Reinhold Neibuhr
I was going to put this up no matter who won the election: toward reunifying the faith
St.
Augustine's name always comes up when feminists attack church fathers
who said sexist things. By all accounts Augustine seems to have been one
of the worst offenders. I've tired to point out to many feminists, of
both secular and Christian ilk, that Augie's words defended by feminist
philosopher Geneva Lloyd in
The Man Of Reason. Augustine was
using some bizarre metaphorical reasoning and only used Eve as a
derivation from Adam symbolically. But no one cares. It's so much easier
just to write Augie off as a dead white male church guy who said
stupid sexist things, let it go at that. Oddly enough even Augustine's
best friends are not that willing to support everything he said. At one
point my favorite prof. at Perkins, and good friend William S. Babcock
(major Augustine scholar) remarked "you don't have to accept it just
because Augustine said it, in fact if Augustine said it there's a good
change its wrong." I think we were talking about free will at the time.
But be that as it may, Augustine is loved by the right wing politicos
of the Catholic church because he is used (wrongly) by a scholar name
O'Connell to bolster the double edge sword of civil and religious
authority; these hacks somehow think that this gives them the green
light on their own social agenda. The deep irony here on both sides is
that if one understood what Augustine really says in his massive tome
The City of God (which was really just a letter to afferent, but thinker
than the NY phone book) one would have to conclude that Austine should
be a comfort as well as a caution to sides, the left and the right.
The
City of God was written in response to the sacking of Rome by the
Barbaric hordes in 410 AD. This situation left Christians in a dyer
situation, since the Roman state under Constantine had worked up a
connection between Christianity and God's blessing on the state that
supported it. Constantine PR man Eusebuis had so inculcated the idea
that God was blessing Rome because it was turing to Christ, that Roman
Christians had come to understand that their well being and the success
of the Empire was all linked in support of the Christian agenda. All of
this can be seen in elaborate detail in one my favorite books of all
time, Christianity in Classical Culture, by Charles Norris Corcoran.
It's an old book, written in the late 40's, Corcoran was at university
of Toronto. He has a tendency to make certain aspects of the Rome of St.
Augustine analogue to the cold war of the 1940s, viewing Constantine
as a mild social democ rat of somewhat liberal flavor--at least in
terms of social programs. Another excellent and more up to date book
which lays out a similar line of thinking is Christianity in the Roman
World By S. Markus.
The Christians of early fifth
century Rome had come to be very selfish in their outlook. They saw
themselves as God's chosen people, they alone had been given the right
to extort obedience from other nations because they were doing God's
will. Of course this was nothing more than the same old political
philosophy of the Cesar who came before, the reason of state argument.
Constantine merely revitalization it in order to give the Roman morale a
new shot in the arm. In the old pagan configuration, the Cesars were
adding other nations to the matrix of civilization, doing them great
favor by conquest, in spite of their ungrateful refusal to be taken.
Constantine merely expanded this role, not only were they incorporating
other people's into the matrix of civilization, (Corcoran' term,
nothing to do with the movie) but they where also making the way clear
for people to hear the Gospel, thus saving souls and expanding the
kingdom. The Christians of that era came to understand their material
success to be a direct blessing from God in exchange for their support
of the political agenda.
The sack of Rome came as
terrible news to these Christians, because suddenly God had withdrawn
his favor. The pagans capitalized on this mishap by arguing that the
old gods of Olympus had punished Rome for turning away from them. The
Christians really had no answer because they had come to think so
clearly that material reaches meant divine favor. The destruction of
material riches had to mean the removal of God's favor, or perhaps even
the triumph or another god? Of course, the City of God is as thick as
the New York Phone book, so pardon me if I give the short version:
basically, Augustine argues that no temporal power arrangement can
claim to be the city of God. Temporal power is an earthly thing it
belongs to the city of man. The city of God and the City of Man are
made for two different purposes and they have two different ends. The
City of Man is Temporal and fleeting. It is not permanent and it is not
holy. The City of God is permanent and Holy, and though the two exist
one inside the other, the City of God inside the City of man, the City
of God is everlasting and the City of man is not. Thus the temporal
power can never claim to be the City of God. That means that
Constantine did not set up a Christian state, and that Rome was never
the commonwealth of God. No political agenda can ever be sacred and no
temporal seat of power can ever claim to be the work of God on earth.
Augustine totally bores the connection between temporal rewards and
material success and eternal destiny.
Augustine was
also a major influence upon modern political thinker and theologian
Reinhold Neibuhr. Neibuhr is, oddly enough, another misunderstood
figure who has been cast in the role of "neo-liberal." Far from being
Neo-anything, Neibuhr was a define socialist until the day he died. I
know this to be the case through my own association with his friend
Frederic Carney. Neibuhr applied Augustine dictum to modern cold war
politics. While he did write "why is commission so evil?" and he was
too slow in denouncing the warin Vietnam (waiting until almost the day
he died in 1971) he was a tireless advocate of whomever needed
advocating. He not ony wrotet "why is communism So Evil?" But the also
went to bat to help defend the defendants in the Dennis vs. United
States case, because he felt hat those representatives of the Communist
Party USA were being rail-roadbed. Neibhur did not allow himself to be
standoffish about the people he helped, and he did not try to enshrine
the American effort in the cold war on the grounds that "we have to be
as bad as they are to fight communism." His work Moral Man and Immoral
Society pointed out the danger in thinking pointed to the errors in
human wisdom when we try to project our own personal morality onto the
group. We always wind up supporting things as a group that we would
never condone as individuals, because we internalize the group interest
and that overshadows our ability to think as free moral agents.
Neibuhr
tried to cut a third course through the mine field of the American
cold war politics. In the 1950s he fought a journal war against Billy
Graham over the issue of Grham's anti-commuist crusades. Grham argued
that all one needed was a McCarthy like anti-communism and the "simple
answer of the Gospel" and one could beat communism. Neibuhr argued that
Graham's approach was simple minded; that we needed keen political
analysis, and answer to social ills on our own side, and a more complex
message than going down to the front at a Graham crusade. Graham won
the war in the popular mind because it was easier for the common man to
identify with him and his answers seemed more "clear cut" (if not more
simplistic). Neibuhr, of course, won the respect of his colleagues for
standing up to the crwod, there was never any danger of Billy Graham
besting Reinhold Neibuhr in an intellectual debate, but this was the
MacCarthy era. Neibhur's attempt at steering a third course (Debsian
socialism is socialism but divorced from Marxist Leninist philosophy)
never panned out in the American mind. The cold war sucked all other
forms of thinking into a black hole in which it was possible only to be
community, or anti-communist. There were other attempts at a third way,
however, but they wound up in the same swamp of indifference. The
Papal office tried through several Popes to run a third way political
solution through Christian Democrat parties. This met with mixed
results, sometimes good government in West Germany, sometimes support
for the death Squads in El Salvador. Overall the Pope (JPII) had much
more success helping to destabilize communism than he did in founding a
third way.
But what other avenue should we expect in
the political arena? We should expect to fail to starting a concrete
third alternative since that would mean setting up a new agenda for
temporal power. The strength of the City of God (the Kingdom of God)
does not arize from temporal political power. The chruch is a priori
the third way. When we try to forge a concrete political alliance by
uniting the Gospel to anyone political agenda we miss the point and
merely re-create Constantin's mistake.The City of God is not about
holding temporal power, the city of man is not the city of God and
cannot claim to have the anointing of God. No political party can claim
to be the part of God; and by contrast, the other party is not the
"party of sin." Both or all political parties are just confused humans
looking for historically bound power arrangements and hoping
desperately that this will make their lives better. In some senses it
will, it will also make something worse. These are unavoidable
realities of the world. We cannot cast the aura of the sacred over the
temporal and claim victory foe the Kingdom of God!
Now
we are ensconced in a kind of cold war in the church. Another enemy
has been thrust upon us, one we don't' understand very well, but it
remains to be seen what becomes of that conflict. But in the church the
new cold war is not about that, it is about the social changes
inaugurated in the 1960s which still continue today; it is about the
Reagan era and the moral majority and the new republican party which
somehow never quite says it is the party of God, but somehow one gets
that feeling. The cold war is the culture war, "liberal" vs.
"conservative." But for "liberal" read, pro gay, pro feminist, pro
abortion, for "conservative" read prayer in schools, teaching
creationism in schools, keeping gays and feminists out of everything and
supposedly ending abortion; the short answer; Democrat vs. Republican,
blue country vs. Red country. The blue/red split in the church (it's
so confusing being blue after being red so long) is mainly about the
role of women and gays. These are the issues that seem galvanism both
sides.
Liberals are so despised and rejected by
American society that there isn't a single liberal talk show on PBS.
Charley Rose is what passes for a liberal and he is an avoid
conservative Republican who openly camping for Reagan. Somehow, he is
what passes for liberal, and he actually does a pretty good job of
substituting for one. The media is reviled by the conservatives as the
"dreaded liberal media" but if one were to read Noam Chomsky books one
would see what a joke that is (Manufacturing Consent). There are two
media watchdog groups, one left, (FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting) one Right (AIM, Accuracy in Media). Having studied both and
having been a local organizer for FAIR my own bias is that FAIR makes a
much better case for a conservative media than does AIM for a liberal
media. The media is solidly in the hands of the conservatives,
especially the news media. About the only place "liberals" really rule
in the media now are on cit cons, where the husband is always a
bumbling fool and the wife is the only competent person and the husband
is a bit afraid of her and she's always proven right. The liberal
tinge to the cultural side of the meida is probalby wht leads many
think of the media as liberal. But that is just what Marcuse called the
"carnation on the lapell of capitalism."
The
Evangelical movement, since tasting real political power a couple of
times, well almost, have become more despondent and feel more
surrounded than ever before. Seeing the utter failure of the old
patriarchal hierarchy in Western civilization they founder and
desperately grab at deck chairs while the vast unsinkable titanic of
guideline Age America goes under. Of course this means in reality that
they are closer to political control than ever. The only way to get a
conservative to move into political action is to convenes him that he's
surrounded. So the more defeated and desperate the conservatives
believe their cause to be, the more one can be sure they are winning.
But the outcome either way will be bad for the Gospel. The Gospel is
not the city of man. Taking temporal power can never be the fulfillment
of God's will, not in the long run.
Reinhold Neibuhr
I would have put this up no matter who won the election: It's sort a re-unifying plea
The Gospel should
always be the third way. It was the third way when it came out in the
time of Christ; neither Jew nor Greek. In other words, not Hebrew and
not pagan. It was the third way in the cold war, as there was a vast
Christian left history which is usually pretty much ignored and unknown
in conservative churches, but it still exists. Figures like Dorothy
Day and Mother Jones were real Christians and really did fight for
workers and the poor. The Gospel must be the third way because it is
not the City of Man, it cannot be a temporal political agenda, and the
temporal political power cannot be confused with the gospel doctrine and
moral view points are essential in following the Gospel, but the
Gospel is much more than just sound doctrine. There is also the matter
of living out our sound doctrine and how we treat people is a large
part of that.
We cannot make a Christian Democrat
party, as some have tried, because that's jut playing the world's game.
To be effective in helping people in the world for the Gospel, we can
at times enter the political arena. We can enter on either side, and we
should never lose sight of the fact that real Christians who really
love the Lord are on both sides. Neibuhr once said that we demonize the
other because we see in him our own temporal minded pretensions. We
must remember as we play the politics game that the other guy is
playing the same game, he/she may have the same motives we have and we
must recognized that fact. That realization could be to laud the other,
or it could be to convict ourselves. We must take seriously Paul's
talk about party spirit and realize that this is never more a danger
than when one becomes involved in political parties.
