Month: March 2007

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Justice Law and Policy Theology

The Ontology of Peace

In the past, I’ve referenced my interest in Radical Orthodoxy, which developed after I attended an RO-heavy conference at Baylor last fall. I’m working up a proposal for a presentation at next year’s Baylor conference, with the vague thought of how the “ontology of peace” can apply to information law and policy. I stumbled across this nice summary of the Augustine-Aquinas-Milbank trajectory through the “ontology of peace” in a delightful little essay by Joel Garver about “Kenny” from “South Park” as a Christ figure:

An Ontology of Primordial and Final Peace

Let’s begin sketching an alternative by examining some of the suggestions and presuppositions of two Christian philosophers and saints–Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Then we will consider some considerations of a contemporary Christian philosopher–John Milbank.

Augustine

The fundamental presupposition of Augustine is that the material world is a result of free creation by God–as opposed to violence. Since, for Augustine, God is a Trinity of persons in a relation of love, freely shared, God is free to create a reality that may enter into that love. Futhermore, human beings who are in the image of God possess free will by which they do wrong–as opposed to find evil’s source in mere ignorance. Moreover, evil has no ontological purchase on Augustine’s view. It is defined negatively as the choosing of lesser goods over greater goods and so evil is seen as a privation–as opposed to an ontological reality.

In his Confessions Augustine presents the history of his person, lived before the face of God and offered up to God, redeeming his painful memories of the past. Thus, Augustine can be credited with the first deep theorization of psychology and personality as we know it–as opposed to the ultimate impersonalism of the Greeks.

Finally, in his City of God Augustine proposed an alternative city, a re-telling of the pagan myths which unmasks their inherent violence. Moreover, it is the proposal of a new narrative that is plausible by out-narrating the alternatives.

Let us turn then to Thomas.

Thomas Aquinas

For Thomas the fundamental nature of the world is to be understood by means of the analogy of being (analogia entis) in which the relations and reality of creation find an analogy in the very life of God. Thus being and difference must be seen in the final context of relation and love within the Trinity. God is who he is–both in the unity of the Godhead and in the differences between the Persons–only in virtue of his internal relations of love.

By the analogy of being we can then also see that the ultimate nature of things is love. Difference within the creation is established in love. Moreover, being unveils itself to me and so knowledge is a gift of love, but since love is fundamental to knowledge reason and faith are not extrinsically and externally related to one another and to knowledge, but are mutually and intrinsically related. This ontology and epistemology provides an alternative to empirical-positivist model of science by invoking formal and final causality, intrinsic relationality, and gift–as opposed to a privileging of control, atomism, and force.

John Milbank

Augustine and Thomas show us, then, that it is possible to narrate reality in a way that does not presuppose and perpetuate violence either as a primordial condition of ontology or as a sustaining event within the world and human practices and discourse. There is an alternative within the Christian message.

For Milbank, the Christian message is not to out-argue the ontology of violence by an appeal to some supposedly neutral and universal discourse of rationality. Rather, Christian belief claims to out-narrate and out-practice any alternatives. Part of that narrative is the example of Jesus who embodies the ultimate rejection of violence by refusing to play the game and answering conflict with transforming love. In him, the church is to be the space in which the alternative world is manifest with its alternative narrative and counter-history. Thus the ontology of violence is to overcome with a lived narrative and ontology of peace.

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Spirituality

Kyrie Eleison, Resolution, and Reward

The reason the Kyrie in Rutter’s Requiem is so appealing is the sense of resolution it brings to the tension built up in other sections of the piece. It is a metaphor for the release of tension at the end of a Christian life well-lived. The Christian story is all about this sense of tension waiting to be resolved. In Romans 8, Paul says “[w]e know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” This universal sense of frustration and brokenness, of waiting and straining for resolution, captures us all, as Paul continues in the next verses:

Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.

Why doesn’t God resolve every problem and question now? Why is it that even Christians — especially Christians — feel a painful sense of longing? Because resolution now is not what our present faith and hope are about. Our faith and hope concern a resolution that only begins to break into the world now. The beginnings of that resolution make us long for its fulfillment.

What is its fulfillment? We often speak of some sort of an individual “heavenly reward.” That is part of it, I suppose, but only a small part. It is really about the resolution of the longings of all of creation. It is about the setting to rights of injustice, the healing of brokenness, and the restoration of loving relationships, through the consummation of the peaceable reign of Christ. It is about coming to “Aslan’s Country,” and finding it filled with richer songs, deeper stories, more fruitful industries, all more “real” and beautiful than any present shadow.

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Uncategorized

Kyrie Eleison

As I’m working on some research this morning, I’m listening to Rutter’s Requiem. Rutter mixes aspects of the Catholic Requiem Mass with some texts from the Book of Common Prayer. A Requiem is a Christian funeral liturgy. There are aspects of Rutter’s setting that are somewhat dark and intense, though never so broken as something by, say, Arvo Part. The truly moving of Rutter’s setting, though, is the Kyrie. It resolves beautifully into a melodic, major tonality. The sense is not of desperately pleading “Kyrie Eleison” (“Lord have mercy”), but rather of experiencing a mercy already known. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been feeling a little wiggy this week and wrestling with my faith a bit, but when I heard Rutter’s Kyrie this morning I could close my eyes, take a deep breath, and feel it massaging those deep knots in my soul.

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Augustine Humor

But You Can't Take it With You…

From the obituary of Janet Brown, famous proprietor of a New York fashion botique that catered to the very wealthy, in today’s New York Times: “At an early age Ms. Brown showed an aptitude for shopping.”

Well. There’s hope for all us dads of preteen girls yet.

Categories
Photography and Music

A Little Jazzy Riffage

I laid down this little sketch of an idea a couple of days ago. I love how the Variax guitar’s “jazzbox” sounds. Enjoy!

Categories
Spirituality

The Apologetic of Humble Love

I’ve been reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov lately, and came across this little snippet from a portion of the book that sketches the “talks and homilies of the Elder Zosima.” Zosima is of course a fictional character, but some of this section on his talks and homilies is drawn from homilies given by St. Isaac the Syrian, an early Christian ascetic. Here is what caught my eye — actually what struck me to the heart:

One may stand perpelexed before some thought, especially seeing men’s sin, asking oneself: ‘Shall I take it by force, or by humble love?’ Always resolve to take it by humble love. If you so resolve once and for all, you will be able to overcome the whole world. A loving humility is a terrible power, the most powerful of all, nothing compares with it. Keep company with yourself and look to yourself every day and hour, every minute, that your image be ever gracious. See, here you have pased by a small child, passed by in anger, with a foul word, with a wrathful soul; you perhaps did not notice the child, but he saw you, and our unsightly and impious image has remained in his defenseless heart. You did not know it, but you may thereby have planted a bad seed in him, and it may grow, and all because you did not restrain yourself before the child, because you did not nurture in yourself a heedful, active love. Brothers, love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is difficult to acquire, it is dearly bought, by long work over a long time, for oune ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time.

The best apologetic is humble love.

Categories
Justice Law and Policy

Family Research Council Beats the War Drum

I get a daily mass email from the Family Research Council. Honestly, most of the time it ticks me off. Today’s missive was particularly infuriating. Under the headline “The War Over War Rages On,” the message states,

In the four years since coalition troops first invaded Iraq, it has become painfully obvious that some Americans have short memories and even shorter attention spans. While our brave men and women risk their very lives for freedom, some at home have grown weary of the fight.

First, what does this have to do with family issues?

More importantly — well, no, we don’t have “short memories and even shorter attention spans.” We’ve been paying close attention, and we remember all to well that our troops were committed to an unwinnable war, with great cost to American and Iraqi lives, at untold financial cost, on false pretenses, and without any coherent plan for victory and no realistic hope of resolution.

All Christians should be disgusted that this organization, which purports to represent our interests in Washington on family issues, has instead become the mouthpiece of neoconservative warmongers. In my view, this is just another evidence that FRC speaks only for a radical fringe and not for mainstream evangelical Christians who care deeply about peace and justice.

Categories
Photography and Music

Snow?

In NJ today. Sigh. This moves golf season back a couple of weeks.

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Uncategorized

An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture

The National Association of Evangelicals has released an important declaration against torture. I have to confess that I have a minor jurisprudential quibble with the Declaration’s heavy reliance on “human rights” concepts. I certainly believe in the sanctity of life and therefore in basic and inalienable human rights, but I might want to be a little more careful about grounding those notions explicity in the imago Dei. Nevertheless, this is a Declaration to be warmly embraced by all evangelicals concerned about social justice.

Here is a key section:

The abominable acts of 9/11, along with the continuing threat of terrorist attacks, create profound security challenges. However, these challenges must be met within a moral and legal framework consistent with our values and laws, among which is a commitment to human rights that we as evangelicals share with many others. In this light, we renounce the resort to torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees, call for the extension of procedural protections and human rights to all detainees, seek clear government-wide embrace of the Geneva Conventions, including those articles banning torture and cruel treatment of prisoners, and urge the reversal of any U.S. government law, policy, or practice that violates the moral standards outlined in this declaration.

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Uncategorized

The Evangelical Discussion About Political Values

On the God’s Politics blog, Jim Wallis posts some encouraging thoughts, following up on his suggestion that he and James Dobson debate evangelical political proirities. Wallis says:

In his letter [calling for the resignation of National Association of Evangelicals public policy director Rich Cizik, over Cizik’s emphasis on the global warming problem], Dobson named the “great moral issues” as “the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.” I [Wallace] said in my last blog that I believe the sanctity of life, the integrity and health of marriages, and the teaching of sexual morality to our children are, indeed, among the “great moral issues of our time. But I believe they are not the only great moral issues.” As many writers have been saying in this blog, the enormous challenges of global poverty, climate change, pandemics that wipe out generations and continents, the trafficking of human beings made in God’s image, and the grotesque violations of human rights, even to the point of genocide, are also among the great moral issues that people of faith must be – and already are – addressing.

Wallis also notes that the NAE just concluded its annual meeting, and that

The only mention of Rich Cizik, whom the Dobson letter had singled out and called upon the NAE to fire, came with these words in the official NAE press release:

Speaking at the annual board banquet, Rev. Richard Cizik, NAE vice president for governmental affairs, quoted evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry in his wake up call to evangelicals sixty years ago: ‘The cries of suffering humanity today are many. No evangelicalism which ignores the totality of man’s condition dares respond in the name of Christianity….
Speaking of a new generation of evangelicals that has responded to those cries, Cizik said: ‘We root our activism in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ on the cross and are giving it a proper temporal focus by emphasizing all of the principles that are found in the Bible. We come together in a positive way as a family bonded by the love of Christ, not as fractious relatives. We desire to be people known for our passionate commitment to justice and improving the world, and eager to reach across all barriers with love, civility, and care for our fellow human beings.’

Wallace senses that

the NAE Board, and its president Leith Anderson, know that a new generation of evangelicals wants that same sound theology and good balance, and believe that Christian moral concerns (and God’s concerns) go beyond only a few issues. Recognizing how their broader agenda is resonating with evangelicals around the world, the NAE announced that at its fall board meeting in Washington, D.C., October 11-12, “the association will host an ‘International Congress on Evangelical Public Engagement,’ drawing prestigious leaders from around the world to meet with American leadership around the principles of the Association’s ‘For the Health of the Nation’ document.” It seems the broader evangelical social agenda has solid support and is moving forward.

So, Wallace says, “let’s have the big debate; and make it into the kind of deep and necessary conversation among the people of God that it needs to be.”

Amen to that.