Resquiescat in Pacem: Madeleine L’Engle (1919-2007)

Madeleine L’Engle, the author of the classic children’s book, A Wrinkle in Time, died last Thursday, September 6, of natural causes. L’Engle was a prolific author who composed fiction for both children and adults, nonfiction, and poetry. She has been recognized for her literary achievements many times over. In addition to the Newbery Award for A Wrinkle in Time, L’Engle has received the Sophia Award (1984), the Regina Medal (1985), the ALAN Award (1986), the Kerlan Award (1990), and the National Religious Book Award. Her death is a deeply sad event for her many devoted readers. One of her most devoted readers is my wife, Amy, who has read and owns almost every single book that L’Engle has published. Amy has made it her goal to collect all of her works, and she is only two or three away. For those of you who do not wish to collect her works for yourself, you may always visit the Wheaton College Special Collections, which has housed the Madeleine L’Engle Collection since 1976. In light of her death, the Wheaton College Special Collections has created a special online photo gallery.

While her Time Quartet is the best known of all her books, L’Engle has many other works that are equally as good. One of the distinctive features of L’Engle’s fiction is her carefully constructed families which form the characters for most of her young adult fiction. The Time Quartet centers on the Murry-O’Keefe family, while the Austin family is the focus for a number of other books, including Meet the Austins, The Moon by Night, and my wife’s favorite book by L’Engle, A Ring of Endless Light. L’Engle identifies these two families as Kairos and Chronos, respectively. There is also a list of characters who bridge Kairos and Chronos, and thus weave in and out of the various books. In addition to her young adult fiction, L’Engle has written the autobiographical Crosswicks Journals, and the Genesis Trilogy, and numerous other works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. My wife’s favorite adult fiction work is A Live Coal in the Sea, which is one of two books centered on the character of Camilla Dickinson.

My favorite works by L’Engle are her books of nonfiction, particularly Penguins and Golden Calves, The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth, and Walking on Water: Personal Reflections. These books reward multiple readings. L’Engle’s wisdom and spiritual insight is on full display in these works, as she discusses art, literature, faith, Scripture, worship, and love in ways that are both deeply moving and profoundly theological. In her book on icons and idols, Penguins and Golden Calves, L’Engle coins a word that I have been using for several years now to describe the brand of evangelicalism which is both fundamentalist and literalist. She writes in response to some women who spread lies about her in the 1990s:

These women, like many of the attackers, call themselves fundamentalists, but that is not a good use of a perfectly good and useful word. I, too, am a fundamentalist, though the word is too often used pejoratively, to describe anybody who disagrees with a particular brand of Christianity. I believe the fundamentals of the faith. ... I do care about the fundamentals, which to me are the rock of love on which I stand, the Love that was great enough to create not only the magnificence of the starry sky but each one of us—the Love that will never let us go until we become what our Maker wants us to be.

So yes, I think of myself as a fundamentalist, that is, someone who still cares about fundamental things, like truth and friends and imagination and love and story and honour and compassion, none of which seem important to the fundamentalists, or literalists, or whatever word we currently use. ... [P]erhaps we need another word that is simpler than fundamentalist/literalist. A word like fundalit.

Throughout this wonderful little book, she reflects on our images of God (using Amma as well as Abba), the story of Scripture, and heaven and hell. Her other works are equally as illuminating. But I think the most appropriate way to remember L’Engle is through her poetry. She published a few works of poetry in her life, but her writing style is poetic through and through. And poems appear in most of her books at some point. Recently, her poems were collected in the book, The Ordering of Love. The following is a previously uncollected poem which, like most of her poems, focus upon the crucified and risen Christ.

“I am become like a pelican . . .”

I am become like a pelican in the wilderness....
For I have eaten ashes as it were bread,
and mingled my drink with weeping....
But thou, O LORD, shalt endure for ever.
—Psalm 102:6, 9, 12

God is dead? Well, of course God is dead!
Where have you been? Did you not see the dark
Cover the hill and strike against the cross?
We killed him then two thousand years ago
And once was not enough. We kill him now
In each denial, each unloving act.
Daily we kill him, trampling on his name,
Spitting on his word. And we are told,
And rightly, that he died between two thieves
And not two candles shining on an altar.
And yet there, too, perhaps most terribly,
He’s crucified each day by priest and those
Who take him, unaware of all the clouds
Of witnesses encompassing them in song
And prayer, who kneel there coldly unaware
Of those who suffer in the adjoining pew.
We do not understand his feast; we live
Again his crucifixion, but forget,
Each time we crucify him there again
Between those candles whose bright flame is lost
To darkened eyes, that when he died for us
After three days he rose, and still for us.
We kill him, but we cannot keep his light
From blazing forth in flame for every one
Who fouls his word and calls him dead and cries
In loneliness because his name is lost.

And yet, receiving now my heart’s true food
I feel his light rush coursing through my blood.
Nourished by his spilled wine and broken bread,
I know that my Redeemer is not dead.

Update: “Remembering Madeleine” at Semicolon Blog.

Roger Lundin: re-enchanting the world

In Books & Culture, there is a review of the recent book by my professor at Wheaton College, Roger Lundin, entitled From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority. I cannot emphasize enough how influential Dr. Lundin was for my own intellectual growth. He was the one who first introduced me to Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, M. M. Bakhtin, Czeslaw Milosz, George Steiner, and Charles Taylor. I have not yet read his new book, but I eagerly look forward to it. In the meantime, I commend this review. Here is a selection of it:

[T]here are several remarkable aspects of Lundin's argument that are worth noting here. First is Lundin's daring attempt to bring certain Christian thinkers into close conversation with the looming cultural and literary theorists of our era. It is not often that one reads criticism of this sophistication pairing Rorty and Fish with Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Lundin's mastery of literary theory is on full display here, and he writes a lucid prose that makes this mastery accessible. Along the way, he highlights the accomplishments of theorists and critics whom he believes share his desire to bring theology and the Christian tradition into closer dialogue with the reigning priests of the "hermeneutic of suspicion": in particular, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Charles Taylor, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Paul Ricoeur all receive ample consideration. In addition, the study considers major American writers (besides Emerson) in the light of the cultural shift charted in the book, particularly Emily Dickinson, Henry Adams, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and that honorary American W. H. Auden. It is thus a model for those of us who are looking to engage current literary theory with the resources of the Christian tradition.

But From Nature to Experience is out for much bigger game than merely outlining a view of intellectual history. It is an attempt to recover lost wisdom and reassert lost knowledge. A crucial moment occurs at the end of the first long section, in Chapter 4, entitled "'Diminished Things': Literature and the Disenchantment of the World." Arguing that we can "re-enchant" the world, Lundin enlists the aid here of Ricoeur, whose emphasis on teleology, eschatology, and destiny are the antidotes for an unbalanced hermeneutic of suspicion. Ricoeur, along with Gadamer and Bakhtin, "acknowledge[s] the spiritual and epistemological limits of naturalism," and in echoing these theorists, Lundin reveals the burden of his overall argument: "literature and theory must recuperate certain resources that naturalism has suppressed or forgotten." Or, as Alister McGrath argues even more bluntly in his book The Reenchantment of Nature, we must "reclaim the idea of nature as God's creation and act accordingly." Lundin is taking an approach similar to McGrath's into the field of literary theory, desiring to "re-enchant" literature, and thus turning current theory on its head.

... The book ends powerfully with Karl Barth's meditations on the "real mystery of Easter," which Lundin pits against Dante's version of Limbo as a place of hopeless sighing and never-ending discussion (rather like some of the departmental meetings I've attended lately). Lundin cites Dorothy Sayers' remarks about the citizens of Limbo: "Their failure lay in not imagining better … . [They fall] short in the imagination of ecstasy."

—Harold K. Bush, “Re-Enchanting Emerson” in Books and Culture

PET III: Missional Theology

Problems in Ecclesiology Today III:
Missional theology—in vogue or indispensable?

The last decade has seen a meteoric rise in interest in “missional theology.” Much of this interest can be directly traced to the seminal works by Lesslie Newbigin (The Open Secret; The Gospel in a Pluralist Society) and David Bosch (Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission). Some of the current major names in the field of missional theology and missional living include Darrell Guder (The Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America), George Hunsberger (The Church Between Gospel and Culture: The Emerging Mission in North America), J. Andrew Kirk (What is Mission?), Alan J. Roxburgh (The Missional Leader), and Michael Frost (Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture).

The term “missional church” is often thrown around in “emergent” circles, but the theological weight of the concept is much more extensive than its current “in” status might suggest. Rather than construct my own missional theology—a small attempt at which you can read in my ‘Spirit of the Lord’ series—I will outline the central features of missional theology and then examine a few problematic areas in current missional literature that require more careful explication.

First, the two central features of a missional theology:

1. God is a missionary God. Missional theology often begins with the Latin term missio Dei (“mission of God”), a term coined by German missiologist, Karl Hartenstein, in 1934. The theological term missio Dei underscores the fact that mission is antecedently a divine event before it is ever a reality within the life of the church. Mission is essential to the very nature of God as a being-in-act—a being-in-mission, so to speak. Mission properly belongs to the triune life of God; only because God is a God of mission is the church a community of mission. In other words, mission is first and foremost an attribute of God, not an activity of the church. Furthermore, the missio Dei is defined by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, as the missionary God incarnate. In him, the mission of God becomes a concrete reality ‘for us and our salvation.’

2. The church is a missionary church. Because God is a missionary God, the church commissioned by Jesus Christ is a missionary church. God is missional by nature; so, too, the church is missional by nature. The eternal missio Dei precedes, grounds, and sanctifies the missio communionis (“mission of the community”) as the creaturely embodiment of and witness to the eschatological kingdom of God. By framing the mission of the church within the prevenient mission of God, missional theology seeks to redress the missiological faults of the past—viz. viewing mission as the work of the church in converting the world, rather than viewing mission as the work of God in reconciling the world in which the church is called into being as God’s creaturely agents for the fulfillment of Christ’s apostolic commission. The church is a missionary community, but its missional character is encompassed by the work of God. The work of the church is always preceded, accompanied, and followed by the work of the triune God. Moreover, the church’s missional identity is not one part of its identity among other parts; on the contrary, its missional character is definitive of the church itself as a whole. Its being and act as the ekklesia is missional from beginning to end. The church is missional without remainder.

These two very simple axioms are the foundation for any missional theology. Despite their brevity, a lot of important theological work is accomplished in these two axiomatic principles. The benefit of missional theology to missiology is immense: it grounds the work of the church in the antecedent work of God; it provides a christological basis for the church’s involvement in culture; it offers a relational-communal account of mission rooted in the triunity of God. A missional framework benefits systematic theology by offering a way of connecting the being-in-act of God with the being-in-act of the church; that is, missional theology connects the doctrine of God with ecclesiology in a way that does not collapse the one into the other.

The potential problems with missional theology arise when we seek to understand the relation between the first and second axioms above. What is the material connection between the missionary God and the missionary church? Obviously, we would want to begin by speaking about Jesus Christ. But what then is the connection between Christ and the church? In other words, even though missional theology provides an important and very helpful way of speaking about the connection between God and the ecclesial community, the relation between dogmatic loci cannot be merely semantic. This is where the seams begin to appear in contemporary works of missional theology. My goal here will be to point out the problem areas and offer a few thoughts about how we might approach a more coherent and consistent theology of mission.

1. Participation. Most theologians concerned with missional theology connected the first and second axioms through an appeal to the concept of participation—viz. participation in Christ (participatio Christi). There is certainly a long tradition here, but what do we mean by participation? Most of the same theologians will say that we participate in Christ through the power of the Spirit. But when does this participation occur? And how? Do we participate in Christ through the sacrament of baptism, as classical theologians would suggest? Is our participation a result of the Logos assuming human nature in the incarnation? Or is our participation a moment-by-moment reality, always actualized in the present through the Spirit of Christ? Must we pick only one? And if there is a way of affirming all of these and more, how do we understand the relation between them?

The central problem here is, of course, christology. We want to affirm that there is a participation in Christ, but we also need to articulate this in a way that carefully attends to the various theological issues at stake. Unfortunately, there is a distinct lack of such attention in a vast majority of current missional literature. In particular, there is a lack of attention to christology, despite the interest in Jesus Christ as the concrete incarnation of the mission of God. For example, our participation in Christ cannot and must not infringe upon Christ’s utter uniqueness and his perfect work of reconciliation, in which we only participate as faithful recipients, never as agents. In our explication of the participatio Christi, we must be very careful to distinguish between the person and work of the Mediator and the being and life of the church. No affirmation of the church as the corpus Christi can ever allow us to blur this all-important distinction. Missional theology tends to speak about the church’s participation in Christ in an active sense, because it is focused on the missional character of the church’s existence. But here is one place where we must not allow the interest in the church’s work to obscure the unique, antecedent, and all-sufficient work of Jesus Christ. These are the kinds of theological questions that tend to be ignored or overlooked.

2. Social Trinitarianism. A second area of major missional interest is the doctrine of the Trinity. Since missional theology focuses on the relational dimension of both God and church, it generally follows that many (most?) missional theologians hold to a social doctrine of the Trinity. I suspect a couple things contribute to this: (1) the assumption that only a social doctrine of the Trinity can sustain a relational theology of mission; and (2) a poor historical and systematic education which tends to see the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of a binary opposition between an Augustinian-psychological model and an Eastern-social model. Neither of these are accurate.

Space and time permitting, I would offer a more systematic account of the doctrine of the Trinity, one that would fulfill the central interests of missional theology while also doing justice to the complexities and distinctions at stake in the doctrine of God’s triunity. Instead, all I have time to say here is the following: (1) Barth offers a third model which is neither tritheistic nor modalistic, and which fully sustains a relational ontology; and (2) because of its faulty notion that we can read off human relations from the intra-trinitarian relations, social trinitarianism opens the door to hierarchicalism (since there is clearly submission and hierarchy within the Trinity). We do not need a God who models our ideal vision of human relationality in order for such an ideal to be authorized by the gospel. We need, rather, to look toward Christ and confess, with Paul, that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Paul offers a relational ontology that is far more radical than any social doctrine of the Trinity. This one verse from Galatians affirms unity and equality in terms of social, racial, national, economic, political, and biological identity. We do not need a social trinitarianism; instead, we need a radical christocentrism.

3. The Immanent and Economic Trinity. Here we begin to wade into more abstract territory; the theological air surrounding this subject is much more rarefied. To put the question as simply as possible, what defines the mission of God in eternity, i.e., in the immanent Trinity? Is it defined by the economic event of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit? Or is it rather defined by a larger concept (e.g., love) which encompasses the missio Dei as a whole, in both its immanent and economic manifestations? Is the mission of God a mission of love that is then contingently embodied in Jesus Christ in relation to the cosmos? Or is the mission of God from all eternity a mission of reconciliation constituted by the event of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection?

I leave these as questions, but not because they are less significant. Their importance is related to the other problems already mentioned. For example, how we define the mission of God directly relates to how we conceive of the church’s own mission. If the mission of God is to love the other (whether an other within the Trinity or outside in creation), then this makes it easy to unite the work of God and the work of the church. But if the mission of God is to reconcile the world to God in Christ (cf. 2 Cor. 5:19)—i.e., if the immanent is defined by the economic—then we are forced to distinguish between the two much more carefully. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that love and reconciliation are somehow irreconcilable. I only mean that it makes a difference where we begin in understanding the missio Dei.

4. The Kingdom of God. Missional theologians love to speak about the kingdom. But there is a noticeable lack of attention to the relation between church and kingdom. On the one hand, the church is clearly not the eschatological kingdom of God: we are radically disunified, we are plagued by sin, and the world remains a broken and fragmented place. On the other hand, the church is quite clearly the eschatological kingdom of God: when Jesus sent out the “seventy” (Luke 10:1-12), he told them to say to the people wherever they went, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” There seems to be a lack of eschatological reservation in the mind of Jesus. Where his disciples are, there the kingdom is present.

So how do we understand the relation between church and kingdom? Clearly, the church is not a stop-gap between Jesus and New Jerusalem. But neither is the church we encounter here and now the final manifestation of the promised new community. What then is the relation? What is the connection between ecclesiology and eschatology?

I have sought to answer this question in my ‘Spirit of the Lord’ series. The next post, in fact, addresses this very problem (§10.6.3). My solution is to speak of a “threefold eschaton”—that is, three temporal modalities of the one eschaton. There is a past modality, a present modality, and a future modality of the eschaton. The past modality is Jesus Christ himself: he is the concrete embodiment and constitutive actualization of the eschaton. This is why we can say that the kingdom of God is identified in the New Testament with the person of Christ himself. The kingdom is near because Jesus himself is near. The present modality is the present ecclesial community: this is the mode of the eschaton under the form of shame, suffering, and death. The church here and now follows the path of the Suffering Servant, the Crucified One. Our journey is the way of the cross (via crucis). I call this modality of the eschaton the corpus Christi (“body of Christ”) in order to identify it with the Crucified Christ. The future modality is the coming eschatological kingdom: this is the mode of the eschaton under the form of glory, joy, and resurrection. The kingdom to come follows the path of the Resurrected and Ascended One. Their journey is the way of the New Jerusalem, the way of new life. I call this modality of the eschaton the regnum Dei (“reign of God”) in order to distinguish it from the present-tense modality of the eschaton and to identify it with God’s perfect and eternal reign over creation. The past-tense modality is definitive and basic for the other two; the present-tense modality is dependent and anticipatory; and the future-tense modality is final and unsurpassable.

My threefold conception of the eschaton (which owes a lot to George Hunsinger) accomplishes everything a missional theology seeks to affirm regarding the church’s embodiment of the kingdom. The advantage is that I have a way of carefully articulating the distinctions between each modality (see my post for fuller explanations) that can withstand theological scrutiny. It may not be the best way of articulating the distinctions, but it at least proffers one possibility for understanding the relation between ecclesiology and eschatology.

In addition to these four problematic areas in missional theology, one would need to consider many others. These would include the doctrine of the imago Dei, the understanding of the relation between Christ’s body and the Body of Christ, and the basic doctrines of justification and sanctification, which often seem presupposed or ignored in most theological works on mission.

In the end, is missional theology simply ‘in vogue’ or is it indispensable? I hope the latter. Missional thinking has much to offer the systematic theologian who is concerned about the concrete connection between system and community, between orthodoxy and orthopraxis. Currently, the term “missional” is in vogue, but it need not remain only a passing fad. Hopefully, in time, it will move out of the realm of pop theology and into the purview of serious theology.

Online Resources:

• Allelon: A Movement of Missional Leaders.
• Moving into the Neighborhood. An Allelon blog about missional living in suburbia. Connected with this is a paper by my pastor, Todd Hiestand, entitled, “The Gospel and the God-Forsaken: The Challenge of the Missional Church in Suburbia.”
• meremission.org.
• Two earlier posts of mine on the topic of missional theology: God’s Mission and Our Mission; John Franke and Social Trinitarianism.
  

Impromptu theo-blog conference in Princeton

From right to left: Shane Wilkins, yours truly, W. Travis McMaken, and James (a recent graduate of our alma mater and new colleague, whose wife took this photo) standing in front of the Yankee Doodle Tap Room, part of the Nassau Inn in Princeton, NJ, after hashing out the ethical complexities posed by the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. Also present during this meeting of the minds but gone by picture-time: Chris and Peter.

(Photo shamelessly stolen from WTM.)

Education should not be relevant

It is one of the most deeply rooted superstitions of our age that the purpose of education is to benefit those who receive it. What we teach in school, what subjects we encourage in universities and the methods of instruction are all subject to the one overarching test: what do the kids get out of it? And this test soon gives way to another, yet more pernicious in its effect, but no less persuasive in the thinking of educationists: is it relevant? And by “relevant” is invariably meant “relevant to the interests of the kids themselves”.

From these superstitions have arisen all the recipes for failure that have dominated our educational systems: the proliferation of ephemeral subjects, the avoidance of difficulties, methods of teaching that strive to maintain interest at all costs – even at the cost of knowledge. Whether we put the blame on Rousseau, whose preposterous book Emile began the habit of sentimentalising the process whereby knowledge is transferred from one brain to another, on John Dewey, whose hostility to “rote learning” and old-fashioned discipline led to the fashion for “child-centred learning”, or simply on the egalitarian ideas which were bound to sweep through our schools when teachers were no longer properly remunerated – in whatever way we apportion blame, it is clear that we have entered a period of rapid educational decline, in which some people learn masses, but the masses learn little or nothing at all.

True teachers do not provide knowledge as a benefit to their pupils; they treat their pupils as a benefit to knowledge. Of course they love their pupils, but they love knowledge more. And their overriding concern is to pass on that knowledge by lodging it in brains that will last longer than their own. Their methods are not “child-centred” but “knowledge-centred”, and the focus of their interest is the subject, rather than the things that might make that subject for the time being “relevant” to matters of no intellectual concern. Any attempt to make education relevant risks reducing it to those parts that are of relevance to the uneducated – which are invariably the parts with the shortest life span. A relevant curriculum is one from which the difficult core of knowledge has been excised, and while it may be relevant now, it will be futile in a few years’ time. Conversely, irrelevant-seeming knowledge, when properly acquired, is not merely a discipline that can be adapted and applied; it is likely to be exactly what is needed in circumstances that nobody foresaw.

—Roger Scruton, “Culture Counts” (H/T Douglas Knight)

Evangelicals for Human Rights

From the home page of the Evangelicals for Human Rights (EHR):

Evangelicals for Human Rights (EHR) seeks to reaffirm the centrality of human rights as an unshakable biblical obligation fundamental to an evangelical Christian social and moral vision. We oppose the weakening of these commitments by the United States—especially (but not exclusively) in relation to the practice of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of persons detained by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the war on terror. This initiative is offered by Christians who agree that the threat against our nation’s security is real and who support our nation’s legitimate interests. We do not agree, however, with those who believe that national security may be secured by any and every imaginable means, such as the torture or cruel treatment of detainees. We believe that human rights protections apply in any and every situation, including the one we now face, and that the seeming necessity of weakening such protections in just this one exceptional case should be perceived as a temptation requiring determined resistance. We believe that any resort to torture is a violation of God-given human rights which Christians must strenuously resist.

EHR resources:

• EHR has an Evangelical Declaration against Torture which you can sign. It is well worth reading and passing along to others.
  
• There is a whole page of church resources, including articles, essays, links, and a Bible study on torture and the cross.
• David Gushee, the head of EHR, has an excellent page on “defining torture” and why the EHR has decided to not use a definition.
• There is also an excellent discussion of the so-called “ticking time-bomb” scenario that comes from Gushee’s article in Theology Today.
  

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.