The War Racket

The conservative periodical, City Journal, has published a highly opinionated article denouncing the “peace programs” found at many major universities in the United States. The author, Bruce Bawer, calls these peace wackos the “Peace Racket.” Here is how he begins the article:

“If you want peace, prepare for war.” Thus counseled Roman general Flavius Vegetius Renatus over 1,600 years ago. Nine centuries before that, Sun Tzu offered essentially the same advice, and it’s to him that Vegetius’s line is attributed at the beginning of a film that I saw recently at Oslo’s Nobel Peace Center. Yet the film cites this ancient wisdom only to reject it. After serving up a perverse potted history of the cold war, the thrust of which is that the peace movement brought down the Berlin Wall, the movie ends with words that turn Vegetius’s insight on its head: “If you want peace, prepare for peace.”

This purports to be wise counsel, a motto for the millennium. In reality, it’s wishful thinking that doesn’t follow logically from the history of the cold war, or of any war. For the cold war’s real lesson is the same one that Sun Tzu and Vegetius taught: conflict happens; power matters. It’s better to be strong than to be weak; you’re safer if others know that you’re ready to stand up for yourself than if you’re proudly outspoken about your defenselessness or your unwillingness to fight. There’s nothing mysterious about this truth. Yet it’s denied not only by the Peace Center film but also by the fast-growing, troubling movement that the center symbolizes and promotes.

Call it the Peace Racket.

Bawer is an apologist for an individualistic, capitalistic, militaristic West. As a result, he stands steadfastly against the rising peace movement: “[The Peace Racket’s] opposed to every value that the West stands for—liberty, free markets, individualism—and it despises America, the supreme symbol and defender of those values.” Bawer simply takes it for granted that these are values worth defending, and that America is actually a defender of them. He goes on to vilify the founder of the International Peace Research Institute, Johan Galtung, as a “lifelong enemy of freedom,” because Galtung himself denounces the West’s “structural fascism” and America’s “neo-fascist state terrorism.” Once again, Bawer sees the world in black-and-white terms: America and “the West” are right, and the rest of the world is wrong. Anyone who contradicts this doctrine is clearly an enemy—not to mention downright nuts. In addition, like other advocates for peace, Galtung focuses his criticism against capitalism. Bawer writes, disapprovingly:

In 1973, explaining world politics in a children’s newspaper, [Galtung] described the U.S. and Western Europe as “rich, Western, Christian countries” that make war to secure materials and markets: “Such an economic system is called capitalism, and when it’s spread in this way to other countries it’s called imperialism.”

Bawer calls this criticism of capitalism “anti-Western.” The assumption is that capitalism and free markets are wholly positive. To criticize capitalism, in the mind of Bawer, is to reject the best of all possible economic systems. He goes on to summarize the teaching of peace studies programs in the following way:

First and foremost, they emphasize that the world’s great evil is capitalism—because it leads to imperialism, which in turn leads to war. ... Students acquire a zero-sum picture of the world economy: if some countries and people are poor, it’s because others are rich. They’re taught that American wealth derives entirely from exploitation and that Americans, accordingly, are responsible for world poverty.

Bawer does not offer any criticism of the points made by these proponents of peace. He takes it for granted, it seems, that what they proclaim is nonsense. In any case, his strategy is to divert attention away from the arguments themselves by employing ad hominem. Bawer’s primary criticism is that this “Peace Racket” is thoroughly hypocritical in its criticism of capitalism, because the people in these peace studies programs are products of the capitalist system. In other words, they are biting the hands that feed them. He does have a point: these peace studies programs are thoroughly bourgeois, and that certainly makes their stand on behalf of the oppressed a little hard to swallow. But this is no argument against the position of peace itself, just as the infidelity of a priest is no argument against the gospel. Even so, Bawer jumps on the opportunity to point out the irony:

If the image of tenured professors pushing such anticapitalist nonsense on privileged suburban kids sounds like a classic case of liberals’ throwing stones at their own houses, get a load of this: America’s leading Peace Racket institution is probably the University of Notre Dame’s Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies—endowed by and named for the widow of Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, the ultimate symbol of evil corporate America. It was the Kroc Institute, by the way, that in 2004 invited Islamist scholar Tariq Ramadan to join its faculty, only to see him denied a U.S. visa on the grounds that he had defended terrorism.

Bawer’s article basically boils down to the following “thesis”: These “Peace Racketeers” are rich anti-American Americans who are disseminating nonsensical ideas against capitalism and warfare, when it is capitalism who has made them rich and warfare which has given them the ability to speak so freely against American policies. For all his overblown rhetoric, Bawer effectively raises the question regarding whether pacifism is an inherently bourgeois position—i.e., a position that takes for granted what warfare has accomplished in the past. I think that’s worth discussing, but it diverts our attention from the issue at hand—viz. whether people ought to study peace rather than warfare, reject capitalism rather than revel in it, and embrace other cultures rather than dominate them.

Bawer essentially presents two groups: the “Peace Racket” which hypocritically fights against capitalism and warfare while benefiting from them, and what I will call the “War Racket” which continues to advocate for both capitalism and warfare without any obvious hypocrisy. In other words, both groups benefit from the Western, American economic system, but one group argues against it while the other argues for it. The assumption is that the latter is right, because they are honest about their loyalty and dependence upon the capitalist system. But this is patently ridiculous. To accept the views of the “War Racket” would be like agreeing with casino gambling lobbyists because they admit their addiction to gambling over against those who have won money from the lottery but now argue against gambling altogether. Or, to use another example, it would be like agreeing with oil tycoons who admit their stake in oil over against advocates for an oil-free transportation system who still drive around in their cars. Just because one side is straightforward about their personal investment in a particular social system does not make their position right. Even if the other side is somewhat compromised, they may still have the correct view. Moreover, Bawer gives no indication whether the advocates for peace are actively trying to curb their own complicity in the capitalistic-militaristic system.

In the end, we desperately need to get beyond this superficial dualism. Not only does this dichotomy—between “Peace Racket” and the “War Racket”—create a false dilemma that ignores the arguments for and against the pursuit of peace rather than warfare, but it also obscures the fact that there are other options. The Christian church must be the third way: a way which confronts the evils of capitalism, American imperialism, and global violence, while at the same time embodying a life of peace and simplicity as the community of God’s “covenant of peace” (Ezek. 37:26). The confessing community must advocate on behalf of peace while leaving warmongers like Bruce Bawer no opportunity to use ad hominem attacks. As the church, we must say, “If you want peace, seek the God of peace.”

See Also: “Why Study War?” by Victor Davis Hanson: Since Bawer told us why we shouldn’t study peace, City Journal has another article discussing why we should study war. Here is the thesis: “democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war—and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.” This is really the companion piece to Bawer’s article. Hanson laments that there are so few war studies programs, which is the converse of what Bawer lamented. Nothing new; just more warmongering.

Lesslie Newbigin: creation as an act of divine peace

“The first chapter of Genesis was almost certainly written during the time when Israel was in exile in Babylon. And we must picture these writers as slaves under the shadow of this mighty empire with its palaces, fortresses and temples. Babylon had its own account of creation, as we know from the work of modern scholarship. It was a story of conflict, battle and bloodshed. Violence was the theme underlying the whole creation story as the Babylonians understood it.

The writers of Genesis had a quite different picture of God. They were the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. They knew God as the redeemer God, the God who had saved his people from bondage. And they had a totally different picture of God’s creation—not as the result of violence but as the action of a God of love and wisdom who, out of sheer love, desired to create a world to reflect his glory and a human family to enjoy his world and give back his love.

And so we have in Genesis a picture of the creation of light to be distinguished from darkness, of the dry land to be distinguished from the chaos of the sea, of a home in which living creatures could grow and thrive, of the creation of the animals and of human beings among them, and of the special responsibility given to human beings of being in the image of God. And to this human family he has given the specific responsibility of cherishing his creation, of bringing it to that perfection for which God intended it, so that it, with the whole human race, should truly reflect his glory.”

—Lesslie Newbigin, A Walk Through the Bible (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 1999), 6-8.

Tim Gorringe: social cement or great disturbance?

Timothy Gorringe has a homily in the most recent issue of Expository Times on Luke 12:32-40 which touches on some of the issues that I have raised recently regarding consumerism and the Christian's place in society. He begins by mentioning the ancient document, “The Ruin of Britain,” by the monk Gildas in 520 CE, as an example of doom and destruction. The question raised, then, is what is the church's role in the midst of a society in turmoil and disarray? Here are Gorringe’s own words from the sermon. I think he asks the right questions, and we would do well to listen to them carefully.

In this country we are currently spared such horrors, but many books on climate change have the same tone as Gildas. One way or another, we live in uncertain times. One response is to look to the church for security. Are we not about building up community, about healing wounds, giving hope to the hopeless? Yes, of course we are. And yet Jesus did not call his disciples to be social cement, and did not give them a gospel of middle class niceties and securities.

Our passage is addressed to a ‘little flock’ which also lived, for sure, in uncertain times. Inflation is running high, mortgages are being foreclosed, the pillars of the world, the social sureties by which we live, are shaken. Luke knew that some early Christians had taken Jesus’ advice literally: they had sold up and shared what they had. Perhaps he, the companion of Paul, also knew how Paul had had to put an aid package together for these very same Christians. But Luke now puts together a series of sayings and parables of Jesus which are not about social certainties but about the great disturbance of the gospel. ... Christians looked towards the coming of the kingdom, not as the promised land of welfare capitalism, not as somewhere which they would reach with a little common sense just over the next hill, but as the coming of the Lord which would relativize all their efforts and all their moral proprieties—their family relationships, for example. ... Luke [knows] that the gospel sets the world by the ears, turns the world upside down.

What does our text mean for us today, therefore? Ought we, like the first community, or St Francis, to sell all we have and give to the poor? Or do we, like Christians throughout the ages, and as the passage implies in its word about treasure, say that the big deal is not being possessed by our possessions? That often sounds like a ‘cop out’, a piece of casuistry designed to send us to bed comfortable with our comfortable lives. I think it can be, but it need not be. The question is how seriously we take ourselves as members of this new group which is intended to be what both Jesus and Paul quite clearly understood be ecclesia (‘church’), the seedbed of a new humanity. Are we recognizable as that, and if not, is it because we have replaced the great disturbance of the kingdom with the very different gospel of providing a safe anchorage in a troubled world? Or is it that we don't see how the safe anchorage only comes in and through the great disturbance? And being part of the great disturbance is centrally connected with what we do with our money and our time. That is the question! To what end are our possessions, purses and alms put?

And what does it mean for us to be the community eagerly awaiting its Lord, if it does not mean gathering together on some chilly mountain top waiting for dawn, or voting for ‘son of Trident’ in the hope that this means the Lord will come in some great conflagration in which the wicked are eliminated? Every syllable of Scripture speaks against this, I believe, but equally it speaks of a burning hope for a different world which makes a domesticated church impossible. ... The real challenge is to understand what this means for our local Christian communities, our parishes ... If we have understood our gospel aright, however, community maintenance will never be the pious support of the status quo ... but a constant challenge to understand the practical outworking of love in a way which responds to Jesus' original shaking of our moral and social foundations.

—Tim Gorringe, “Sermon on Luke 12:32-40,” Expository Times 118:10 (2007), pp. 497-98.

St. Isaac of Nineveh: hell is full of love and compassion

Gehenna, Its Duration

Even in the matter of afflictions

—the judgment of Gehenna, say—

there bides a hidden mystery, whereby

the Maker has taken as a starting point

our patent willfulness, using even Hell

as a way of bringing to perfection

His greater dispensation.

If the world to come proves entirely the realm

of mercy, love, and goodness,

how then a final state that claims

requital for its measure?

That we should think that hell

is not also full

of love and mingled with compassion

would be an insult to our God.

By saying He will deliver us

to suffering without purpose, we

most surely sin. We blaspheme also if we say

that He will act with spite or with a vengeful purpose,

as if He had a need to avenge Himself.

—Adapted from the writings of St. Isaac of Nineveh by Scott Cairns, Love’s Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2007), 78.

PET II: The De-Catholicization of the Church

Problems in Ecclesiology Today II: The demise of denominations and the loss of tradition—inculcating a church family in the 21st century

You don’t need a crystal ball to see the future of the American Protestant denominations—and the future does not look good. At the end of his article on Karl Barth’s christology as a theological resource for a “Reformed kenoticism” (IJST 8:3), Bruce McCormack writes the following:

The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches. I have heard it said – and I have no reason to question it – that if current rates of decline in membership continue, all that will be left by mid-century will be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and non-denominational evangelical churches (the last named of which will include those denominations, like the Southern Baptists, which are non-confessional in doctrinal matters and congregationalist in their polity). The churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene – and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation.

McCormack writes about this ecclesial crisis from the perspective of theology (e.g., who will pass along the theology of the Reformation?), but I wish to discuss this crisis from the perspective of worship and tradition (e.g., who will pass along the traditions of our ancestors?). Obviously, these two questions are related—the lex credendi and the lex orandi depend upon each other—but they are also distinct. The theological scene is indeed dire, and most people seem to recognize the problem. But I have not heard people discuss the problem facing evangelicals and tradition in the 21st century, which is the more perplexing one, in my opinion.

The question before us is deceptively simple: How do Christians inculcate an ecclesial tradition or family? Historically, this was accomplished through a formal liturgy that was common to all the churches—the Catholic Mass in the West and the Divine Liturgy in the East, both of which (as McCormack points out) will, quite likely, long outlive the Protestant denominations. With the Reformation, Luther and Calvin turned to catechisms to train people in the Protestant faith. After a while, catechetical training faded away as children were reared in Protestant churches and the faith was passed along from generation to another. As with the Orthodox and Catholic churches, a distinctly Protestant family was inculcated through a common form of worship, and this unique form was the hymn. For churches with a lower sacramentology, hymns were their liturgy and hymnals were their Book of Common Prayer. For many decades, the hymnal was the definitive means by which congregationalist Protestants passed on the traditions of their ancestors. American Protestants, in particular, tended to replace theology with apologetics, the sacraments with expositions of the Word, and an established liturgy with established hymns. As a result, the hymnal was—at least up until my parents’ generation—the cornerstone of the church family, the basic building block of evangelical tradition. Evangelical churches rooted in the Reformation were united by a few basic theological axioms and the hymnic tradition, and since theology is generally ignored or confused in most local congregations, hymns were almost all that concretely connected evangelicals together.

But how will Protestants continue to inculcate a tradition in the absence of (most) denominations and in the wake of the hymn’s marginalization? Or, from another perspective, how can Protestant evangelicals inculcate a church “family” when children do not remain in the churches of their parents—something which is difficult today (because children tend to move someplace very far from where they grew up) and which may one day be impossible (with the demise of denominations altogether)? What will form the backbone for an ecclesial culture which continues beyond a single generation? Or will Christians simply reinvent the wheel with each successive generation?

Case in point: We are seeing many young (post-)evangelical churches—sometimes called “emerging” churches—pop up around the country. Many of these non-denominational, non-confessional congregations write their own music and appeal to a particular generation. Here we see the embodiment of this crisis: a church without a hymnic or sacramental or confessional or catechetical tradition. The only remaining link is, of course, the reading and preaching from Holy Scripture, but this is done apart from any theological-exegetical tradition of reading. Each church is its own “interpretive community,” to use Stanley Fish’s terminology. (More needs to be said about this, but it will have to wait.)

A quick note about worship and music today. Certainly, contemporary Christian worship songs are, in many respects, the modern equivalent of the hymn. But whereas the classical hymns combined serious theology with music that has lasted for generations—even though C. S. Lewis once described hymns as fifth-rate poetry and sixth-rate music—contemporary songs are almost devoid of theological reflection, the music is generally forgettable, and, unlike with many classic hymns, not reusable. Contemporary Christian worship songs are thus ill-suited for the lofty task of inculcating a Protestant tradition. These songs are like fashion fads: they appear seemingly out of nowhere, dominate the scene for a short period of time, and then fade into oblivion with only a few left still using them, seemingly unaware that they are now out of style.

Though the “emerging” church phenomenon will, like any fashionable trend, fade away at some point in the near future, it nevertheless represents a problem that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon—viz. the de-catholicization of the church. By the “de-catholicization of the church,” I mean a re-conception of the church that sees each individual community as an autonomous enculturation of the Christian gospel. The “catholicity” of the church unites both locality and universality in the person of Jesus Christ, preventing the collapse of the church into either an isolated concretion or an abstract conception. And while many independent evangelical churches have a catholic self-identity, this seems to be subservient to the more important self-identity as a concrete, local enculturation of the gospel. The notion of enculturation, found in many recent works in missiology (see the works of Andrew Walls, for example), understands the church as a kind of “incarnation” analogous to Christ’s own incarnation as a Jew from Nazareth. Andrew Walls calls this the “incarnation principle.” The obvious problems with christology aside, this kind of ecclesiology tends to emphasize ecclesial “relevance” to the local culture as the central factor shaping each local community. While the notion of enculturation is itself unproblematic, the problem becomes acute when enculturation becomes so central that the cultural diversity of the church displaces the catholic unity of the church.

I recently told a person that I am uncomfortable with the way these young independent evangelical churches seem to be reinventing the wheel with each new generation, as if there were no Christian church before this particular community. My interlocutor responded by saying that each generation is its own culture, and thus the church needs to be newly enculturated within that generation in order to remain relevant. I am uncomfortable with this sentiment for many reasons, but I responded by employing the metaphor of a family. If the church is a family, then we are seeing the rise of a family in which the birth of each child results in the death of the parents, and each child raises itself as an orphan. Each child—each young ecclesial community—has no historical consciousness, no concrete connection to the living history of the Christian church, no parents or grandparents, so to speak. Moreover, with the passing of that particular generation or “culture,” the corresponding church must either reconstitute itself or pass away with it. For this reason, the “emerging” church movement has no future—precisely because it has no past.

In conclusion, the demise of the Protestant denominations and the loss of traditions rooted in the history of the church presents Christians in the 21st century with a future full of unknowns. The evangelical de-catholicization of the church is a problem that threatens to continue the modern individualization and privatization of the ecclesial community. Moreover, the marginalization or localization of the sacraments, liturgies, catechisms, confessions, and hymns has resulted in communities that are incapable of passing on the faith from one generation to another. As a result, young independent churches today are orphans without parents; their existence is always locked in the fleeting and intangible present, rather than rooted in the past and living out of the future. In the end, the one remaining foundation for the church continues to be and always will be Jesus Christ. He alone is the basis for the church’s identity: he grounds the enculturation of the community while maintaining its catholicity; he establishes its diversity while ensuring its universality. Because of Jesus Christ, the church of the 21st century need not fear the future, for he “is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8).

Eberhard Jüngel: postmodernity is ambiguous by definition

“What postmodernity? It barely bloomed and has already faded. At least modernity lasted a few centuries. But look at what has happened to its successor. After only a few decades, postmodernity is no longer what it intended or appeared to be. Actually, postmodernity was never able to articulate clearly what it wanted to be. And any effort to mold it into a less-than-ambiguous concept seems quite paradoxical. After all, postmodernity was an affront targeted at any claim to clarity; thus it was ambiguous by definition.”

—Eberhard Jüngel, “The Cross after Postmodernity,” trans. Uwe Siemon-Netto, One incarnate truth: Christianity’s answer to spiritual chaos (St. Louis: Concordia, 2002), 109.

What would Jesus drive? What would Jesus buy?

Over at the Touchstone Magazine blog, Mere Comments, there was a post (“Blood, Gore, and Global Warming”) back in early July on Russell Moore’s thoughts on the environment that were published in the Baptist Press. Moore’s basic point is that both sides in the environmental debate need to cool the ideological religious rhetoric—you know, the kind that says, “God is on my side, not yours!” The author of the post at Mere Comments goes on to say that “[m]y family and I make disparaging remarks when we pass SUVs in the very yuppie town near us, but still, I'm not sure I'd want to invoke Jesus' authority for my dislike of the things.”

Things become much more interesting in the comments. Touchstone is a rather conservative magazine, and I suspect the readers of the blog tend to be of the conservative, patriotic, and wealthy variety. There are many, many comments saying that global warming is a total fallacy, a conspiracy devised by (insert name here) in order to (insert evil anti-American plot here). If you want to be reminded of how ignorant some people are, feel free to read these comments at your own risk. In any case, two of the comments, I felt, were worth discussing. I have not made any grammatical or spelling corrections; they are printed as they appear in the blog:

... If a person wants it, and can afford it, he can have it. ... I can think of a number of reasons why a person might want a HMMWV. First, they look really cool--although the military ones (which are considerably larger than any of the civil versions) are waaat cooler. Second, they can go anywhere (though I don't actually know anyone who takes his off-road). Third, they can haul a ton (actually, several tons). Fourth, they need to compensate for an under-developed masculine organ (or in the case of female HMMWV drivers--the majority in this area--to compensate for its total absence). Finally, consider that a person might want one because he can afford it and desires it.

... As for SUVs: I think like or dislike of them is on the same moral level as like or dislike for mustard on your french fries. Is there any excuse for making judgments about what size car/house/yard/sterio/food processor/etc. a person "needs"? All any of us need is air to breath, food and water to stay alive and freedom to worship God. Everything after that is luxury and none of us have the right or authority to say what is an Acceptable level of luxury. Leave that to betyween each man and his Lord.

These comments once again raise the topic of consumerism in America today. The assumption is that if a person wants something—and has the material means to purchase it—then that person is perfectly free to buy that object. In other words, the only consideration is whether a person has enough money to ensure that he or she does not go into debt. Hence, the consumeristic axiom in the first of these two comments: “If a person wants it, and can afford it, he can have it.” Similarly, the second comment argues that buying a car (or any other object) has no moral or ethical implications whatsoever; it is as significant as deciding what condiment to use in a meal. Moreover, the author of this comment seems to think that financial responsibility belongs to the individual: “Leave that to betyween [sic] each man and his Lord.” Individual Christians are, according to this view, not accountable to the community of believers in terms of how they spend their money. This is a decidedly modern, Western view of the human self: one that is voluntaristic, individualistic, and private. Evangelicals think that a person is accountable sexually, so why not financially? Is it really less sinful to satisfy material urges than to satisfy sexual urges? I, for one, disagree.

At the very least, these comments demonstrate how prevalent these disturbingly anti-Christian views are in the Christian church today. This is an issue, a crisis, in which each and every pastor—regardless of one’s denomination or ecclesial tradition—must decide where he or she stands. Complacency on this topic will destroy the church—and in many ways already has. Jesus spoke more about money than about any other topic in his earthly ministry. It is our responsibility, then, to ensure that we take up our crosses and follow Christ in terms of our financial stewardship—and that does not just mean giving a little to our local church and paying our taxes.

In conclusion, this issue goes far beyond the environment, though this is still very important. But the problem of global warming raises a more primal concern: financial ethics. How should followers of Christ spend their money? What does “costly discipleship” look like in terms of how we spend money? What should we drive? Where should we live? What should we buy? I steadfastly refuse to succumb to the modern worship of the Individual, which says that such questions are not the responsibility of the local Christian community. They are. And while we fail on a daily basis to follow Christ, we should not baptize our failure to live in accordance with Christ’s call just because it is difficult or out of sync with modern culture.

NB: I have started a new poll called “What would Jesus drive?” It is meant to be humorous, but that does not mean there is anything humorous about the crisis of consumerism in the church today. But I do want to have a sense of humor. I think Jesus would appreciate that.