What I Love About the Roman Catholic Church

I recently put up a blog post that begins with some pretty harsh criticism of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.  I am committed to speaking the truth as I know it in this blog, but I must admit that when that call to speak the truth leads to criticism of the Roman Catholic Church it feels a bit like I’m biting the hand that once fed me, and fed me very well.  My Master of Divinity degree is from the School of Theology and Ministry of Seattle University.  Seattle University is a Catholic university, specifically a Jesuit university.  Seattle University welcomed me and a great many other Protestant students into the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies of the School of Theology and Ministry.  There, where my teachers were mostly Catholic, I learned the joy and the challenge of Christian ministry.  I learned theology and church history.  I learned the practice of prayer and other spiritual disciplines.  I was challenged and supported, encouraged and criticized, all with an eye to making me a competent minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  I will forever be grateful to the SU School of Theology and Ministry and to the many wonderful Catholic people there who were my teachers and my classmates.

There is much that I truly love about the Roman Catholic Church.  I love its ritual.  The Roman Catholic mass is a worship service of great beauty and spiritual power.  In the mass the symbols of the Christian faith are lifted up and surrounded with actions of devotion, actions of love.  The ritual of the mass works in my soul, drawing me to God with a power beyond words.  I wish the Eucharistic table of the Roman Catholic Church were open to me, for I know that receiving the body and blood of Jesus Christ as part of a well-done Catholic mass would have great spiritual meaning for me. 

The Roman Catholic Church is immensely rich in the ways of spirituality, ways that I’m afraid much of the Protestant world has lost.  The Church follows the traditional Christian calendar more faithfully than many Protestant churches do.  In the Catholic Church the repeated rhythms of the church year speak powerfully to the people and draw them to Jesus Christ.  The Roman Catholic Church has many spiritual traditions and practices that aren’t limited to the mass.  Franciscan spirituality celebrates God’s creation and the divinity apparent in nature.  Benedictine spirituality stresses hospitality that is beautiful and welcoming for all people.  Jesuit spirituality is strong in its commitment to quality education and to social justice in the world.  The Catholic social teaching, something that even Catholics call the best kept secret of the Church, is a powerful voice for social and economic justice for working people and for the poor around the world.  The Vatican has discouraged it, but the liberation theology that Catholic people have developed, especially in Latin America, continues that strand of the Catholic tradition that calls and works for justice.  Many great Catholic people have given their lives in the struggle for justice.  Archbishop Oscar Romero is but one of the better known of them. 

So yes, there is much that I love about the Roman Catholic Church.  That love is not diminished by my critical attitude toward much of what the church’s hierarchy has done and is doing.  The Roman Catholic Church nurtures Christian faith in hundreds of millions of people around the globe.  Catholic people do much great work in the causes of peace and justice.  I pray that my occasional criticisms of other aspects of the Church will not obscure my great love for and appreciation of Catholic spirituality and the Catholic commitment to social justice.

The Idiocy of Ideology

Ideology is idiocy, and we have just seen a prime example of that fact.  The Roman Catholic Church has just reaffirmed its opposition to the use of condoms to help control the spread of AIDS.  When I heard that news report I said to my wife “If I believed in hell I’d hope that they burned in it for that one.”  That is an uncharitable response I know.  It is, I suppose, and un-Christian one.  So be it.  The Roman Catholic Church does much good in Africa providing medical care to victims of AIDS.  For that God bless them.  Their opposition to the use of condoms, however, is simply incomprehensible.  It is incomprehensible everywhere, but it is particularly unconscionable in the pandemic stricken continent of Africa.  The Catholic hierarchy is a bunch of celibate, mostly white men who cannot possibly understand human sexuality or the cultures of Africa, yet they arrogate to themselves the right to tell people whom they cannot possibly understand how they must behave.  That anyone at all listens to them on topics such as this is beyond comprehension.  Yes, some macho African men resist using condoms.  Yes, condoms aren't always available everywhere.  In the news report I heard some Catholics were advocating these facts as reasons for the Church’s opposition.  Those things are, of course, no reason for opposition to advocating the use of condoms at all.  More importantly, they aren't why the Church opposes the use of condoms in all situations.  For decades the Roman Catholic Church has based its prohibition on all types of birth control, including condoms, on the thoroughly specious notion that any act of sexual intercourse is immoral unless it carries with it at least the possibility of procreation.  These isolated, privileged, celibate men have for a long time now tried to tell everyone else what is and what isn’t moral in the realm of  human sexuality.  No reputable psychologist today would say that procreation was the only psychological, or for that matter spiritual, function of human sexuality, yet men who have taken a vow never to engage in any sexual act (not that all of them keep that vow of course) claim to know better.  The Catholic prohibition of the use of any measure of birth control in any circumstance has become a classic example of the idiocy of ideology.

An idea, or a set of ideas, becomes an ideology when those who believe it adhere to it even when the application of the idea or set of ideas to real life has destructive consequences for the people rather than the positive consequences the idea’s advocates claim that it has.  Examples are not hard to find.  In the Soviet Union, with which the readers of this blog know that I have considerable familiarity, the Communist Party clung to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism for decades after it had become obvious to anyone with eyes to see that the ideology was having disastrous consequences for the people of the USSR.  Marxism-Leninism was the justification for Stalin’s slaughter of millions of people.  It was the ideology behind the forced collectivization of agriculture, which led to mass starvation and greatly reduced the agricultural output of the Soviet Union.  It was the ideology behind the planned economy that kept millions of people in poverty and produced a poor standard of living for nearly everyone, creating inadequate numbers of shoddy consumer products and hampering innovation and creativity throughout the economy.  It was the ideology behind the regime’s strict control of the people’s intellectual activity, restricting access to useful, accurate information and distorting the view of history (and of everything else) that the regime taught to the people.  Yes, by the 1970s at least the leaders may not have believed the ideology themselves (although I argued at the time that they did), but they continued to use it to justify their own privileged lives and their monopoly of power.  The Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union is perhaps the 20^th centuries prime example of the idiocy of ideology.

We have another one right here in the United States.  It is the conservative ideology of the Republican Party.  The Republican Party continues to insist that government is a bad thing and that free market economics will bring great benefits to all Americans.  It simply isn’t true, and it is obvious that it isn’t true.  The tax policy that was begun under Reagan in the 1980s and continued by every President since, including so far President Obama, of giving big tax breaks to the wealthy has produced an ever increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few and threatens to destroy the American middle class altogether.  The deregulation of the financial sector of the economy, including its repeal of the law that prevented banks from engaging in financial speculation, crashed the economy in 2008, leading to high unemployment and a collapse of the housing market, from neither of which have we yet recovered nor will we for a long time to come.  Every supposedly advanced country in the world other than the United States knows that the only health care delivery system that makes any sense and that has the ability to provide health care for all of the people is a government run, single payer system.  Republican ideology says that we will all be better off if left to the tender mercies of the private insurance companies, whose only motive is profit and who have shown again and again that they care about nothing else.  So the Republicans prevented the passage of any meaningful health care reform, and the Obama Administration now expects us to be satisfied with half measures that are nothing but warmed over Republican ideas from decades past.  As a result, millions of Americans still have no health insurance, nor will they any time soon.  The insurance mandate in the Obama health care plan nevertheless delivers millions of new victims to the insurance companies and has no potential for creating truly universal health insurance coverage.  Yet the Republicans continue to attack even the half measure that was passed because, they say, anything run by the government is bad and anything run by private industry is good; and it just isn’t true.  The Republican Party is the party of a failed set of ideas that have become an ideology as the Republicans continue to advocate it despite its undeniably disastrous consequences for the people.

All of these examples—the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control, the way Marxism-Leninism functioned in the Soviet Union, and the policies that the Republican Party advocates in the US today—shed a bright light on the idiocy of ideology.  Many other examples could be given (religious fundamentalism of all stripes is a very good one), but I think the point is made.  Much of the harm that people do to each other in this world is a consequence of ideology.  It is a consequence of people putting ideas ahead of human welfare.  It is a consequence of people sticking to ideas even when the destructive effect of those ideas has become undeniable.  Ideology is idiocy.  Are we humans ever going to learn that obvious truth?

A Lesson from Moscow and Prague

Once, back in 1968 and 1969, I encountered, if only in a superficial way, a significant event in world affairs  I think there is a lesson in that encounter that I want to share.  In the summer of 1968 I was a participant in Indiana University’s Russian language study tour program.  We spent five weeks at the IU campus in Bloomington, Indiana, intensively studying the Russian language.  We then flew to the Soviet Union, where we spent the next five weeks touring the country and continuing our Russian language studies in the place where people actually spoke the language.  It was an invaluable experience.  The tour group of which I was a part spent a week in Leningrad, ten days at the Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages in Piatgosk (now Piatigosk Foreign Languages University, a few days in Tbilisi, Georgia and a few days in Kiev, Ukraine.    Then we flew to Moscow.  We were there for one full week, but there is, one memory of that week in Moscow that overshadows all the others.  It is that memory that I want to share here, as it may be of some historical interest to people other than myself.   It is at least an unusual and, I hope, an interesting story.

In 1968 Czechoslovakia, as the country was then called before its more recent split into The Czech Republic and Slovakia, was experiencing what was known as the Prague Spring.  Czechoslovakia was part of the Soviet bloc, a member of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet's counterpart to NATO, and was ruled by its Communist Party that the Soviets had installed in power after World War II.  The Prague Spring was a period of political and economic liberalization.  It was led by Alexander Dubček, the head of the Communist Party, and Ludvik Svoboda, the President of the country.  (Coincidentally, the word svoboda means freedom in many Slavic languages, including Czech and Russian.)   Dubček said that he wanted to create “socialism with a human face.”  The reforms of the Prague Spring included loosening restrictions on speech, travel, and the media as well as administrative decentralization.  The Soviets were, to say the least, not pleased.

On the morning of Wednesday, August 21, 1968, a few days before we were scheduled to leave the Soviet Union for home, we were on our Intourist bus going somewhere or other.  One of our number was sitting in the back of the bus reading the morning newspaper, either Pravda or Izvestia, I can't remember which came out in the morning.  All of a sudden we heard him cry out, in English:  “Holy shit!  They invaded Czechoslovakia!”  Indeed they had, they being the Soviet Union and every member of the Warsaw Pact except Romania.  The Soviets had sent in the Red Army to put an end to the reform movement in Czechoslovakia, a movement that the Russian Communist leadership apparently feared threatened even their own tight control in the Soviet Union.  After all, if people got the idea that Soviet-style Communism could be reformed into something that worked better for the people but that threatened the control of the Party bosses, there's no telling what might happen!  So they sent in the tanks.  They sent in the soldiers.  They put a forced end to the Prague Spring. 

Of course, the Soviet press didn't say that the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact underlings had “invaded” Czechoslovakia.  They said that the armies of the fraternal socialist nations had responded to a request from the people of Czechoslovakia to put down the counterrevolution that was being fomented and financed by the CIA.  We knew we were in the middle of what could become a pretty tense situation.  I don't think we ever thought that the United States would really use military force to defend the Czechoslovak reformers, but that seemed at least a remote possibility.  We knew we'd never get the straight story from the Soviet press, so each morning for our remaining few days in Moscow one of our members went to the British Embassy, which was not far from our hotel, and got the news release the British were putting out each day with accurate information about what was happening. 

The next day we were supposed to go to something called VDNKh, the Russian initials for something called the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy.  It was a sort of permanent Soviet Union wide exhibition center that was a propaganda piece for the Communists.  I've never been there, but I've seen pictures.  It touted the Russian space program.  It glorified the huge industrial projects that the Soviets were so proud of but that did so little to improve the life of the average Russian.  We agreed that we wouldn't go, and we told our Intourist guide and monitor that because of what her country had just done we refused to go listen to a day's worth of propaganda about what a great place her country was.  We didn't blame her.  She was a very pleasant and helpful young woman.  I don't know if she understood what we were doing, but she didn't try to talk us out of it.  Instead of going to VDNKh we bought Stolichnaya Vodka at the hard currency store of the Hotel Rossia just across the Moscow River from our hotel and sat in our rooms shouting toasts to  Dubček and Sbovoda into the hanging light fixture in the center of the room, where we assumed the bug was planted.  That may sound a bit risky, but in those days the Soviets really didn't care what people like us thought.  They cared what their own people were doing.  If any Soviet citizen had been caught with us drinking toasts to the Czechs that person would have gotten into a lot of trouble, but the Soviets really didn't care about us.  So we drank their good vodka and let them have it verbally, assuming but not really knowing that some low level KGB operative would hear us through the hidden microphone that we assumed was planted in the room.

Our hotel was right across the Moscow River from Red Square and the Kremlin.  From that vantage point we saw a remarkable thing.  The Soviets had, and I suppose the Russians still have, a practice they followed when a foreign head of state was visiting Moscow.  They would put crossed flags of the Soviet Union and of the nation of the visiting dignitary on the bridges that cross the Moscow River at either end of the Kremlin.  They had essentially kidnapped Dubček and Svoboda and hauled them off to Moscow; but of course they hadn't invaded Czechoslovakia, they had rescued their socialist brothers from a CIA sponsored counterrevolution.  So they billed Dubček and Svoboda coming to Moscow as a state visit by the President and the head of the Communist Party of a fraternal socialist nation.  They put Soviet and Czechoslovakian flags along both sides of both bridges, just like they would for a legitimate state visit.  It was a show incredible chutzpah and dissembling, an act of propaganda designed to mislead their own people, something the Soviets were pretty good at.  We heard later than when Soviet soldiers returned from Czechoslovakia they were all sent to Siberia for extended periods because they knew the truth.  The people of Czechoslovakia had not welcomed them as liberators as the Soviet propaganda machine claimed.  They hadn't fought back because they knew that fighting back was useless, but they cursed the soldiers and did everything they could do to make it clear that the Soviets had invaded against the will of the people and had in no way come as the liberators they claimed to be.

My whole experience of Moscow that week in August, 1968, was colored by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.  The invasion was on a Wednesday, and we were scheduled to leave Moscow on either the following Friday or Saturday as I recall, so we weren't there long after the invasion.  Our feelings about the Soviet Union in light of their brutal suppression of a true people's liberation movement in Czechoslovakia was summed up when, as our bus drove out to Sheremetyevo, Moscow's international airport, for our flight to Helsinki, Finland, we all spontaneously started singing the hit song of the time by the Animals: 

We've got to get out of this place,

If it's the last thing we ever do.

We've got to get out of this place.

Girl, there's a better life for me and you.

Leaving Moscow in August, 1968, wasn’t the end of my personal experience of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.  The following academic year, 1968-69, I participated in a study abroad program of the Oregon State System of Higher Education at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, West Germany at the time.  In March, 1969, I signed up for a short trip to Prague, Czechoslovakia, sponsored by the university's student association.  With a group of German students I rode the train from Stuttgart to Prague.  I remember Prague as a gray, dirty, lifeless city.  People tell me it is one of the most charming cities of central Europe because, unlike so many others, it had not been heavily damaged in World War II.  I don't doubt it, but the recent Soviet invasion had cast a pall over the city in early 1969 that was nearly palpable.  I have one really powerful memory from that trip.  Our group had gone to a beer hall in Prague.  (The Germans claim to make the world's best beer.  They make really good beer, but the Czechs make better beer.  The beer we had in Prague was world class.  Interestingly, the previous summer I had had Czech been in Russia.  It was swill.  I think the Czechs intentionally kept the good stuff for themselves and for export to the west and send the slop to Russia.  Not that I blame them.)  We were sitting there drinking great Czech beer, speaking German of course, when a small group of student-age Czechs walked up to us.  They scowled at us and said, in German:  “Ost, oder West?”  East or West, meaning East or West Germany.  When we answered West they immediately relaxed, welcomed us to Prague, and sat down to have a beer with us.  I don't like to think what would have happened if we had said East, since the East Germans had participated in the Soviet invasion the previous summer. 

I got to talking with a couple of these Czech folk.  I explained that I intended to pursue graduate studies in Russian history.  They were appalled and dumbfounded.  They said that absolutely nothing good had ever come out of Russia, and nothing ever would.  They said it with an intensity that betrayed a hatred of the Russians that ran deep and strong.  I had never experienced hatred like that before.  I think I understand it.  The Czechs in 1969 had every reason to hate the Russians.  The Russians had imposed an oppressive, Soviet-style dictatorship on them after World War II and just seven months earlier had sent in the tanks when the Czechs and Slovaks had tried to soften the oppression just a little bit.  The Czechs are the most western of the Slavic peoples; but they had lived for a couple of decades under the boot heel of their Slavic cousins to the east, and they resented it mightily. The strength of the hatred that humans are capable of feeling is truly scary.  I saw it that day in Prague.  I hope I never see it again.

There is an important lesson here.  Oppressive regimes can lie to their own people, claiming to be the champions of freedom rather than the oppressors that they truly are, as the Soviets did to their citizens at the time of their invasion of Czechoslovakia and essentially continually throughout the Soviet period.  In the end, however, they cannot conceal the reality of their oppression.  The oppressed people will hate them for the oppression.  Eventually the people will throw off the oppression.  The yearning in the human heart for liberty is universal, and in the long run it cannot be denied.  Different cultures define freedom in somewhat different ways, and the freedom that the people will establish won’t look exactly the same in every nation.  Yet people know oppression when they experience it, and they will eventually overthrow it. 

The Soviets couldn’t deny the oppressive nature of their regime, and Soviet Communism collapsed a mere twenty-three years after the invasion of 1968.  The Czech Republic and Slovakia are now independent, democratic nations.  Today we see the people of many Arab nations throwing off their oppressive governments, or at least trying to do so.  They will not all succeed today or even tomorrow, but eventually they will succeed.  Eventually the people of those nations will be free, free of home-grown oppressors and free of foreign exploitation by the United States and other western powers.  All who wish to be on the side of history are well advised to learn this truth, a truth a saw lived out, if only as an outside observer, in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

The Risk of Peace

We all know that war is risky.  It is risky for the nations that engage in it.  They might lose, and the consequences of losing can be disastrous.  It is risky for the people unfortunate enough to be caught up in the fighting.  They might be killed.   They might be maimed.  They might suffer psychological trauma for the rest of their lives, indeed, it is certain that at least some of them will.  Nations regularly celebrate the bravery of those who take the risk of war, those who order it (at least when they win) and those who fight it (sometimes whether they win or lose).  As I write this piece it is Memorial Day weekend here in the US, a day when we remember and celebrate those who died in our country’s wars, past and present.  On one level it is right that we do so, since they died at our behest.  On another level Memorial Day is nothing but a part of the effort of the powers to sanitize and glamorize war, to make it acceptable to the people who must fight the wars and without whose support the powers cannot go to war. 

That, however, is not my main point here.  My main point here is that while war is risky peace is at least as risky.  While war requires people to take a risk, peace requires people to take at least as great a risk.  One of the reasons that conflicts persist and never seem to be resolved is that people are so unwilling to take a risk for peace.  Let me give a couple of examples.

One of the best examples before us today is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Perhaps the prime reason why that conflict has lasted so long and still seems so far from resolution is that neither side is willing truly to take a risk for peace.  The Palestinians have been unwilling to take the risk of compromising on some of their core demands, especially that East Jerusalem must be their capital and that the descendents of the people displaced when Israel was created be resettled back in Israel.  Some of them are unwilling even to take the risk of recognizing Israel’s right to exist.  For its part Israel insists on a peace agreement with no resettlement, with them in control of all of Jerusalem, and with what they call “secure borders,” whatever that means.  That demand for “secure borders” in particular shows an unwillingness to take a risk for peace. 

My own country, the United States of America, provides another very good example of an unwillingness to take a risk for peace.  Our leaders and most of our population are unwilling to take the risks involved in truly dealing with the problem of Islamist extremism and the threat it presents of terrorists attacks on our country and elsewhere around the world.  We have responded to the violence of September 11, 2001, with even greater violence of our own.  We invaded Iraq, which of course had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks.  We invaded Afghanistan, which at least did have something to do with the September 11 attacks but which we have still been unable to bring under our control almost ten years after we invaded.  We have hunted suspected terrorists with our own weapons of terror, drones that have targeted people especially in Pakistan and Yemen, often killing innocent civilians in the process.  It is obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that our violence directed against Muslim populations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere is the terrorists best recruiting tool, yet we are willing to take the risk of violence but unwilling to take the risk of peace.  It seems perfectly obvious, at least to me, that a far more constructive response to Islamist terrorism directed against us would be to examine our own behavior in the Muslim world to see what it is that we have done to provoke such hatred against us and to begin to modify our behavior in the direction of a more just and supportive relationship with Muslim nations.  Yet anyone who suggests such a thing in this country is accused of being “soft on terrorists.”  They are accused even of being un-American.  We will take the risk of violence, but we will not take the risk of peace.

I know at least something about how risky peace can be.  History teaches it clearly enough.  Anwar Sadat of Egypt made peace with Israel and was assassinated because of it.  Yitzhak Rabin of Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians and was assassinated because of it.  These brave men took a risk for peace, and they both paid with their lives, murdered by extremists who were willing to take the risk of violence but unwilling to live with the risk of peace.  I know that Israel accepting at least some of the demands of the Palestinians and the Palestinians accepting the reality of Israel and making concessions to get a peace agreement would not immediately end the violence in Israel-Palestine.  Violent extremists on both sides would try to undo any peace accord in which both sides took a risk for peace.  I know that an American policy of reexamining our relationships with the Muslim world and beginning to work toward a more mutually respectful and supportive relationship with them would not quickly stop terrorists attacks against us. Continued vigilance and diligent police activity would be necessary to try to stop those who resort to violence.  They would try to hit us again and again, and at some point they would probably complete an attack, killing American citizens.  I don’t deny that reality.  That’s precisely why peace is a risk. 

Yet in the end only peace can bring peace.  Only love can stamp out hatred.  There is great wisdom in the Buddhist tradition that says that there is no way to peace, peace is the way.  That wisdom is not only Buddhist, however.  More importantly for us Christians it is the wisdom of Jesus Christ.  The Gospel of John attributes to him the words “I am the way,” and the way that he taught and lived was the way of nonviolence, the way of peace.  Teaching and living that way cost Jesus his life.  He died, but his message of peace will not die.  It will not die because peace is not just an effective human strategy, it is nothing less than the way of God. 

The wisdom of the world, which in the end is folly not wisdom, says that peace comes through violence.  The wisdom of God, which is of course ultimate wisdom, says that peace comes through peace.  The wisdom of God doesn’t say that peace is without risk.  Rather, the wisdom of God calls us to follow the way of peace despite the very real risk involved.  God doesn’t tell us that the way of peace is safe.  It wasn’t safe for Jesus, and it isn’t safe for us.  God does tell us that God will be with us in the peaceful struggle for peace.  That’s all the assurance we get, and it is all we need.  May we Americans and all people at long last find the courage to take the risk of peace.

Those Who Cannot Forget the Past

The philosopher George Santayana famously said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  The saying has been misquoted in many ways.  I remember it as “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”  However we put it, the sentiment that Santayana expressed is an important one, and it is one that a professionally trained historian such as myself should understand and value.  There is indeed truth in it.  Perhaps the best example of the truth in it is this common slogan of the Jewish people since the end of World War II:  Nie wieder! Never again!  We must not forget the Holocaust because if we forget it we just might repeat it.  We must remember the depths to which humans have sunk throughout history if we hope to avoid sinking to those depths again.  History teaches us the depravity of which otherwise civilized humans are capable, and that is an important lesson.  Fair enough.  There is truth in Santayana’s famous aphorism.  Yet I have become convinced that there is also great danger in it, and I have become convinced that the opposite of this saying also contains truth and is just as important.  As we affirm that those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it we must also keep in mind that in many instances those who will not forget history are equally doomed to repeat it. 

We just saw a powerful example of the need to forget history in the news stories of the past couple of days.  The Serbian authorities finally got around to arresting Ratko Mladic, the butcher of Srebrenica.  The news media consistently refer to Mladic as the world’s most wanted war criminal.  In 1995 he ordered and oversaw the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.  The circumstances of that atrocity are a chronicle of treachery, deceit, and brutality, but the important thing about the massacre for my purposes here is the justification Mladic gave for the massacre.  Mladic calls the Bosnian Muslims “Turks.”  They of course are not Turks, but Mladic transferred all of Serbia’s historical hatred of the Turks onto them nonetheless.  He stated at the time that the murder of those 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys was an act of revenge of a massacre of Serbs carried out by some Turks in 1804!  That atrocity was part of the Serbian revolution against Turkish rule.  It occurred 191 years before the massacre at Srebrenica.  The Serbs, many of them at least, have nonetheless never gotten over it.  They would not forget history, so they repeated history, killing 8,000 innocent people who, obviously, had nothing to do with 1804 killing of Serbs.  They weren’t even of the same nation.  But even if they were, what kind of sense does that make?  To those of us who are not Serbs, none at all.

Another example of the truth that those who won’t forget the past are doomed to repeat it is found on a much larger scale among the Arabs.  Holding tenaciously to ancient hurts and slights seems to be a central characteristic of Arabic culture.  This is not to bash Arab culture.  Over the course of history the Arabs have given the world some of its greatest art, architecture, literature, philosophy, and science.  In our day, despite the poverty and oppressive governments from which most Arab people suffer, the Arabs have produced world class diplomats, authors, scientists, and others of great accomplishments in many fields of human endeavor.  Yet holding onto ancient wrongs is widely recognized as a prominent aspect of Arab culture.

We see this aspect of Arab culture in the way Arab people react to any western mention of the Crusades.  The Crusades were wars of aggression conducted by the kings and princes of western Europe against the Muslim rulers of what these western Christians called “the Holy Land.”  They were conducted in the name of religion, of Christianity, despite the fact that Jesus Christ taught and lived nonviolence and would never had sanctioned the Crusades that were fought in his name.  The Crusades are a sorry chapter in the history of Christianity and of Christian-Muslim relations.  They are something of which Christians may not be proud and of which they should repent.  The historical fact is, however, that the Crusades ended more than 700 years ago, yet they are still an extremely sore point with many Arab people.  We see how touchy the subject of the Crusades is in the Arab world in the reaction to the use of the word by former US President George W. Bush.  In the days after the terrorist attack on the US on September 11, 2001, Bush referred repeatedly to a “crusade” against the terrorists.  Reaction in the Arab world and by those in the West who understand the sensitivity of that word in the Arab world was swift and highly critical.  Numerous different voices told Bush not to use that word, not that he heard those voices or understood what their objection was.  The Crusades are ancient history to Americans and western Europeans, but, so I understand, they are as yesterday to many Arabs.  Because people dwell on them, continually rehearse the insult that they were to Arab and Muslim people, and will neither forgive nor forget the hurt, the anger and the resentment toward the West that the Crusades engendered lives on.  They color people’s reactions to statements made, and more importantly actions taken, by the western powers in the region.  Arab hypersensitivity to those ancient battles and American ignorance of how the Crusades play in the Arab world create unnecessary tensions and make healing the rift between the West and the Arabs more difficult if not impossible.

Then there are the Israelis and the Palestinians.  Israel has been an established fact of life in the Middle East for over sixty years.  It is true that a great many Palestinians were displaced from their homes and forced into exile in other Arab lands.  That that was an injustice from the Arab point of view, indeed also from a western point of view, is clear.  That there were reasons for it that outweighed the injustice involved was also clear, at least to the western powers that created and supported the Israeli state.  My point here is not to take sides.  I point out only that Israel has been a reality for what, by western standards, is a long time.  Yet if to the Arabs the Crusades happened yesterday, Israel was established five minutes ago.  For us the establishment of Israel is history, a fait accompli, something that must be accepted and that cannot be changed.  The Palestinians, however, will not forget the history that is the establishment of Israel and the way their world was before Israel was founded.  So some of them refuse to recognize Israel, and all of the Palestinian leadership insists that the descendants of those Palestinians who were displaced be allowed to return to their families’ former homes in what is now Israel.  Few of the original displaced Palestinians are still alive.  The people the Palestinians want to resettle in Israel are their descendants, but to people who will not forget history that is a distinction without a difference.  That is one central dynamic, although not the only one, that makes a permanent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict difficult if not impossible.

There are many, many other examples.  The Turks and the Greeks can’t get along because they won’t forget the history of the empire that was once Greece and the empire that was once Turkey.  The Serbs, many of them, hate not only the Bosnian Muslims but the Croats as well, and the Croats return the sentiment with glee, all over ancient struggles and hurts.  The Ukrainians, many of them, hate the Russians because of Russia’s historical disrespect of Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian language.  The Koreans, many of them, still hate the Japanese because of the atrocities the Japanese committed during World War II.  Many Americans still hate the Japanese because of Pearl Harbor.  And so on, and so on.

It is of course imperative that we learn from the past.  Santayana was right about that.  But it is also true that the past becomes an obstacle to peace when people use it to keep old grievances alive and as an excuse not to come to terms with contemporary reality.  Sometimes for the sake of peace and progress in human relations we have to acknowledge what happened in the past, then forget it.  Let it go, then move on.  When we don’t the result is Srebrenica.  When we don’t the result is September 11.  When we don’t the result is Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel and Israeli shells and rockets in Gaza.  Yes, in some ways those who cannot remember history are doomed to repeat it.  Yet it is an equally important truth that those who cannot forget history are equally doomed to repeat it.

Was D-Day Necessary?

We are approaching another anniversary of D-Day.  For most Americans D-Day, June 6, 1944, the allied invasion of Normandy, was the turning point of World War II in Europe.  For most Americans D-Day marks the beginning of the end of the Third Reich.  I in no way wish to minimize the sacrifice, the suffering, and the bravery of the Americans and other allied soldiers by participated in the D-Day invasion nor to dismiss or minimize the loss suffered by the spouses, the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers who lost loved ones in that invasion.  Yet as a student of history, and of Russian history in particular, in seems clear to me that D-Day was not the turning point of the war in Europe.  Consider these facts. 

In 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.  The Nazi armies pushed east.  They moved fast and they moved far.  They blockaded Leningrad and pushed to the outskirts of Moscow.  Father south they pushed even further east, driving toward the strategically crucial oil fields of Azerbaijan and other areas of southern and eastern Russia.  They came to Stalingrad, the city formerly called Tsaritsyn and now called Volgograd on the southern Volga river east of Ukraine.  There the Soviets dug in an determined to stop them.  The Battle of Stalingrad raged from August, 1942, to February, 1943, more than a year before D-Day.  Stalingrad was the bloodiest battle in human history.  Casualties for both sides combined ran to something like two million men.  After Stalingrad the German advance in Russia was stopped and the German retreat began.  It ended when the Red Army entered Berlin in April, 1945.  Stalingrad is undeniably the true turning point of World War II in Europe.  It was fought by the Red Army of the Soviet Union, not by the western allies.

Then there is the great battle of Kursk.  In July and August, 1943, almost one year before D-Day, the Germans tried one last desperate offensive in the eastern front.  In a battle that has gone into history as the greatest tank battle ever, the Soviets stopped that last German offensive.  The Germans never mounted another one on the eastern front.  Their retreat was continuous from that time until they surrendered in May, 1945.

Americans by and large don’t know this history, but by June, 1944, the Germans were already on the run in the east.  By June, 1944, Germany’s fate had already largely been sealed by the Soviets on the eastern front.  It is always problematic to say what would have happened in history if something significant had not happened as it did, but it seems to me to be a reasonably safe conclusion that by June, 1944, the Germans were already defeated.  The Soviets would have marched to Berlin regardless of what the allies did in the west.  True, it may have taken them longer.  True, they may have sustained even more than the massive casualties that they in fact sustained.  Yet it seems to me undeniable that the Soviets would have defeated the Germans even without the allied invasion of France on D-Day.

So was D-Day necessary?  To defeat the Germans almost certainly no.  There is, however, another consideration for which D-Day was very much necessary.  It wasn’t the reason Americans were given for the invasion of France.  It wasn’t the reason most Americans understood for the invasion of France.  Yet it is surely the real reason why the Americans and their western allies had to invade France in 1944.  That reason is precisely that the Soviets would have defeated the Germans even without the allied invasion of France.  The reason the allies had to invade France in 1944 was, it seems to me, not to defeat the Germans.  It was to prevent the Soviets from dominating all of Europe after the war came to its inevitable end with the defeat of the Germans by the Soviets.

I don’t know if President Roosevelt, General Eisenhower, and the other American leaders of the time had this thought in their minds.  All Americans were committed to doing whatever it took to defeat the Nazis.  Everyone wanted to be a part of defeating the Nazis even without any consideration of what letting the Soviets do it alone would mean.  Yet, from the perspective of over sixty-five years later, with knowledge of the reality of the war on the eastern front, and with the experience of having lived in the Soviet Union thirty years after the end of the war, the inevitability of a Soviet victory even without the allied invasion of France seems obvious to me.  It seems that the inevitability of a Soviet victory even without the allied invasion of France must have occurred to someone in the American leadership.  Whether stopping the Russians was anyone’s reason for ordering the invasion of France or not, preventing the Russians from dominating all of Europe unchallenged after the war was the major long-term effect of the allied invasion of France. 

So  was D-Day necessary?  To defeat the Germans, no.  To keep the Soviets from dominating all of Europe rather than just the eastern half of it after the war, yes.  Was it worth it?  Is war ever worth it?  Were there nonviolent means of achieving the same end?  There always are, at least in theory, even if they often aren’t apparent to those of us so conditioned to resort to violence as the first resort.  Does any of this matter?  Does understanding history ever matter?  I am among other things a professionally trained historian, so of course my answer to that question is yes.  Understanding the true dynamics of history as opposed to the myths and legends of the popular understanding of history is the only way we can truly learn from history.  

The Best Anti-War Movies

I was recently watching Ken Burns’ documentary “The War” on PBS.  It reminded me of a truth I have long known.  The best anti-war movies are the best war movies.  The movie that originally made this truth clear to me was Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.  That great film opens with a harrowing reenactment of the D Day invasion of Normandy.   It is almost impossible to watch, but Burns’ account of D Day in his documentary makes the reality of the event seem even worse than Spielberg was able to depict.  That there is great heroism in war I do not doubt; yet neither do I doubt that heroism is not the ultimate characteristic of war.  The ultimate characteristic of war is death.  Along with death war is characterized by suffering, immense, unfathomable suffering.  Physical and mental suffering.  Suffering by those who die and suffering by those who survive.  Suffering on both sides.  Suffering by those whose cause is “just” and whose struggle is defensive and suffering by those caught up in events beyond their control who end up fighting for causes that are not just.  Suffering mostly by those who fight and die but suffering also by those who do not fight and die but who lose children, siblings, parents, spouses, other loved ones, or friends or who live in fear of such loss .  Suffering while the fighting lasts and suffering that lasts for a lifetime afterwards.  The pain of physical wounds and the psychic pain of PTSD, the nightmares, the continuing fear, the shattered psyches and shattered relationships. 

The best and most effective way to turn people against war is simply to tell them the truth about war.  Telling the truth about war is something the powers that be in America (and not only in America) have long been loath to do.  American movies about World War II are a perfect illustration of this truth; and a perfect example is the contrast between two movies about D-Day, the aforementioned Saving Private Ryan from 1989 starring Tom Hanks and 1962’s The Longest Day starring John Wayne.  The Longest Day is a classic of the post-war American genre of World War II movies.  Those movies showed a version of the violence of war, but it was a sanitized and romanticized version of it.  The apparent intent of those movies was not to present a realistic view of war.  It seems rather to have been to celebrate, even glorify, the service of the Americans who had fought in the war.  Yes, they showed people dying, but even the dying was sanitized.  The dying was romanticized.  It was, as nearly as it could be, dying without suffering, dying without loss.  They showed killing, but any killing the Americans did was always killing without regret, killing that was righteous, killing that was merely giving the bad guys what they had coming.  The humanity of those dying on the other side of the war was rarely if ever depicted.  All of these things are certainly true of The Longest Day.

Saving Private Ryan is a very different kind of war movie.  Especially in its opening reenactment of the D-Day invasion that movie presents an unblinking look at war in all its horror.  It shows the fear.  It shows the chaos and the mistakes that are always made.  It shows the suffering.  It shows the dying without sanitizing it, without romanticizing it, without ennobling it.  We see war in all its horror, or at least as much of its horror as it is possible to depict through a reenactment.  There are other movies that present similarly unflinching views of the reality of war.  Platoon, set in Vietnam, and Glory,  a story of Black Union soldiers in the American Civil War, are two that come to mind.  I’m sure there are others.

I had the same reaction to each of the three films I have mentioned, Saving Private Ryan, Platoon, and Glory.  They are films every American, perhaps every person, should see, and they are films that left me happy at some level that I had seen them but definitely wanting never to see them again.  They are too disturbing.  They are too gory.  They are, in other words, too real.  They come too close to showing what war really is.  Each of these films strengthened my preexisting aversion and opposition to war.  They show what war really is---suffering, death, and destruction, acts that when committed by an individual are treated as the most serious crimes but that we consider honorable when committed on orders from a nation. 

The great Georgian/Russian protest poet and singer of the Soviet period Bulat Okudzhava has a song with a line that sums up nicely the way we accept in war what we never accept from individuals.  He calls the song “Song about an American Soldier,” but of course it applies to all soldiers; and Okudzhava certainly intended it to apply to Soviet soldiers as well, he just couldn't say so.  One line of that song goes, in my translation from the Russian:  “And if something isn’t right, that’s not our problem.  As they say, the motherland has ordered it.  How glorious to be merely a simple soldier, not guilty of anything.”  A soldier who kills.  A soldier who maims.  A soldier who destroys, yet he isn’t guilty of anything because he does it all at the behest of his nation.  The best war movies see through that pretense.  They see through the idealization of war that the ruling powers of all nations perpetuate and propagate among their people.  They jettison the romanticizing of war that the powers so love and that the film industry is usually happy to provide.   The best war movies show war as it really is, and that’s what makes them the best anti-war movies. 

If people really understood the horror of war there would be no war.  If everyone really understood the reality of war the people would rise up and demand an end to war.  They would refuse to participate in war.   In the great anti-Vietnam war song “Eve of Destruction” Barry McGuire sang “You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’?”  If people really knew they wouldn’t tote those guns for the powers that be.  That’s why the powers that be of every nation since the beginning of nations have worked to make war noble and heroic.  To make it every citizen’s duty.  To make it necessary in order to bring security or even to end war itself, which of course it never does and never can.  The best war movies show the reality of war, which is what makes them the bast anti-war movies.  So far they haven’t  brought about mass popular resistance to war.  We can only pray that some day they will.

Insanity

I suppose it really isn't necessary to say it, but this guy Harold Camping is dangerously insane.  His lunatic prediction that second coming of Christ and the end of the world would occur on May 21, 2011 didn't come true, as every reasonable, intelligent, sane person knew it wouldn't.  His lunacy in predicting that it would has caused immense grief among people so ignorant and so desperate as to believe him.  Yet he won't stop.  He has now moved the date of his delusion to October 21, 2011.  This isn't funny any more.  It's dangerous,  It's irresponsible.  I don't know how this guy and others of his ilk can legally be stopped, but if there is a way to do it I hope that someone does it and does it soon.

Of course people have been predicting the second coming of Christ and the end of the world on specific dates for a long time now, especially for some reason here in the United States.  The Millerite movement of the 1840s, a movement caught up in such a prediction that of course didn't come true and the failure of which came to be known as The Great Disappointment, should have been the end of this nonsense; but sadly it wasn't.  The Millerite movement morphed into Seventh Day Adventism, and the nutty predictions of the end of the world on specific dates continues.  Have these people never read Mark 13:32?  Speaking of a coming apocalypse Jesus there says "But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."  If these literalists who make the predictions would take that verse literally a lot of grief could be avoided.

Yet there is something important that we can learn from the repeated failure of these predictions.  They are all grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of scripture.  They all assume that the Bible reports historical, scientific fact.  These predictions of a specific date for the end of the world take the few biblical references to a coming end of the world literally, as factual predictions.  They take the creation myths of the Bible as historical fact.  They then turn to the various biblical genealogies as historical fact.  Using them they count backwards to get a date for the creation of the earth.  Then they somehow count forward to arrive at a specific date for the occurrence of what they take to be factual predictions.  And they are always wrong.

What we can learn from these incidents is something that we really shouldn't need the nonsense of end time predictions to teach us but of which these failed end time predictions are good evidence.  The Bible is not primarily factual.  It doesn't, for the most part, report historical fact.  The Bible is a collection of myths, of stories that particular ancient people told to make sense of their world and to express their experience of God.  As such the Bible contains much spiritual truth; but it contains very little factual truth, especially in its accounts of events of which its authors had and could have no factual, scientific knowledge.  The reason predictions of dates for the end times fail isn't that the people who make the predictions have misread biblical details.  The reason they fail is that the people who make these predictions are using the Bible for an entirely illegitimate purpose and fail fundamentally to understand what the Bible actually is.  If we can learn from the failure of the end time predictions and not merely make fun of them, perhaps more people will come to realize the fundamental fallacy of biblical literalism, of biblical factualism.  If the destructive nonsense that Camping spreads can wean some people away from biblical literalism it will have had, quite contrary to Camping's intent, at least some positive effect.

On President Obama's Praise of Nonviolence

Today, May 19, 2011, President Barack Obama gave a speech in which he intended to state a new American policy toward the Middle East and North Africa.  That speech contained many lofty statements praising democracy and calling for governments throughout the region to respect the fundamental human rights and dignity of all of their citizens.  Fair enough.  There was little that was said in the speech that was objectionable as far as it went.  There is one aspect of the speech, however, that cries out for comment.  Two of President Obama’s statements in that speech lay bare the hypocrisy of American policy.  They are the President’s statements in praise of nonviolence.

The first of these statements was in reference to the recent, mostly nonviolent people’s revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.  President Obama said that “through the moral force of non-violence, the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in decades.”  The second was a more general praise of nonviolence as an agent of change.  Referring to the civil rights movement in the United States the President said “I would not be standing here today unless past generations turned to the moral force of non-violence as a way to perfect our union – organizing, marching, and protesting peacefully together to make real those words that declared our nation: 'We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.”  In these two statements President Obama affirmed the two fundamental truths about nonviolence, namely, that it works and that it is a moral force.

I applaud the President’s recognition of the moral force and the efficacy of nonviolence as an agent of social change and progress, yet my first reaction when I heard these statements was hardly a positive one.  As the President was lauding the nonviolent popular movements in the Arab world I saw, alongside images of those movements, American soldiers on kill missions in Afghanistan and American drones dropping bombs on human targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  I saw NATO planes, some of them American, strafing and bombing in Libya.  I saw an American commando team violating the sovereignty of Pakistan to commit what is surely murder under the laws of that nation.  Yes, Osama bin Ladn was a very bad man; but President Obama resorted to violence not nonviolence to deal with him (as indeed he had promised to do during the 2008 election campaign), thereby making his praise of nonviolence today sound hypocritical at best and intentionally deceptive at worst.  Apparently for President Obama nonviolence is fine for the people of the Middle East and North Africa and for movements for social change within the United States but not appropriate for, much less morally binding on, the United States in its actions abroad. 

How can the President expect anyone to believe his praise of nonviolence when his actions abroad are consistently violent?  His words praise nonviolence.  His actions say that, at least for the United States as it acts in the world, violence is appropriate and morally justifiable.  His actions say that nonviolence is fine for others but violence is our chosen method of addressing problems.  People are influenced much more by what they see other people doing than by what they hear other people saying.  The behavior that the United States models in the world is violent.  As long as it remains violent, all the President’s pretty words in praise of nonviolence will sound hollow and unconvincing.

At Last

This is the sermon I gave on May 15, 2011.  I think it is important enough to post here on the blog.  It gives an interpretation of the meaning of the current flap in evangelical Christian circles over Pastor Rob Bell's book Love Wins and its suggestion that there is no hell.

Nota bene:  This sermon begins with a spoof, a parody of how I imagine a conservative evangelical pastor reacting to Rob Bell.  My actual view of the matter follows.  

We’re facing a crisis folks.  It’s a crisis that threatens to undermine the Christian faith altogether.  A Christian pastor has written a book that he calls Love Wins, and in that book—can you believe it?—he says that there is no hell!  This guy, whose name is Rob Bell, has the unmitigated gall, the unspeakably bad judgment, the gross misunderstanding of Christianity, to suggest that there is no place of eternal torment for people who do not accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior during their life on earth.  O the scandal!  The affront to Christian people!  The threat to the salvation of those souls misguided enough to believe what Bell says!  Bell has taken away all reason to be Christian!  Christianity is how we save our eternal souls from an eternity of anguish, right?  The only way to avoid damnation is to believe in Jesus, right?  If there’s no hell, anything goes!  This guy Bell has got to be stopped!  We have to shut him down or all is lost!  May the Lord Jesus Christ move Bell to repentance.  If Bell won’t repent, may God smite him, may God strike him down, may God send him straight to that hell that he denies!  That’ll show him.  Then he’ll know, won’t he? 

Now, in case any of you have any doubt about it, let me assure you that I’m being completely facetious here.  As most of you I’m sure know, I agree with Bell.  I am a Christian universalist, as are a lot of progressive Christians today.  It is true, however, that an evangelical pastor named Rob Bell has set off a great kerfuffle in evangelical circles by claiming that there is no hell.  He’s the pastor of Mars Hill Church, not the one in Seattle but one in Michigan that draws something like 7,000 people every Sunday.  It is also true that a lot of evangelicals are reacting to Bell and his book in pretty much the way that I was lampooning at the start of this sermon.  They very much want to drum Bell out of the evangelical fold as a dangerous heretic. 

Moreover, this flap in evangelical circles has been getting a lot of press lately.  It is the cover story of the April 25, 2011, issue of Time magazine.  It’s that article in Time that is prompting this sermon.  You see, I was a little put out when I read it.  Here’s what’s going on as I see it.  A few, so far a very few, evangelical Christians are starting to tumble to some of the things that the rest of us Christians, us much maligned mainline, liberal Christians, have gotten for a very long time now.  Like God is a God of love for all people and that the old notion of a hell of eternal torment for people who aren’t Christians is incompatible with a God of love and just doesn’t make any sense. When a few of the right-wingers start to tumble to some pretty obvious truths about Christianity, they get tons of publicity about it, and we don’t get mentioned at all.  The only mention of the mainline denominations in the Time article refers to us as “declining.”  Yet what I think we’re seeing in the flap over Rob Bell’s denial of hell is evidence of a major dynamic in Christianity today.

Ever since the nineteenth century there has been a fundamental split in American Christianity.  It isn’t a split along denominational lines.  It isn’t even a split between Protestants and Catholics.  It’s not easy to put labels on the split, but for purposes of convenience only I will call the two sides liberals and conservatives.  What follows here is greatly simplified, but I think it accurately outlines in general terms at least how American Christianity got to be split the way it is.

The split came about in the nineteenth century as a result of two major developments in the life of Christianity and in the life of western culture generally.  The first of those two developments was the rise of what is called the higher biblical criticism.  This is the approach to the Christian faith and to the Bible in particular that treats them as subject of intellectual inquiry the same as any other subject of intellectual inquiry.  The higher criticism began in Germany in the early nineteenth century.  It developed into the kinds of criticism you hear me using around here all the time—form criticism, linguistic criticism, historical criticism, and so on.  The higher biblical criticism seeks to understand the Bible as an historical document.  It probes the circumstances of the creation of its different parts, the cultural and religious assumptions out of which it grew, what its linguistic nuances are, and so on.  Higher criticism doesn’t necessarily deny a divine inspiration for the Bible, but it doesn’t treat the Bible as sui generis, as a unique kind of thing to which the tools of human intellectual inquiry don’t apply.  Many Christians, especially in the United States where the culture had already long had a strong anti-intellectual bent, saw the higher biblical criticism as a threat to the faith and rejected it outright.  That rejection led to the creation of true Fundamentalism in the early twentieth century.  American Christianity split between those who accept the higher biblical criticism and those who do not.

The other development that led to the split was the advent of Darwinism.  A great many American Christians, probably a substantial majority of them, saw Darwin’s theory of evolution as a profound threat to the faith.  They still do.  Darwinism is incompatible with the Bible only if you see the Bible as accurately reporting the facts of creation and of history, which it doesn’t; but most American Christians insisted, and insist, that it does.  So the split in American Christianity gained the additional dimension of being a split between those Christians who are willing to let science be science and develop its scientific truths according to its own methods and to let faith be faith and develop its spiritual truths according to its own methods on the one hand and those who saw an irreconcilable conflict between the two on the other.

Today the kind of evangelical Christianity that Rob Bell comes out of is the dominant form of the conservative side of the split in American Christianity.  That kind of Christianity insists that the Bible is literally, factually true and that, basically, God wrote it so it cannot contain any error.  That kind of Christianity sees the function of Christianity as being the only means of avoiding hell and gaining heaven after death by believing in Jesus.  It sees Christianity as the only truth, and traditionally it has seen all people who aren’t Christians as damned for eternity because of their failure to accept Jesus Christ.  For example, the article quotes R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, as calling Bell’s book “theologically disastrous.”  For Mohler, denying that non-Christians spend eternity in hell so undermines the basis of the Christian faith that it is “theologically disastrous.”  Mohler adds:  “When you adopt universalism [the belief that all are saved]…then you don’t need the church, and you don’t need Christ, and you don’t need the cross.  This is the tragedy of non-judgmental mainline liberalism, and it’s Rob Bell’s tragedy in this book too.”  Do you hear what he’s saying?  The only function of Jesus Christ and of his death on the cross is to get Christians, and only Christians, into heaven.  Mohler names the split I’m talking about.  He sees it as being between people who think like him, i.e., the conservatives, and mainline liberals who don’t think that the primary purpose of the church is to get Christians, and only Christians, into heaven.

Mainline liberal Protestantism, the kind of Christianity Mohler condemns, has been having a rough time of it lately.  Membership in the mainline churches has been declining for several decades, and most (but certainly not all) of the growing, energetic Christian congregations are on the conservative side of the split.  But I am convinced that Rob Bell is one sign that, despite their numbers, despite their energy, despite their money, and despite their well-oiled publicity machine, the future does not belong to the conservatives.  Some of them, like Rob Bell, are starting to tumble to the truths that we maligned mainline liberals have known for a long time.  That God loves and saves everyone is the truth to which Bell has tumbled.  There are other positive developments.  The Episcopal Church is starting to get it about the equality of gay and lesbian people.  So is the ELCA Lutheran Church, which recently approved the ordination of gay and lesbian people.  Just last Wednesday the Presbyterian Church USA removed an article from its constitution that was a barrier to the ordination of gay and lesbian people.  Many other examples of a major shift that is under way in American Christianity could easily be found and cited.

Time quotes Bell as saying “I have long wondered if there is a massive shift coming in what it means to be a Christian.  Something new is in the air.”  Maybe it’s new to him, but we’ve known that supposedly new way of being Christian for a long time.  Friends, the tide is turning.  The biblical literalism that is the foundation of conservative Christianity is intellectually and spiritually untenable.  We mainline liberals have known that truth for a long time.  At last the contradictions and problematic morality inherent in literalist, exclusivist Christianity are starting become clear even to some committed evangelicals.  So indeed some Christians are facing a crisis today, but it’s not us liberals as the conservatives claim.  It’s the conservatives themselves.  The intellectual and spiritual weakness of conservative evangelicalism is finally becoming clear even to some of them.  The Holy Spirit is at work, opening hearts and minds and leading people away from the narrow, judgmental, exclusivist kind of faith that far too many people believe represents true Christianity.  It’s only a beginning.  The arc of history bends slowly, but it is bending; and it is bending in the right direction.  At last.  Amen.

A Modest Proposal on the Question of Theodicy

Theodicy is perhaps the one ultimately unsolvable issue in theology.  It has baffled and bedeviled Christians from the beginning of the faith.  This essay is a modest attempt to add something to the Christian discussion of theodicy.  I offer it as a proposal, not as a final resolution of the issue.  I make no claim that it is irrefutable or without conceptual problems.  I am aware of some of those problems.  I do not doubt that there are others that have not occurred to me.  I make no claim to have done a thorough study of the issue, only to have given the matter considerable thought.  Still, I find the solution to the theodicy problem that I offer here at least intriguing.  I believe that it may produce fruitful results as I and, I hope, others continue to develop it.  So here it is, for whatever it is worth.  This brief essay is a much condensed version of a longer essay that I have written that is too long to post on a blog.  In that longer piece I address some of those conceptual problems with this model of which I am aware.  If you want a copy of that longer essay please let me know by sending an email to the address at the top of this blog.  I’ll email it to you or, if necessary, send it to you snail mail.

Theodicy is the justification of God in the face of evil.  It asks the question:  How can a good and loving God permit all the evil, all the suffering, that so characterizes human life on earth?  The issue of theodicy arises because of three assumptions that Christianity and the other monotheistic faiths make about God.  Those assumptions are first that there is one and only one God, second that that God is good, and third that God does or at least can control events on earth.  If any of those three assumptions is removed theodicy is no longer a problem.  Dualistic religions solve the problem by positing two gods, one the source and ground of the good and the other the source and ground of evil.  A monotheistic religion that understood God as evil would not have a theodicy issue either, although it might have a problem explaining where all the good in the world comes from.  A faith whose God cannot control events on earth would not have a theodicy problem either, since that God could neither cause evil nor prevent it. 

Christianity has a theodicy problem primarily because it is unwilling to give up any of the three basic understandings about God that create the theodicy issue in the first place.  Christianity is monotheistic, even if its Trinitarian form of monotheism makes it look to those who do not understand like Christianity has three Gods not one.  We believe in one ground and source of being, not in two.  For Christians the one God is and wills only the good.  Our God is gracious and loving.  We know that God is good, gracious, and loving because we know God in and through Jesus Christ, who taught and lived God’s good, gracious, and loving nature.  In addition, Christianity has always believed that God as least can control events on earth; and in the fact most Christians have believed that God actually does control events on earth.  Thus arises Christianity’s theodicy problem.

I believe that there truly is no solution to the theodicy problem that does requires us significantly to modify at least one of these assumptions if not to discard one of them altogether, and I believe that Christianity cannot modify either its monotheistic assumption or its assumption that the one God is good and still remain in any recognizable sense Christian.  Which of course leaves us with the assumption about God’s control of events on earth as the only possible candidate for the assumption that we must modify if we are to solve the theodicy issue.  As I have stated it that assumption has two elements, or perhaps better it comes in two possible forms.  One is that God can control events on earth.  This is the assumption behind our calling God the Almighty, one of our favorite appellations for God.  I’ll have more to say about that assumption shortly; but the assumption about God that I want to examine, and that I believe we must modify if we are ever even to approach a satisfactory resolution of the theodicy issue, is the assumption that God does control events on earth.

It should be relatively easy for Christians today to give up the assumption that God does control events on earth.  The horrors of the twentieth century, especially perhaps but not only the first half of that late, unlamented century, make the belief that God actually does control events on earth simply untenable.  If as we insist that God is one, and if as we insist that God is good, then the meaningless slaughter of a generation in World War I, the government mandated starvation of millions of Russian peasants in the 1920s and 1930s, the Holocaust, the firebombing of Dresden, the Japanese atrocities in Manchuria and Shanghai, and so many other instances of mass murder and genocide that the world experienced in the twentieth century prove that God does not control events on earth.  The Hebrew prophets of the eighth century BCE could make God responsible for the destruction of Israel by the Assyrians.  We cannot make God responsible for the meaningless horrors of our time.  Whether God can control events on earth or not, that God does not control events on earth is, I believe, an unavoidable conclusion from the facts of world history in our time.  Any God who would cause such massive suffering is not a God worth worshipping or following.  Such a God is not the God of Christian experience and belief.

Christianity has long ascribed certain attributes to God, and one of attributes Christians have always attributed to God is omnipotence.  We think that God must be omnipotent in order truly to be God.  Since it is difficult if not impossible for us to imagine God not being omnipotent, and since human experience drives to the conclusion that God does not exercise God’s omnipotence, at least not in any way that we humans can recognize as omnipotent, the question inevitably arises for us of why the omnipotent God chooses not to control events on earth so as to prevent unjust human suffering.

The most common answer that our tradition has given to the question of why God does not intervene to control events on earth to prevent suffering is that God allows evil to persist in the world because God respects human freedom. It is I suppose clear that God could not overcome the evil that humans cause without overriding human freedom, and I believe that this traditional answer points in the right direction. Ultimately, however, this answer falls short in two major respects. First, it does not address the question of why God chooses to value human freedom over the safety and security of God’s people. Most of those people would be very happy to have God appear in a great display of power and majesty to put an end to evil in the world. The victims of the Holocaust were not, I dare say, much concerned with Adolf Hitler’s human freedom. The “God respects human freedom” answer to the theodicy question leaves us longing for an explanation of what so often appear to us from the perspective of this answer to be God’s tragically misplaced priorities. Second, this answer does not address the question of human suffering that results not from human intention but from natural disasters or from the accidental, unintentional consequences of human actions.  The “God respects human freedom” answer to the question of theodicy in the end is inadequate to answer the question it seeks to answer.

So have we reached a dead end? Is there no convincing answer to the question of why God does not control events on earth? I think actually that we are not quite at a dead end. To see a way out of our dilemma we must look, I think, at the fundamental nature of God’s relationship to creation.  We need to look at the nature of the creative process itself.  I think that there is an understanding of God’s relationship to creation that preserves God’s status as God while explaining in a more comprehensive and convincing way than does the human freedom theory why God does not prevent suffering in creation. I call this understanding the “God respects creation as creation” answer to the question of theodicy. Let me explain.

For us Christians, and indeed for Jews and Muslims as well, God is first and foremost the Creator. There is good reason for the Bible to begin with its two great creation myths, the six days of creation of Genesis 1 and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2. It is not merely that creation comes before all else chronologically. Creation comes before all else conceptually. Everything else follows and flows from God as the Creator of all that is. If God were not first of all Creator we would not be here to call God Creator or to struggle with the question of God’s relationship to creation. Whatever God’s reason for creating may be, the important point for us is that God does indeed create.

The fundamental relationship between God and the world then is that of Creator and creation. God created the world and all the universe that we know. So we ask: What is the nature of the creative act, and is there anything in the nature of the creative act that helps us answer the question of theodicy? Let us then begin this phase of our inquiry with an examination of the nature of the creative act itself, and let us do that, as many others have done, by first examining a creative act with which we are all familiar and in which we have all participated as creation and in which many of us have participated as creator, the act of human procreation.

The essence of human procreation is that something new originates with biological parents as creators, then exists on its own as an autonomous being. The person created comes out of the persons creating. He arises within them but then exists apart from them. From the moment of birth, or even before birth, the new person has separate being, a separate identity from her parents. Creation is in essence an act of separation of the creature from the creator. In humans, that act of separation becomes a process of separation in which the child’s growth is a series of steps toward ever fuller separation from the parents. A newborn infant has separate being, but that being is still completely dependent upon the parents (or other parental figures) for nourishment, care, and protection. As the child grows and develops he becomes ever more separate, more autonomous. Sometimes the process of greater differentiation is gradual. Sometimes it proceeds in spurts, as during the “terrible twos” and during adolescence. If the child is healthy, and if the parents do their job well, the result of the process is a fully differentiated, autonomous human being who had her origin in her parents but who is distinct and separate from them. In a healthy relationship between parents and an adult child, the parents respect the autonomy of their child. They continue to love the child, to be present with and for the child, to offer the child support and guidance when the child needs and asks for it; but they do not seek to control the adult child or make his decisions for him. They are present, but they respect their child’s status as an autonomous human being.

God’s process of creation is of course not identical to human procreation, but God’s creating is nonetheless in many ways analogous to human procreating. Just as in human procreation a new, separate being comes into the world, so in God’s creation a new, separate sphere of being comes into existence. Just as the child is separate from the parent, so God’s creation is separate from God. God creates out of Godself something that has its origin in God but that is different from God and that has its own autonomous being. The Judeo-Christian tradition has never been pantheistic.  Creation is not God. Creation is precisely creation. It is other than God precisely in that it is created being not divine uncreated being. Creation is existentially different from the Creator. It arose with the Creator, but it is fundamentally and necessarily separate from the Creator.

And here’s the crucial point: Precisely because it is God’s will to create, God always and necessarily respects the status of creation as creation. The traditional answer to the question of theodicy says that God respects human freedom, but that answer is nowhere near comprehensive enough. God respects human freedom because that freedom is part of creation’s autonomous status as creation, as other than God. What God fundamentally respects is the creaturely status of creation. The question of God’s relationship to creation, including the question of theodicy, must be understood in the context of God respecting the status of what God has created precisely as creation, that is, as existentially other than God, separate from God. It cannot be otherwise. God did not create another God. God created a world, a universe, that is in its essence other than God. Since we must assume that God did not create something other than what God intended to create, we must assume that God intended God’s creation to be what it is, namely, other than God. Theologians say that God is totaliter aliter, totally other than creation.  It follows that creation must be totally other than God.  If, then, God intended creation to be creation and not God, we can be sure that God has, does, and always will respect the status of creation as creation, that God will honor and respect God’s own intention in creating and will not violate that intention.

We have previously established that God does not control events on earth. Our understanding that God relates to creation precisely as Creator of creation provides the answer to the question of why God does not control events on earth. The answer is that God does not control events on earth because God’s exercising control over events in creation would be inconsistent with creation’s status as creation. God does not control events in creation because, quite simply, creation is creation and not God. God respects creation’s status as creation, as created, autonomous being that is other than God.

In this understanding, then, God cannot consistently both respect the nature of creation as other than God and interfere in creation to control events there. The autonomy of creation that is inherent in God’s act of creating that which is other than God precludes such interference.  What happens on earth does not happen because God is Deus ex machina, sitting offstage and pulling wires and levers to make things happen on the stage of creation.  What happens in creation happens according to the inherent dynamics of creation, not because God is intervening in creation to cause things to happen. God cannot do that without violating the nature of creation as creation, a nature that we must assume God intends to preserve.

The question of theodicy, the question of the justification of God in the face of evil, now appears in a different light. God’s not interfering in creation to prevent evil of any sort, whether caused by natural processes or by human beings, now appears to be an inherent, necessary, and unavoidable consequence of the act of creation itself. Evil exists because it is creation not God in which we live. God’s responsibility for evil therefore also appears in a new light. God’s only responsibility for evil, it turns out, is that God engaged in the act of creation. We of course cannot blame God for the act of creation. As believers in a Triune God we Christians believe that God is, to the extent we can know God, relational by nature. That is, it appears from our Christian experience of God that it is in God’s nature to be in relationship with another, both within the Godhead Itself between the Persons of the Trinity and between God and the universe in which we live, between God as Creator and creation. If we blame God for the evil in the world we blame God for the act of creation itself. Yet creation seems to be God’s nature, and who are we to blame God for being God?

So there it is.  The suggestion here is that the answer to the question of theodicy lies in the very nature of the creative act.  I have been thinking along these lines for at least a couple of years now.  So far, this understanding works for me.  Whether it works for you is not for me to say.  I hope only that my discussion here will prompt some deeper thinking about the matter in you.  Perhaps you will find that this way of looking at the matter works for you.  If your deeper thinking leads you to a different conclusion that too will be a very good thing.