (like Rob) read it as if it all spoke with the single voice of God, and of course some people have read it that way for centuries, although I note that the effort requires a lot more hermeneutical acrobatics (allegorical method in the early church; nowadays, doctrines of verbal inspiration "in the original autographs," etc., etc.) than is required, for example, for Muslims to read the Qur'an as the voice of God (after all, the Qur'an has the prima facie advantages of having been written in a single language, over the course of a few decades, and wholly in the first-person voice of God).

But that's not the only way to read the Bible. It's not the most reasonable way to read the Bible. And it's not the only Christian way to read the Bible.

If it were, we'd have to work really hard (and I concede that Rob does work really, really hard, in his big book) to explain, for example, why all those biblical passages telling slaves to keep a stiff upper lip don't really represent the single authoritative voice of God justifying slavery for all time. I'm just astonished that people like Rob don't see the fundamental methodological inconsistency here. Some of them will actually admit that yes, okay, whatever the Bible says about slavery was culturally conditioned, but go on to insist that that's not the case with sex. What God said about sex (not the parts about stoning women to death or having sex with your slave, of course, you know, the other stuff about how Adam and Eve had an ideal marriage, just like Joseph and Mary did) is absolute, transcendent, eternally valid. So--it follows naturally, at least for them--the hard work other scholars do to pay close attention to cultural contexts and what words actually meant in those contexts is a lot of unnecessary bother.

What I Don't Know (and Rob Doesn't, Either) about Romans

Rob also knows what Romans 1--3 is there for. Again, I quote him:

The whole point of the discussion in 1:18-3:20 is to “charge” that “both Jews and Greeks—all—are under sin” (3:9), that “no one is righteous, not even one” (3:10 . . .), and that “the whole world” is “under God’s judgment” (3:19), “for all have sinned and are lacking in the glory of God” (3:23). A critique limited to a couple of emperors would not establish this point.

The last line is correct, though irrelevant, since I don't see Paul's critique as "limited to a couple of emperors." But "the whole point" of Romans 1:18--3:20 is not what Rob says it is. Sure, I know, he sure sounds authoritative (after all, he's quoting the text). And sure, what he says sure sounds familiar (after all, most commentaries on our shelves repeat this argument over and over again). But the problems I mentioned before inhere right here. This supposed "argument" doesn't work as advertised; it wouldn't have moved anyone to accept Paul's conclusion if they weren't already convinced of it. That's why scholars like Sanders describe Paul's argument as working "backward."

Even Rob admits Paul is writing to convinced Christians. He also thinks that "later in Romans 6:15-23, Paul looks back on the discussion in 1:18-32" and "reminds [the Roman Christians] about their own behavior at the time that they were unbelievers." I note, first, that Paul says no such thing. He doesn't refer back to chap. 1 in chap. 6, nor does anything in chap. 6 "remind" the Romans that they used to commit murder and rob temples (crimes mentioned in chap. 1).

To be fair, this isn't just Rob's problem. How we get from the indictment in chap. 1 of people against whom the wrath of God is "being revealed," people worthy of death, to the assurance in chap. 6 that Paul's readers have been justified in Christ though they used to serve sin, is one of the chief puzzles of the letter. It's important to bear in mind that there really is a puzzle here. The conventional answer--the stuff of all the evangelistic sermons we've ever heard and all the "four spiritual laws" tracts we've ever picked up on the bus seat--is that Paul is simply explaining just how lost everyone is before Christ comes along to save them. The puzzle at the heart of the letter is why Paul spends time rehearsing that argument in a letter to people who have already accepted Christ. The leading answer, still printed in commentaries in the twenty-first century, is that Paul is trying to gain respect and support from the Roman church by showing a sample of the kind of initial preaching he would normally present to other people. 

I find that answer maddeningly unsatisfying. Sure, it's comfortable and familiar for Evangelical Christians because it reassures them of what they already know--Jesus died for our sins, we're saved, hallelujah. But this answer implies that the Roman church was made up of people like modern Evangelical readers: that is, people who already know Paul's gospel so the first chapters aren't really meant to impress them, just to reassure them of their status. I think that's a gigantic misreading of Romans.

I've argued, at length, in two books now, for a different reading of Romans, based on the sort of rhetorical criticism that other scholars have found useful (I name Nils Dahl, Ben Witherington, and Stanley Stowers, from all of whom I've learned a great deal, though I don't want to imply that they would agree with me on all of my conclusions!). I think my reading of Romans 1 makes sense within the larger argument of those books; at least, it's meant to.

I wouldn't mind if Rob didn't find those arguments convincing; but he doesn't address them. He misrepresents, and then rejects one part of my reading of Romans--the part that really annoys him because it's opposed to his reading of Romans 1 and, more largely, of "the concerns of Scripture" regarding homosexuality--by insisting that I just don't understand what Romans is about.

It's more accurate to say that I don't accept the conventional reading of Romans that he assumes. That doesn't mean, automatically, that he's right and I'm wrong (or vice versa). It means, I suggest, that Romans still presents a puzzle (or set of puzzles) to be explored. I've tried to explore them in my work; that exploration has led me to a different understanding of Romans 1. Rob hasn't engaged those puzzles or that exploration because his concern has been to demonstrate that the whole Bible has just one view of homosexuality, from beginning to end. And that, again, is more than I know.

Notes

[1] Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994; Fortress Press edition, 2006), pp. 192-94.

[2] Neil Elliott, The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 75-83.

 

 

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