Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Giving Up On Self-Defense
What this reveals is that for the most part violence is already understood to be illegitimate by most people in most circumstances. Very few are willing to argue in favor of unilateral aggression, or retributive violence. The difference between a pacifist and most people is that a pacifist says, " even in the case of violent threats I choose to refrain from responding violently." So we are not arguing about 99% of violent scenarios. We are arguing about 1%.
I could go into detail about various hypothetical scenarios, or historical scenarios arguing from a pacifist viewpoint. I could point out (as I have in the past) why these scenarios are dishonest, but here I want to make a different point about why it is crucial to give up on self-defense even in that vanishingly rare hypothetical situation. The reason is this: self-defense inevitably becomes a cover for other types of violence.
Think about the wars the US has waged in the past century. Which one of them was not justified on the basis of self-defense? Even in the most extreme cases of obvious unilateral aggression such as the most recent Iraq War the justification was "weapons of mass-destruction", "Iraq-AlQaeda link", "defending Iraqi people from an evil dictator" etc... The doctrine of pre-emptive warfare is just self-defense stretched beyond the breaking point. WWI? Self-defense. WWII? Self-defense. Korean War? Self-defense? Vietnam? Self-defense. We've been defending ourselves from Nazis, communists, and terrorists over and over again by spending billions of dollars to fly overseas and bomb other countries.
In the case of an individual - when am I entitled to defend myself with violence? When someone physically attacks me? When they threaten me with a gun? When they loom over me menacingly? When they verbally abuse me? Is me feeling scared a sufficient justification for violent response? How can I even make a wise decision about proportional response to danger when I am in a state of terror? It seems like begging for a tragedy to me.
As long as we keep self-defense on the table it will continue to be a universal justification for any kind of violence that we can pretend falls under that umbrella. We adamantly refuse to see ourselves as anything other than paragons of nobility and peaceful intentions beset by violent bullies on all sides. If you want peace the only option is to give up the ways of war.
Speaking theologically I think this is a reason we need to cling to some language about Christ that is repugnant to some feminists and liberation theologians. To understand Christ as submitting himself to evil, or as a willing sacrifice may indeed be problematic from the perspective of victims of violence and the oppressed. It certainly has been abused by those in power to encourage passive acceptance of injustice. I understand this critique - but is there anything more urgent for those who walk the corridors of power or for any budding peacemaker to grasp than the truth that we absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, return evil for evil? Is it not close to the heart of the gospel to say that we must endure calamitous injustice rather than lift a finger in retribution? Isn't that what Christ actually does on Good Friday and Easter?
Monday, November 9, 2009
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
God Out of Bounds: Brain/Mind Science
Monday, November 2, 2009
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Cliche Driven Pastors
There are definitely worse books out there than Warren's drivel, but there are also much better. Pastors it seems are largely reading fluff books from the Christian living genre, instead of serious theology. More pastors have read something by Joel Osteen than by folks like Bonhoeffer, Yoder, Hauerwas, Brueggeman, Wright, Barth, Wink, Niebuhr, or Tillich. We are more likely to be influenced by Rob Bell or Mark Driscoll than by David Hart or Karl Rahner.
Despite how it sounds this isn't an elitist whine. It is anti-elitist. I have no problem with the C.S. Lewis popular style of writing. Marcus Borg, Brian McLaren, Sara Miles and Carol Howard have all written books of this type I enjoyed and have encouraged others to read. But if anyone should be mining the riches of James Alison, or Marilyn McCord Adams, or Gustavo Gutierrez, shouldn't it be pastors? How else is this kind of vibrant beautiful theology going to get into our churches? Don't we lose something if the only level of discourse we are having is at the "purpose driven" level?
Friday, October 30, 2009
Hamas Not Using Hostages
A key defense of powerful nations that terrorize with their military is that civilian casualties are unavoidable because the real terrorists fight dirty using hostages. When Israel besieged Gaza last year they alleged that Hamas was using mosques and hospitals and schools as weapon storage lockers and stuffing them full of civilians in order to incite international outrage when Israel bombed those sites. According to the UN this was a lie. When Israel bombed these locations, the civilians were there, yes, but not the armaments.
Ken Silverstein interviews "Desmond Travers was one of the four members of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which produced the controversial Goldstone Report":
We found no evidence that Hamas used civilians as hostages. I had expected to find such evidence but did not. We also found no evidence that mosques were used to store munitions. Those charges reflect Western perceptions in some quarters that Islam is a violent religion. Gaza is densely populated and has a labyrinth of makeshift shanties and a system of tunnels and bunkers. If I were a Hamas operative the last place I’d store munitions would be in a mosque. It’s not secure, is very visible, and would probably be pre-targeted by Israeli surveillance. There are a many better places to store munitions. We investigated two destroyed mosques—one where worshippers were killed—and we found no evidence that either was used as anything but a place of worship.
So Israel's justifications for targeting these locations proves to be baseless. Will people stop screaming "anti-semitism" now every time the subject of war crimes comes up in relation to Israel? Probably not.
Here's the thing about the hostage argument: if a madman is holding hostages in a building the solution to the problem is never going to be to bomb the building. Negotiate. Wait them out. Prepare to pounce when they make a mistake. Do not, under any circumstances, start lobbing grenades into the room with the hostages! Hamas was not holding hostages, but even if they had been it would be unconscionable that Israel launch an assault under those circumstances.
Yes the terrorists fight unfairly. Sure their tactics are designed to inflict maximum international pressure on Israel. So why give them more ammunition by bombing mosques and hospitals? It just proves there are two madmen in this situation and they are holding everyone else hostage between them.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
But What Will Protect Us From Orthodoxy?
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Doctrinal Orthodoxy Doesn't Work
The story goes like this: liberal protestantism, infected with natural theology, a loose-cannon Holy Spirit, romantic progressivism, the relics of christendom, (or your favorite theological punching bag), sold its soul to the national-socialists and contributed to the Holocaust. Barth in a stroke of unmitigated brilliance saw the doctrinal roots of this problem and courageously spoke against it, helping to write the Declaration of Barmen and thus nipping that problem forever in the bud.
The moral of this story is that if your theology is not Barthian you are a Nazi (or will soon become one).
This is not a new story. It is the same story that has always been used to command doctrinal orthodoxy. If you don't hold the right ideas, you will be responsible for disaster x. The church has spent the past two millenia, for the most part, doing exhaustive historiography to support this idea. Every bad thing that has happened, ever, has been explained somewhere by a champion of all that is pure and noble as stemming from heterodoxy. Orthodox doctrine could protect us from all of this, they allege. The question which never seems to get asked is, "does it work?"
I mean, according to the orthodox, the right doctrine has been available for a long time and it hasn't changed. It's been out there. People have believed it. Lots of people. Did it work? Did it protect them from... whatever it is this stuff is supposed to protect us from?
Orthodoxy certainly hasn't succeeded in eradicating heresy. Every heresy the church has ever named is alive and flourishing today. There are probably more Arians and Unitarians in the USA today than Chalcedonians. There are definitely more semi-pelagians around than "saved by grace through faith" reformed-types. Orthodoxy doesn't eliminate or diminish heresy - it's the opposite actually. Orthodoxy is the ground-of-being for heresy and vice-versa. They can't live without each other.
Even if orthodox doctrine could somehow "protect" us from bad ideas - and there are plenty of bad ideas out there - so what? Who made it a priority to be protected from the intellectually inane and the logically laughable? Besides that isn't what people claim. People claim orthodox ideas can actually save us from life-threatening catastrophes like the holocaust. So show me, in practical, non-ideological terms, how orthodoxy has accomplished this in the past. How many Jews did Barth save because he had the correct theological insights? Where are the concentration camps that would have existed if it hadn't been for his courageous opposition to the heresies of German liberal protestantism?
Honestly. I'd love to see the proof. Show me how orthodoxy protects us from something deeply and obviously harmful. You can't use Hell, either. Why? Here's why: if you don't finish reading this sentence a meteor will fall out of the sky and crush you where you sit. Aren't you glad you read that sentence now? I just saved you from a terrible fate you can't ever prove wasn't going to happen if you hadn't done as I commanded. Be grateful.
For the most part, ironically, I am a pretty orthodox guy (yes in my own estimation the same as it is with anyone else). But I'm really tired, in theological discussions, of everything being cast in apocalyptic terms as if the consequences of disagreement were really anything other than the usual social awkwardness of realizing that reasonable people frequently come to different conclusions, and yes sometimes those conclusions are downright wacky. Wackiness, however, is not a credible cause of genocide.