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The Vitality of the Franciscan Spirit: Reflections on the 750th Anniversary of the Death of St. Fran

When Goethe visited Assisi in Italy in the late 18th century, the only thing he found worthy of his attention was the Roman temple in the main square. He indicated no desire to see the frescos of Giotto, Cimabue or the Lorenzetti brothers, nor did he evince the slightest interest in the man who inspired that outpouring of art in the early Trecento: Francesco Bernadone -- now better known as St. Francis of Assisi.

Goethe’s attitude was not atypical; indeed, he can well stand as an example of the cultured European mind during the Enlightenment period. Saint Francis and his view of life had caused a tremendous outpouring of cultural activity after his death in 1226. His passionate vision of Christianity not only changed the course of the visual arts in Italy but inspired a movement of belles-lettres (a recent American scholar has argued that fully 90 per cent of Middle English lyrics owe their inspiration to the Franciscan impact on English life), producing the great mystical poetry of Jacopone da Todi and inspiring the vision of Dante’s Divine Comedy, especially in the culminating cantos of the Paradiso.

By the 15th century, outside of strictly ecclesiastical circles this was all part of the larger history of European culture. Petrarch, in the 14th century, might have praised and encouraged the poor and simple life as that appropriate for the true humanist, but the civic humanists of the 15th century felt that there was no good reason why a mercantile fortune was inimical to the pursuit of learned virtue. Niccolò Machiavelli, that paradigmatic humanist, had harsh words for the otherworldliness of Francis despite his admiration for the persona of the saint.

I

The interest in things medieval in particular and romanticism in general helped pave the way for a renewed interest in St. Francis in the 19th century. Central to this revival was the work of the French Protestant historian and writer Paul Sabatier. Sabatier’s interest in Francis had been inspired by his teacher at the College de France, Ernest Renan. This interest was fueled by his researches in Franciscan historiography in Italy and culminated, in 1894, with the publication of The Life of Saint Francis.

Sabatier’s biography of the saint was an immediate success and the focus for a critical storm that has hardly lessened to this day. The portrait of St. Francis drawn by Sabatier was that of a simple Christ-intoxicated mystic who wished to lead a life totally dedicated to the gospel ideals of evangelical purity and poverty, only to see his lay fraternity clericalized and routinized by the imposition of older monastic constraints -- constraints demanded by curial authorities in Rome -- while the simple life of poverty was undermined by shallow members of his own Franciscan family. Sabatier’s mentor, Renan, once quipped that Jesus preached the Kingdom of God and the world ended up with the Catholic Church. Sabatier’s biography was a variation on this theme: Francis had preached a lay Christianity bent on radical spiritual renewal, and Europe ended up with the Franciscan order.

It was an unwitting tribute to the persuasiveness of the Sabatier thesis that Rome put his book on the Index Libororum Prohibitorum. More directly, one can say that every serious scholar who has treated the Franciscan question has had to reckon with Sabatier’s thesis. To be sure, Sabatier wrote from the perspective of liberal continental Protestantism, and his presuppositions colored his interpretation. Yet, making allowances for a certain degree of parti pris, there is much persuasiveness in Sabatier’s picture, and quite respectable scholars today (I have in mind especially John Moorman and Rosalind Brooke in England) have attempted to elucidate a modified version of it. It is a sure and happy sign of the ecumenical spirit that the most spirited attack on the Sabatier thesis, outside of those who write from within the Franciscan order and have their own vested interests at stake, is that of E. Randolph Daniels, a contemporary American Protestant historian.

II

For the average person, however, these donnish disputes must give way to a consideration of the more common image of the saint, best characterized by those innumerable bad concrete statues displayed in suburban nurseries and firmly planted in the corners of well-manicured lawns all over the Western world: St. Francis as a vague Doctor Doolittle talking to the animals, taming bad wolves, and saving little lambs from the abattoir. This picture of the saint has its roots in 19th century attitudes but still speaks powerfully today.

Matthew Arnold praised St. Francis as a poetic naïf, while Hermann Hesse in his first novel, Peter Kamenzkind, depicted the artist as a sort of secularized St. Francis, a vocation that the hero, Peter, recognized after a visionary experience in the town of Assisi. This absorption of the Franciscan spirit puts him in harmony with both nature and the lumpenproletariat. In our own day, the distinguished UCLA historian Lynn White, Jr., has suggested that St. Francis of Assisi should be designated the patron saint of ecology because, in White’s words, Francis had a "democratic spirit" in viewing all parts of the created universe.

There are, of course, good historical reasons for emphasizing the affinity of St. Francis and the beauties of the created world. His early legends and memoirs are full of a profound and poetic love of the world: it is the very theme of the poem he wrote in the last years of his life, The Canticle of Brother Sun. The danger in such an emphasis -- and G. K. Chesterton noted this 50 years ago in his life of the saint -- is to detach the deep theological insight that motivated Francis to praise the world and its creatures. It would be the most grievous of errors to see St. Francis as a pantheist or a romantic nature mystic after the manner of Richard Jeffries. The Canticle of Brother Sun was not a medieval Tintern Abbey. In the Franciscan canticle, deeply rooted in the psalmic language of the Bible, the world of nature praises God or is used as the medium of praise, but nature itself is never identified with God. St. Francis totally affirmed the Genesis credo about the world: "God created it and it was good." In that sense St. Francis stood squarely in the sacramental tradition of Catholicism. The world was a sign (sacramentum) of God. Francis was in fundamental accord with Aquinas except that the Angelic Doctor founded his whole metaphysical system on the intellectual grasp of being while the Poverello began his world view with the simple seeing of the beauty of a flower or the flash of a bird’s wing.

III

In the final analysis, however, the significance and the relevance of Francis is founded not in the charm of his personality or in the magnitude of his gentleness but in the seriousness with which he took the person of Jesus as he saw it in the Gospels. The whole complex of virtues, attitudes and motivations of the saint must be related to his holistic view of Christology. For Francis, God first manifested his love in the uttering of the creative word of creation; he spoke a second time in the Word made flesh. For Francis, the life of poverty was tied to the kenosis of Christ just as the beauty of the world was a real evidence of the presence of Ineffable Beauty in the world. As one reads the prose writings of the saint (and surprisingly they are, with the exception of the Canticle, graceless and flat) it is easy to see that for him the presence of Christ is breathed forth in the sacramental ministry of the church, a church to which he was profoundly attached, just as the presence of Christ was evident in the beauty of the world.

Can that Franciscan spirit demand attention today? It has for many persons. Simone Weil, that tortured and rather unfranciscan person, first felt the compulsion to pray in the town of Assisi. In her scattered remarks, later in life, she spoke glowingly of the inspiration of Francis, who had made possible a new form of spirituality. But a further question intrudes. Can groups or structures live the Franciscan spirit? That question burns in the lives of the various Franciscan families found in the Catholic Church today. There is much to recover. Let a simple personal anecdote stand for the magnitude of the problem: last year I was in Chicago for an academic meeting and went, more antiquo, to mass at a downtown Franciscan church on All Saints Day. As I left the church I watched an armored car pull up, presumably to take the day’s collection to the bank. Not a sinful or even an unedifying sight, but hardly a Franciscan one; an exercise not of caritas but of prudentia.

Another memory, this to exemplify the possibility of the Franciscan charism: Dorothy Day of the Catholic Workers speaking to a small group of us in Tallahassee, Florida, with evident fatigue and real effort after having taken the Greyhound bus down from the north. Why the bus? To spend money on an airline ticket was to rob money from the needs of the poor. Here, I submit, is the living continuity of the Franciscan spirit. To think of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers is to think of a Franciscan movement that would satisfy both Sabatier and his critics: a lay movement, supremely orthodox in its religious allegiance, truly poor, zealously evangelical, and totally committed to the social and religious vision of Catholic Christianity. Like the early Franciscans, the Catholic Workers have also spawned a desire to articulate a broad and embracing humanism, with the result that among its members it has had the attention of such disparate persons as the short story writer J. F. Powers, the social critic Michael Harrington, and the late journalist John Cogley; its movement has caught the imagination of many other persons ranging from Robert Lowell and Daniel Berrigan to Robert Coles.

You will not find the Workers or the followers of another great Franciscan personality, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, padding about in sandals and cowl talking to the animals; that is the stuff of the romantic legend. You will find them embracing the lepers of the world and teaching the goodness of creation and the love of Christ. That alone should prove that, 750 years after his death, the way of Francis seems still one authentic method by which to read and live the gospel message.

Thomas Merton: The Pursuit of Marginality

Ten years have now gone by since the tragic and untimely death of Thomas Merton. His death was a tissue of ironies: a man who had fought for monastic solitude for over 25 years died thousands of miles from his Kentucky hermitage; this passionate pacifist was flown back from Thailand in a military plane, from an airfield that was part of the network of military bases that prospered during the Vietnam years.

Things Monastic

Now that a decade has passed, we might reflect a bit on the person and significance of Thomas Merton. That task is both easy and difficult -- easy because his was one of the most familiar names of the postwar period. His spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), was hailed as a modern Confessions, though today it has a slightly smug and triumphant air about it. After that best-selling work, Merton produced scores of books, articles and volumes of poetry. He almost singlehandedly made the American Catholic public aware of its profound contemplative tradition.

Indeed, as Garry Wills pointed out in Bare Ruined Choirs, American Catholicism -- at least ‘liberal" Catholicism -- was gripped by a romantic interest in things monastic. It was not simply a question of more men going into the monastery (Cistercian monasteries did experience a phenomenal growth in that period), but the avant-garde journals of the day were filled with articles about liturgical prayer, Gregorian chant and experiments in community living.

With the coming of the Second Vatican Council and the rapid disintegration of " ’50s Catholicism," Merton should logically have gone into eclipse along with such now-ignored persons as Romano Guardini and Jacques Maritain. But, he did not suffer such an eclipse, even though he did not seem to belong to the ’60s. He wrote no ringing criticism of the church (though he had plenty of criticisms to make), nor did he become, like Hans Küng and other luminaries, a theological media star. He seemed, in fact, to be bucking history; as the cry went up for relevance and engagement in the world, Merton pressed successfully for what he had always wanted: further retreat from the world -- the life of a hermit.

From his hermitage he continued to write books on spirituality, the need for East-West religious dialogue, volumes of poetry, and resounding protests against war and racism. In the last years of his life his influence was further underscored in that others began to write books about him -- a trend that was to intensify after his death so that now we see a steady stream of theses, monographs and studies coming out each year, though we still await the authorized biography to be done by his old friend John Howard Griffin.

At the Margin of Society

What explains the continuing interest in Thomas Merton? That question demands another, more basic one: What did Thomas Merton represent himself to be or, better, how has he been perceived by his public admirers? He was not a theologian in the conventional sense of that word. He did write some impressive volumes on ascetical theology (e.g., New Seeds of Contemplation, The Climate of Monastic Prayer), but there were no books from his pen providing us with systematic reflections on the datum of the faith. He was a poet and literary critic, but I think it does no disservice to his memory to say that his poetry was not quite first rate and that his criticism was eclectic, occasional and of varying quality. He was not a social critic in any sustained fashion, though his social reflections could evoke powerful responses. as they most surely did in the early Eldridge Cleaver, who testified to that effect in Soul on Ice. Even as a monastic commentator Merton could not claim the scholarly stature of a Father Jean Leclercq.

To attempt to "classify" Merton in any of these categories -- as poet, theologian, critic or monastic commentator -- is to miss the point. Thomas Merton was primarily a monk; that is the way he defined himself from the moment he entered Gethsemani Abbey, and that is the way he understood himself in the last months before, his death. It is true that his notion of monasticism had deepened and matured over the years. He had shed any romantic notion of the monk as a cowled figure padding about a cloister garden and had come to define the monk, as he did in a talk he gave just weeks before his death, as a "marginal person who withdraws deliberately to the margin of society with a view to deepening fundamental human experience" (cf. Asian Journal, 1973, p.305).

A Concern with ‘Irrelevancy’

This notion of marginality was very much a part of Merton’s thinking, and it was his pursuit of that ideal that, paradoxically enough, brought him from the margin to the center of people’s attention, In the same talk quoted above, Merton argued that it is the monk’s vocation (as it is the vocation of the poet, the hippie, the prisoner, the displaced or dying person) to be irrelevant. He is to be irrelevant (how odd to apply that badge to oneself in 1968!) because the monk needs to live close to the edge of death, for only in that way can one understand the limits of life.

This concern with the peculiar status of the monk is the leitmotif of the volume Contemplation in a World of Action (1973), which brought together a large number of Merton’s essays and conference papers on the monastic life done during the ’60s. In this volume his idea of "irrelevancy" is expressed in a somewhat different way: "The monk is not defined by his task, his usefulness. In a certain sense he is supposed to be ‘useless’ because his mission is not to do this or that job but to be a man of God" (p. 27). It is from this peculiar perspective that the monk should be able to get a sense of the deepest meaning of life itself; he also "will be in some sense critical of the world, of its routines, its confusions. and its sometimes tragic failures to provide other men with lives that are fully sane and human" (p. 28).

This sense of distance and marginality had to be lived in creative tension with the real world. Merton was anxious to erase the earlier conception of the Trappist that he himself had helped so create in Seven Storey Mountain: "The man who spurned New York, spat on Chicago, and tromped on Louisville, heading for the woods with Thoreau in one pocket, John of the Cross in another, and holding the Bible open to the Apocalypse" (Contemplation in a World of Action, p. 159). In fact, Merton the solitary carried on a passionate, if critical, dialogue with the world. His writings and his addresses attest to a Catholic appetite for the problems and hopes of the modern world.

A Peculiar Angle of Vision

It could be argued that Merton as a monk solitary proved his relevance to modern Catholic life precisely in that peculiar angle of vision which his hermitage afforded him. Many of the issues that exercised Merton’s mind in the last decade or so of his life anticipated many of the topics that occupy us in the ‘70s but which seemed esoteric or trivial at any earlier time.

In the first place, Merton shared, from an early period in his life, a marked interest in cultures other than those of western Europe. He was a passionate student of the poetry and culture of Latin America and of Vietnam. One of his novices, Ernesto Cardenal, was himself to become a poet of stature in his native Nicaragua as well as one of his country’s most vociferous social critics. At this writing, Cardenal’s monastic experiment at Solentiname has been destroyed by the police, and Cardenal, the epitome now of the marginal man, is on the run.

Second, Merton had an early and an abiding interest in Eastern thought, especially in Zen Buddhism and, in his last years, Tibetan Buddhism. Such an interest among many today is a commonplace. What marked Merton’s interest in Eastern thought was his refusal to make facile and misleading appropriations of Eastern spirituality. His study of the East was serious, ongoing and thorough. He exemplified to a significant degree that journey which Notre Dame theologian John Dunne has called (in The Way of All the Earth. 1972) "crossing over."

Merton went to the East not as a teacher or a missionary but as a pilgrim and a student. He went to learn what the East had learned about the monastic life in particular and spirituality in general. His purpose -- as even, the somewhat fragmentary Asian Journal makes clear -- was to enhance the contemplative life of his own tradition. Merton was able to use Buddhist concepts to critique and clarify his own life. One example must suffice. It is quite evident that his own desire for more solitude was tempered considerably by the Buddhist concept of "compassion"; he began to see that his own life had to oscillate between the anonymity of eremetical silence and an openness to the needs of others on both an individual and a social level. It was seemingly because of this clarification that Merton opted for a life which was to balance deep solitude with ‘periods of availability.

A Sane Voice

Finally, and most important, Merton was the foremost American spiritual writer of his generation. He was a theologian in the ancient patristic sense of the word: one who could speak existentially about the experience of God. His status as a spiritual writer is assured both because of his profound grasp of the Western tradition of spirituality and because of his ability to convey that tradition to an audience of contemporary people. In the ‘60s he was almost a vox clamantis in deserto as he argued against a mindless activism cut off from the deep roots of prayer and reflection.

If he was a lone voice then, he is a sane voice today whose interest in spirituality is manifest. Alas, even Christian circles are not immune to odd currents of pseudo-spirituality which are products of the general air of psycobabble. It is precisely in this area that Merton can be a model for our day. He was able to be a part of the ancient tradition of Christian monasticism while being alert to ways in which that tradition could be enhanced, enlarged and made more available to today’s world.

Max Weber once said that the Reformation made every man a monk and the whole world a monastery. There is truth in that statement, but the end result, in technological society at least, has been to imitate many of the worst aspects of historic monasticism: conformity, uniformity and an obsessive concern with communal discipline. In that sense the observance of the monastery of Cluny in the 12th century sounds suspiciously like a spiritual version of life on a modern assembly line.

There need to be persons today who can step back from such orders of life to see from a detached point of view. We find them among our poets, revolutionaries, critics, dropouts and nonconformists. Every once in a while we find them where we should expect to: in our monasteries. Thomas Merton was surely one of those rare souls who are able to turn the marginality of their lives into a presence of importance for the whole church. St. Thomas More once said that what the world needed most was more houses for the poor and more real monks. Ever so slowly we are getting the former; in rare grace-filled periods, we also get the latter. For that small favor we should thank God.

Creation in Our Own Image: Ethical Questions

There are religions which can and do ignore developments in the world of science and technology, but Christianity does not happen to be one of them. Certainly there have always been those Christians who have understood their faith solely in spiritual or personal terms, who have thought of Christianity as the guardian of eternal truths and timeless values in a world of change and decay. But the intrinsic earthiness of biblical faith, with its Insistence that God has always been and remains constantly involved with matter through the creation and preservation and redemption of all things, has moved Christians again and again into the center of public policy concerns that arise from new information and new methods relating to our stewardship of the earth and the life which it supports.

It ought to come as a surprise to no one, therefore, that from the time of the first splitting of the atom down through the destruction of Hiroshima and on to current controversies about nuclear weapons and power plants, Christian people have been involved individually and corporately at every level of the debate, not incidentally but specifically because of their Christian commitment. There was no way for the church to be the church without somehow being involved in those crucial decisions. And the same is going to be true now as public interest shifts from nuclear physics to molecular biology, from the splitting of atoms to the splicing of genes.

It is 25 years since James Watson and Francis Crick published their initial paper on the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), but the technology to manipulate this genetic key to all of life is very new -- so new that only during this past year did it become a matter of interest and concern to the general public. It is difficult at this point to imagine that any informed person is still unaware of these developments, for feature articles on recombinant DNA technology have been carried by national periodicals from the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s to Time magazine and even the Saturday Evening Post.

Only the most otherworldly of Christians will imagine that they have no stake in this new instrument to manipulate the genetic code and to manufacture new organisms whose properties are not completely predictable and whose effects on all of us may turn out to be quite uncontrollable. Most of us will want to be involved somehow in the coming debate. But if that involvement is going to be informed, it will be necessary for us to know something about the technology itself, to isolate some of the major ethical issues, and to suggest some possible lines of response from the perspective of Christian commitment.

Intervening in Evolution

It was in 1854 that the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel began keeping records on smooth and wrinkled garden peas. After 12 years of meticulous observation and careful recording of the results, plus some sheer good luck in his selection of traits to study, he formulated the "Mendelian laws" out of which the modern science of genetics has grown. A century later, in 1953, Watson and Crick put forward their hypothesis of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Their Nobel Prize came in 1962 after the hypothesis was tested and seen to be essentially correct. Early in this decade (one could argue about the exact date since a cluster of events is involved) came the technology to make use of this information to bring about by design significant changes in actual life processes.

The DNA molecule is an extremely long chain of strictly ordered subunits, a length of several hundred to several thousand of which is called a gene. Genes are contained in chromosomes, made up primarily of DNA and some associated proteins. All sexually reproducing organisms have pairs of chromosomes in all body cells (humans have 23 chromosome pairs), one chromosome of each pair inherited from the father and one from the mother. When an egg and a sperm combine, each carrying a single set of chromosomes, those chromosomes also combine into pairs, and the genes function according to the now-familiar laws for dominance and recessiveness. Every cell of a given organism carries the same chromosomes, and thus the same genetic information is copied exactly every time a cell

divides. That is, almost every time. Once in a few hundred thousand times there is a mistake, a mutation, in the copying of the genetic information. In almost every case the mutant cell does not survive. However, in an incredibly small number of instances, the mistake happens to be a "good" one and the cell is "improved," made stronger, more able to survive in its environment, and so it continues to live and to reproduce. According to current evolutionary theory, there is good reason to. believe that all life present on earth, from human beings to bacteria, is the product of several billion years of mutation, recombination and selection. Homo sapiens would never have appeared on the scene had there not been this "recombining" of DNA molecules in nature, brought about through mistakes made by dividing cells in the copying of genetic information. Nor, of course, would have polio or cancer.

Quite likely human beings have never been willing to allow this evolution to take place in a purely haphazard fashion. From the beginnings of civilization, farmers have been intervening in the course of evolution by producing hybrid grains, and stock breeders have been domesticating animals that live longer or work harder or run faster. The new datum in our time is the development by molecular biologists of procedures which make it possible to control this recombining process (so that it is not simply "random"), and to increase almost immeasurably the speed by which it takes place.

The technology involved is somewhat analogous to the development of the computer. Electrical impulses have been occurring in the human brain for as long as human beings have been on the scene. The computer, as an extension of the human brain, enables that same process to go on in a more controlled and an exceedingly more rapid manner. Recombinant DNA technology, then, does not involve doing something that has never before been done. It does make possible a quantum jump in the degree to which humankind can take control of the evolutionary process, including the evolution of human beings.

Recombinant DNA research has been done primarily on bacteria, one-celled organisms smaller than animal or plant cells and simpler in structure, yet capable of very complex chemical activity. The bacterium which has been the chief vector, or vehicle, for DNA research is Escherichia Coli (E Coli), genetically and biochemically the most completely analyzed organism on earth, having been grown and studied in laboratories for more than 50 years. It is also extremely common, living in the intestines of many animals, including humans.

By using restriction enzymes, it is possible to open up a plasmid (a self-replicating circular piece of DNA) and then match it up with a piece of DNA from any source that has been acted upon by the same enzyme. These two pieces are cemented together by the action of another enzyme, called a DNA ligase, and the new recombinant molecule, or plasmid, is inserted into an E Coli bacterium. When the cell divides, it reproduces the recombinant plasmid in each new cell. This technology thus makes it possible to produce not only the recombinant DNA, but also unlimited quantities of new organisms created in the laboratory.

Research and Regulation

One of the most difficult factors for the layperson to deal with is the fact that there is very little consensus among the scientists themselves on whether the research should continue and, if so, under what conditions. Positions not only vary; they vary radically and are argued passionately. James Watson, now director of the Coldspring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island and a proponent of DNA research, places its critics into three categories:

kooks, shits and incompetents ("Recombinant DNA Research: A Debate, on the Benefits and Risks," Chemical and Electrical Engineering [May 30, 1977], p. 26). On the other hand, Erwin Chargaff, retired biochemist at Columbia University and an outspoken opponent of the research, says that "anyone affirming immediate disaster is a charlatan, but anyone denying the possibility of its occurring is an even greater one" (quoted in "Recombinant DNA: The Argument Shifts," by Tabith M. Powledge, the Hastings Center Retort [April 1977], p. 19). One can easily line up the experts on either side of the debate. The public will have to make the decisions, as it often does, quite apart from any clear consensus among the people who know the technological aspects of the issue best. And those decisions are going to involve some ethical considerations.

The doing of ethics involves the use of certain presuppositions and procedures for reflecting on moral and social questions in some sort of orderly fashion. One of its tasks is to identify and describe issues in a given area of concern, the assumption being that issues so isolated can be better handled. The following are some of the questions that emerge in the recombinant DNA debate. Although very large and sprawling questions, which interpenetrate and overlap, they are inescapable for anyone who wishes to reflect seriously on the situation confronting us.

1. Assuming that recombinant DNA research should be subject to some kind of regulation, who should do the regulating?

It is significant that regulation began as a result of worries expressed by those doing the research. Out of the Gordon Conference on nucleic acids in the summer of 1973 came an open letter to Science; the establishment (in October 1974) by the National Institutes of Health of the Recombinant DNA Molecule Program Advisory Committee; and in February 1975 the now-famous international conference at the Asilomar Conference Center in California, where a reluctant decision was made by scientists to declare a temporary moratorium on certain kinds of DNA research.

The reaction of the public was entirely predictable. If the scientists themselves were afraid of what they were doing, certainly the public ought to be. Mayor Vellucci of Cambridge, Massachusetts, took up arms against Harvard and MIT, and across the nation city councils, university boards of regents, and state legislatures entered the fray. The National Institutes of Health went to work constructing guidelines for physical containment of the research, establishing four grades for the facilities, related to the degree of hazard involved. One P4 (the most hazardous) research facility was set up in a large trailer outside the NIH in Washington, D.C., and another is being prepared at Fort Detrick, Maryland, at a site formerly used for germ-warfare research -- a little coincidence which does not serve to set at ease the minds of the critics. A number of federal bills having to do with the regulation of recombinant DNA research were introduced last year. Those receiving greatest attention were by Senator Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.) and by Congressman Paul Rogers (D., Fla.). Although Senator Kennedy has now withdrawn support from his own bill, and regulation has run into new difficulties, it seems certain that there will be some kind of regulation and that someone or some agency will be assigned to do it.

Some of those scientists involved in the initial attempt at self-regulation now resent bitterly the intrusion of lawyers and politicians into the regulation process. In James Watson’s opinion, the discussion has become "a surrealistic nightmare." The public has the power to do whatever it chooses; controls now exist, for instance, regulating experimentation on human subjects. The question is whether the public has the right and the responsibility to tell biologists what they can and cannot do in their research laboratories. And that question is related to the question of academic freedom.

Limits on Freedom

2. Can society afford to set limits on the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge? Is not a free intellectual marketplace the bulwark of Western liberal political institutions?

Critics of regulation are quick to point out the evils of Lysenkoism, that era in Russian history when biological research was brought to a virtual standstill by political control. If society allows politicians to pass laws against free inquiry, we are in a very bad situation indeed, they say. One of the most passionate and articulate opponents of political control is Bernard Davis of Harvard University. He even looks with considerable disfavor on the emerging discipline of medical ethics as "opening the field for shallow pronouncements by individuals with little qualification" ("Novel Pressures on the Advancement of Science," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences [Vol. 265, 1976]). He contends that even lawyers are of questionable worth in determining guidelines for research since they are by their training committed to the adversary process and argue their cases far beyond the point warranted by the evidence. Scientists, says Davis, are trained to give the evidence against their conclusion as well as that which supports it, and are therefore inclined to be more objective and reliable in making decisions about such matters as regulation of research.

One serious problem in the area of recombinant DNA research is, however, that drug companies and government agencies are as much involved as are university professors. The issue is clouded not only by the struggle for research grant money and academic advancement and Nobel Prize notoriety, but also by the desire of corporate board members and stockholders for profits from new product development. To speak of the matter simply as an issue of academic freedom is to fail to see the complexity of it.

In addition, academic freedom has to do with thinking rather than with acting -- or at least some proponents of government regulation like to make that point. Professors can think (and presumably teach) whatever they wish, but experimentation with human subjects, for instance, is something which must be -- and is -- controlled. So also, the argument goes, must the public see to it that the creation of new forms of life is carefully regulated so as to limit the chances for biodisaster. Most research, obviously, ought not to be regulated. How much of it comes under public control will depend a great deal on public attitudes. The question of the freedom of the intellectual marketplace can be resolved only in the context of the question of the burden of proof.

3. In the case of recombinant DNA research, on whom does the burden of proof lie: on those who think it should not be done, or on those who think it should?

The scientific enterprise began under considerable duress, not least from the church, and was specifically suppressed again and again as investigators sought to obtain new information and to devise new methods for working with nature and with human life. The long struggle was described in all its gory detail by Andrew Dickson White in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, published in 1896. Cornell University was founded in 1868 by White and Ezra Cornell in order to provide a place for the free pursuit of truth unhampered by the prejudices of religion. The battle was finally won, and the burden of proof was on anyone who wished to oppose a given research procedure. The dropping of the atomic bomb, however, and the killing of birdlife by DDT, documented by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, introduced a new problem: the presence of totally unpredicted (and probably unpredictable) harmful effects on the environment and on human life stemming from actions taken specifically to produce certain benefits.

If that sort of situation developed from such an apparently unambiguous procedure as the deployment of pesticides, what potential disaster may be lurking in the laboratories of those who are creating new organisms whose pathogenic effects cannot possibly be predicted with accuracy? So there are those who are saying that the burden of proof must lie with those who want to do recombinant DNA research rather than with those who oppose it.

Nancy McCann, for instance, speaks for many when she concludes her article on the subject in Sojourners with the sentence, "Perhaps, as one person has remarked, when we lack sufficient wisdom to do, wisdom consists in not doing" ("The DNA Maelstrom," May 1977). For many people today, the argument has become self-evident; the shift in mood is captured by the title of a recent article by Ruth Macklin (in the Hastings Center Report, December 1977): "On the Ethics of Not Doing Scientific Research." That shift is somewhat subtle but of enormous consequence. It is analogous to the difference between a legal system wherein a person is innocent until proved guilty and one in which a person is guilty until proved innocent.

An intriguing dimension of the burden-of-proof problem is a questioning of the assumption that additional research automatically leads to additional knowledge. Pointing to the great and growing gap in our acquisition of data on the one hand and our ability to make constructive use of it on the other, some people say that what we have is not a knowledge explosion but an ignorance explosion. They talk about the increase in the ratio of "noise" to "signal" and argue that rather than increasing our ability to live in our environment we are specifically decreasing it as the data load multiplies faster than we are able to sort it out and understand and use it.

Burden of proof is an either/or type of issue. The burden :of proof lies either on those who think the research should be done or on those who think it should not. But that either/or decision depends very much on a matter-of-degree question, that of the balance between costs and benefits.

Assessing Costs and Benefits

4. If cost/benefit analysis is an appropriate device to use in assessing recombinant DNA research, what are the anticipated benefits and costs? Is it in fact an appropriate device?

The anticipated benefits of recombinant DNA research are mind-boggling. The rat insulin gene has already been cloned (replicated by means of DNA technology) by a group of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. It is theoretically possible to design bacteria which will manufacture hormones, or blood-clotting factors for hemophiliacs, or highly specific antibiotics. It may even be possible by recombinant DNA technology to develop, vaccines which will attack viruses. And the list of possibilities goes on: to create nitrogen-fixing bacteria which would enable crops to make use of nitrogen from the air and thus virtually wipe out the need for artificial fertilizers; to design a strain of bacteria which would use sunlight to split the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen, providing an unlimited source of energy; to develop bacteria which, as decay agents, could transform wood and straw into sugar or hydrocarbon molecules into protein, or "mop up" oil spills, or break down plastics.

What, then, are the costs? One cost often neglected in the debate over recombinant DNA research concerns the allocation of scarce resources that might be used otherwise. Even if those potential benefits can be realized, is it necessarily the case that scarce resources (money, talent, energy) should be so employed? What if, for instance, the massive funding for cancer research in the post-World War II period had been directed toward public health and preventive medicine, including nutrition research, rather than toward "cures"? Some maintain that the results would have been far more beneficial, including even a lower incidence of cancer. Funds spent for one thing cannot be spent for another. Doing one thing means leaving other things undone.

But the costs of recombinant DNA research are usually talked about in terms of risks. There is always the possibility that a pathogenic bacterium will be produced in a laboratory and will escape, say, in the intestine of a laboratory worker (a specific possibility in the case of research with E Coli), thus bringing on an uncontrollable epidemic, a biodisaster. Those who talk about this "cost" most energetically are unimpressed by the efforts of the NIH to regulate physical and biological containment procedures. Some tend to argue for zero-risk research. The counterargument claims that there is no such thing and that the controls are such as to make the risks virtually negligible.

A further question, however, is whether cost/benefit analysis should be used at all on issues of this sort. Taking one position are those who insist that the entire idea of calculating consequences is wrong-headed. Responding to Garrett Hardin’s "lifeboat ethics," for instance, such people would say it is better to take everyone on board and to let the boat sink rather than for those in the lifeboat to dehumanize themselves by keeping others out. Cost/benefit analysis assumes that everything is relative and that virtually any cost can be sustained if the anticipated benefit is sufficiently desirable and probable.

Even those who work with the calculation of consequences, however, know that the facts are never all in, that calculations often have to be made with less than adequate evidence. In the case of recombinant DNA research, both costs and benefits are still so largely theoretical that it is difficult to move with any certainty.

In the Midst of Uncertainty

5. Given the paucity of hard data on which to calculate probable costs and benefits, how can responsible decisions be made in the midst of this uncertainty?

Ethicists have always worried about "borderline situations," in which clear rules do not yield clear direction, or about the "perplexed conscience," which leaves a person bewildered in the midst of difficult decisions. Far more complex, however, are those larger problems the very fabric of which is characterized by uncertainty. It was an important development for physics when Werner Heisenberg formulated the principle of uncertainty. Such a principle scarcely seems necessary for biology, since the uncertainties are so overwhelmingly obvious. And the problem is complicated by the fact that certainty about, for instance, costs and benefits cannot be achieved without actually doing the research. Yet decisions do have to be made, and even those people who agree with Nancy McCann that "when we lack sufficient wisdom to do, wisdom consists in not doing" will ask how much wisdom is sufficient.

Recombinant DNA research is, of course, not the only area in which conditions of uncertainty prevail. -It is equally true with regard to nuclear power, to delicate diplomatic relations, to fragile economic balances, to environmental concerns. Economists and systems analysts have devoted considerable attention to "decision-making under conditions of uncertainty," and fairly sophisticated ethical machinery has been developed for dealing with these macroethical problems. Ought not that machinery to be investigated for dealing with recombinant DNA research, particularly since the problems are global in scope and decisions made by one government can easily be canceled out by another?

In making such decisions under conditions of uncertainty (Ruth Macklin calls them conditions of ignorance), the construction of best-possible and worst-possible scenarios will probably depend in no small part on the basic orientation of the individuals constructing them. And how is it possible to bring into fruitful conversation the people who are essentially optimistic about the future and those who are essentially pessimistic?

Jacob Bronowski says (in The Ascent of Man) that "the ascent of man is always teetering in the balance. There is always a sense of uncertainty, whether when man lifts his foot for the next step it is really going to come down pointing ahead." Neil Armstrong had no such doubt; he was certain that when he put his foot down on the moon it was a giant step forward for humankind. At the same time there are the proponents of Murphy’s Law who are certain only that if anything can possibly go wrong, it will. These two orientations stem not necessarily from different data but from a difference in fundamental point of view, as William James observed long ago. What we are up against, finally, is whether one thinks that the universe is essentially friendly or essentially hostile. The orientation does not dictate any specific conclusions about a given issue, in this case recombinant DNA research, but it does constitute a very large and often determinative factor in decision-making processes. To take that into account means taking seriously some specifically theological themes not identical to, but derived from, biblical faith.

To the question, "What does the church have to do with the recombinant DNA debate?," some Christians would maintain that the answer is "Nothing." Christianity is, they might say, a religion for personal salvation or for the preservation of eternal values. Others would maintain that there is a simple and direct line from Christian commitment to a given position on such matters. They might say, opposing the DNA research, that we ought not to "play God" or, favoring it, that God has given human beings "dominion" over the creation.

Contrary to both of these extremes, the position taken here is that Christianity provides, in addition to the Word of the gospel, some materials from which certain conclusions can be drawn, however tentatively, about the nature of reality and of history; that theology involves the clarification of the church’s proclamation but also the attempt to delineate the church’s stance toward the world and toward every new event and every new idea.

There is no simple and direct move from the Bible to a position regarding recombinant DNA research. There are, however, implications of biblical faith which may help to inform possible responses to the ethical issues raised by the debate. It may be helpful to match up these implications -- in reverse order -- to the issues noted in Part I (September 13).

Positive Expectations

5. The Christian outlook on reality and. history cannot be adequately summed up as either optimism or pessimism, but if a choice is to be made, the church must stand with the optimists.

To say that Christians are going to be either optimists or pessimists is much too simple. The prophetic motif of salvation in and through historical process and the apocalyptic motif of salvation crashing in from outside of history are intertwined in the biblical documents, and each motif needs to be qualified by the other. There have always been Teilhard-style "optimists" and Ellul-style "pessimists" in the church, and the church needs both. But the Christian faith has a lean toward optimism. G. K. Chesterton, who happened to agree, described the pessimist as a cosmic antipatriot, and the optimist as one who has a supernatural loyalty to things. He said (in Orthodoxy) that any act of cosmic reform must be preceded by an act of cosmic allegiance.

Christians who believe in the creation of all things by a benevolent (and beneficent) God; in his enfleshment in Jesus of Nazareth, and in the eschatological resurrection of the body do have a persistent loyalty to matter and to things that invites an act of cosmic allegiance. The Christian can never be a naïve optimist, because Christianity insists that demonic realities and possibilities be taken seriously. There will, however, be a steady tilt toward expecting good results from new discoveries about the nature of things.

In the biblical documents, the prophetic motif clearly dominates the apocalyptic (which is one good reason for not buying into the current trend to elide the former into the latter), which means that hope characterizes the Christian stance toward life. Hope is a better word than optimism, for it excludes naïveté, invites participation and encourages the thoughtful directing of those processes over which we have some control.

Hope also assumes that there will never be absolute security about anything, that "conditions of uncertainty" will always prevail, that this is, in Norbert Wiener’s words, a "probabilistic world." That view does not mean that no decisions can be made with confidence, nor does it mean that one decision is as good as another. It does mean that relativities always have to be taken into consideration, that data always have to be weighed, that we are always dealing not with what will necessarily happen but with what will probably happen, that decisions always carry some risks. The Christian ought never to be frozen into inaction because of the presence of risks or the absence of complete data, although a given action may be specifically rejected because the risks are too great in the light of the data available. Doubt ought always to be qualified by hope rather than by despair.

The church has a great stake in the future and anticipates it with positive expectations. If a new procedure, such as recombinant DNA research, appears to be full of promise, the tendency ought to be toward investigating its possibilities.

Daring to Calculate Consequences

4. Because the outlook of the church is characteristically full of hope, its expectations of the future ought to, and often do, feed back into the making of current decisions.

There is a long tradition in ethics, focusing in the work of G. E. Moore, which insists that it is impossible to derive an "ought" from an "is." (The philosophical analogue of that tradition is Lessing’s famous dictum that it is impossible to derive eternal truths from historical facts.) Because Protestants have tended to be idealists philosophically and Kantians ethically, they have often assumed that values and facts, or morality and data, have very little to do with one another. Albrecht Ritschl, in fact, stated that quite bluntly.

It is difficult to see, however, how it is possible to take the theological eschaton (the last things, the Kingdom of God, the new heaven and the new earth) seriously without also taking the ethical telos seriously. Teleology, that ethical methodology which calls an action good if it produces good results, though more at home in the Roman Catholic than in the Protestant tradition, cannot be entirely excluded from any decision making process that claims to be Christian. Moving with hopeful confidence into the future on the basis of the data of God’s past and present action in our history is simply what Christianity is about. Thus there can be no a priori reason for ruling out cost/benefit analysis as a device for making decisions, even those having to do with something as potentially destructive as recombinant DNA research.

Furthermore, there seems to be specifically Christian wisdom at work in talk about the "ethics of long-range responsibility," or in John Rawls’s insistence that the notion of justice be expanded to include justice to future generations (A Theory of Justice [Harvard University Press, 1971]). The Christian has a peculiar stake in the long run -- one which the Hindu, for instance, with an essentially spiritual outlook on life and a cyclical view of history, can never be expected to represent. If it is true that the sins of the fathers (and the mothers) will be visited upon the third and the fourth generations, surely it is also true that the responsible and wise and loving acts, of the fathers (and mothers) will be visited upon the third and the fourth generations.

If we worship a God who is from the beginning to the end, who is both alpha and omega, then we ought to be able to walk into the future confident that the creating and redeeming God is truly with us, now and to the end of the age. So we can dare to calculate consequences, to analyze costs and benefits, precisely because we believe that this is what God does as he works with his world, moving it ever closer to the final consummation of his purpose for all things and all people.

C.P. Snow once suggested that scientists have the future in their bones, while humanists tend to look back longingly to a distant golden age. One of the ironies of history is that, given a choice between siding with humanists or with scientists, most Christians tend to choose the former. Of course it is finally a false alternative, but the tendency persists. If the church’s theology were informed more by biblical expectations of a redeemed creation and less by general religious longings for ecstatic experience and timeless truth, Christians would find themselves at the very least congenial toward those who, with a passionate "loyalty to things" and a "cosmic act of allegiance," struggle to unpack the secrets of life on this planet and to work with it toward a new day.

A God-Given Creative Itch

3. For the Christian who operates from a stance of hopefulness, believing that God is getting his work done through human history and through the history of nature, the inclination will be to place the burden of proof on those who oppose a given type of scientific research.

Christians know very well that it is impossible to do anything without making mistakes. The whole creation is not only imperfect; it is out of joint. There can be no such thing as zero-risk research. In fact, the entire history of science could be told as the story of attempts to devise methods by which mistakes can be "good" ones; that is, mistakes which are reversible and from which we can learn something. (For the notion of "good mistakes" in science, I am indebted to David Bella, department of civil engineering, Oregon State . University, Corvallis.) The specific problem in assessing recombinant DNA research is the fear that a mistake will be made which is not reversible, which cannot be corrected, and which will bring misery to us all.

If the potential benefits of DNA research were negligible, there would be no problem in deciding not to do it. Given, however, the benefits projected and the possibility of careful regulation (there does

seem to be some tilting of the scales on the side of those who think that fears have been exaggerated), the burden of proof must be on those who want to stop the research. Quite apart from indications born of biblical faith, it is impossible to imagine a society in which no research of any kind could be done until the researcher had demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt to a judge or a jury or a committee that it should be done. The entire scientific enterprise would simply grind to a halt.

The whole cluster of arguments against "playing God" and "tampering with nature" must, in any case, be rejected summarily. We are constantly creating things in our own image, but that may be quite appropriate if we really believe that we are created in God’s image. Although the creature must be sharply distinguished from the creator, that does not rule out a relation between the two. The creative itch was placed in the creature by the creator, and so long as we remain human we shall be working with him, and he with us, to preserve and to redeem things and situations and people. The question is never whether we will alter nature, but rather how we do it, and to what purpose.

The apostle Paul asks the church at Rome: "If God is for us, who is against us?" (Rom. 8:31). He says to the church at Corinth: "All things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s" (I Cor. 3:21.23). The Christian, more than anyone, expects good things to happen. Einstein, perhaps unconsciously, was gathering up some profoundly biblical insights when hesaid: "God may be subtle, but he isn’t mean." Not everything that can be done should be done; potential costs will often outweigh potential benefits. But in a world in which good things are expected to happen, in which hope rather than fear is the dominant motif, the burden of proof will lie on those who decide in a given instance that a specific research procedure -- in this case the recombining of DNA molecules -- should not be done.

The Church’s Stake in Academic Freedom

2. Since Christian faith is tied to the passing on of information rather than to the repetition of an inspiration, the church will always have a special interest in the acquisition, interpretation and dissemination of knowledge.

Paul writes to the church in Corinth that he is only passing on to it what has been passed on to him; namely, that Jesus Christ died, that he was raised, and that he appeared (I Cor. 15:3 if.). Although he had as great a "spiritual experience" as any person in history, Paul very rarely mentions it. He sticks to the "facts" about Jesus. Those are interpreted facts, of course; there are no such things as uninterpreted facts. But they are nevertheless facts, data, information. The church, when it has been true to itself and its mission, has promoted literacy, encouraged learning, established universities, founded libraries. Its

darkest hours have been those times when it lost touch with its origins and turned against those who sought or found new information about the world or about human life.

B. F. Skinner is surely correct when he insists that there be no areas of human life bracketed out from investigation, even the areas labeled "freedom" and "dignity." And the same goes for anything labeled "mystery." The Christian who knows that God made all things "in, through, and for" Christ (Cal. 1:16) ought never to fear any new information about anything. The church thus has an enormous stake in the preservation of academic freedom, and not just the right of professors to think up great ideas -- in fact, not particularly for that at all. Instead, its interest is in that research which is constantly at work to find out as much as possible about what makes things tick, whether. organic or inorganic, living or nonliving.

And Christians know that thinking and acting are distinguishable, but inseparable. From the very beginning of Genesis, word and deed are partners in doing. So speaking no less than acting is potentially dangerous as well as potentially beneficial. Freedom can never be absolute, since only God is abk solute, and will always have to be subject to some kind of regulation in any specific setting. (Even freedom of speech, of course, is not absolute; try, just for laughs, telling the guard at the airport electronic checking device that you are bringing a bomb aboard.) Recombinant DNA research can be encouraged by the church as one more way to acquire information about and to work with our world, but it must also be subject to some form of regulation, as must every other human enterprise.

Monitoring Molecular Manipulation

1. Because of its confidence in the redemptive possibilities of human activity, the church will tend to think that regulation is possible; because of its awareness of the demonic potential of human activity, it will insist that regulation is necessary.

Reinhold Niebuhr said the same about democracy. Augustine, in his struggle against Manicheanism on the one hand and Pelagianism on the other, said it long before Niebuhr. It also holds true for the church’s attitude toward recombinant DNA research. Any attempt to stop the research entirely (in other countries as well as in the United States) would not only be unrealistic, it would be contrary to basic commitments of the Christian faith-ab6ut God and the world. But to encourage the conducting of the research i~ith no controls is to court disaster at the hands of overly zealous (and ambitious) individuals who may well be more concerned about satisfying curiosity or achieving fame thau about promoting the common good.

There is no reasonable alternative to regulation; hence the church, if it acts wisely, will attempt to be in conversation not only with those who set up regulatory procedures, but also with those who carry them out. Any procedure is going to require constant monitoring and frequent alteration. We have been busy at that task with nuclear energy for a quarter of a century, and there is no reason to believe that the regulation of molecular manipulation will be any easier, or any less necessary.

Where does that leave the church? The answer is, as "a piece of the world redeemed by Christ," as Bonhoeffer was fond of saying. The church has no right to expect to be heard automatically, as though its authority is somehow self-evident. However, because church people know and proclaim him who is Lord of all, the church will -- if it is true to its Lord and to itself -- speak with concern and passion about those things which have been learned regarding this creation, and about those things which are yet to be learned. And, from time to time, the world will recognize in its speech an authentic and helpful word.

 

Old Testament Foundations for Peacemaking in the Nuclear Era

The Old Testament caricature undoubtedly results from the lack of a critical and nuanced understanding of the scriptural witness. If our concern is peacemaking -- particularly the special urgency given that task by the nuclear threat -- then we shall have to come to grips with those portions of the biblical witness in which the community of faith has been forced to deal with the violence and pain of conflict between peoples. In the Old Testament we can learn much about God’s grace in the midst of wars and rumors of wars, but, equally important, we can also be confronted by the nature of our own human sinfulness and the limits of trust in human power for our security.

Many discussions of the Old Testament foundations for peacemaking have narrowed too quickly to the accounts of Israel’s wars, without attention to the wider context of the Old Testament understanding of the world, and people’s relationship to God in the world. It is the Hebrew concept of shalom that will aid us most in identifying this wider context.

"Shalom" is, of course, the Hebrew word most often translated as peace. Its basic meaning is wholeness -- a state of harmony among God, humanity and all of creation.

A full understanding of shalom begins with creation. Shalom is God’s intention for creation from the beginning. All elements of creation are interrelated. Each element participates in the whole of creation, and if any element is denied wholeness and well-being (shalom), all are thereby diminished. This relational character of creation is rooted in all creatures’ common origin in a God who not only created all that is but who continues to be active in the world, seeking our shalom.

Several aspects of the shalom of creation are particularly important for the issues involved in nuclear-age peacemaking.

1. The Hebrews, along with most of their contemporaries, saw the world as constantly poised between the possibilities of order and chaos. The point of Israel’s creation understanding was not that God had brought something out of nothing, but that in the face of chaos, with its power to destroy and render meaningless, God the Creator had brought order. The character of that order was the harmony and wholeness of shalom. God has brought chaos under control, and in so doing has given us the gift of whole life.

Any biblically based seeking after peace must begin with the notion that peace, understood as shalom, is far broader than the absence of war. Biblical scholar Paul Hanson writes, "Perhaps the best way to begin to understand shalom is to recognize that it describes the realm where chaos is not allowed to enter, and where life can be fostered free from the fear of all which diminishes and destroys" ("War and Peace in the Hebrew Bible," Interpretation, vol. 38 [1984], p. 347). Since all that would bring order out of chaos originates in God’s creation, peace as shalom can never be regarded as solely a human product.

2. In the Old Testament the opposite of shalom is not war but chaos. Thus, concern for peace must place our opposition to war alongside an equal concern for every enemy of well-being and wholeness: injustice, oppression, exploitation, disease, famine. But within this broad concern for the things that bring chaos and destroy shalom, war certainly has a special place. War is that form of chaos which results from the violent attack of one group of people on another.

Although the Old Testament arose in a violent world and knew of many wars in its own history, it is not incidental that it begins with Genesis 1 - 11. In those early chapters of Genesis it is clear that although plants and animals are created in great variety, we are to regard humanity as a unity. All are created in the image of God and bear witness in the world to God’s creative sovereignty. The divisions of humanity and the hostile actions that witness those divisions are clearly understood to be the result of sinful and self-centered choices antagonistic to the shalom of God’s creation.

These divisions grow greater and greater through the stories of Cain and Abel, Lamech, the Flood, the Table of Nations and the Tower of Babel until, with the calling of Abraham, the story begins to tell us of God’s intervention of grace. If we take this prologue to the whole Old Testament seriously, then we must understand with the Hebrew writers that all war is sinful, since it necessarily witnesses to and gives violent expression to humanity’s division.

In such a world of sinful, broken unity, any participation in war is a compromise of what God intended and risks serving chaos rather than shalom. But since God involved the divine self in that broken world, our most faithful response is to seek to discern that divine involvement and to pattern our participation in the world after its witness of grace to us.

If war in general is to be seen as sinful because it risks the triumph of chaos over shalom, then nuclear war must be the ultimate sin -- representing the absolute triumph of chaos and the end of all possibility for wholeness and well-being. Nuclear war’s total devastation could have no biblical justification consistent with the command to seek shalom. To trust our security to the threat of nuclear war is to base our ultimate hope on chaos as a greater power than God’s created possibility of shalom.

3. Recent studies have stressed that shalom was seen by ancient Israel not as a far-off ideal but as the natural human state. Humanity was essentially peaceable. As W. Sibley Towner of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia has stated, "Far from being an extraordinary ideal, shalom is the norm which is to be contrasted to the extraordinary out-of-orderness of warfare, disease, and the like" ("Tribulations and Peace: The Fate of Shalom in Jewish Apocalyptic," Horizons in Biblical Theology, vol. 6 [1984]. p. 18). Peace comes naturally to human beings unless we are divided or corrupted by injustice and exploitation -- which in our history have often erupted into the violence of war. As biblical people we are to work out of the assumptions of peace as the basis for trust, not out of the assumptions of war as the foundation for never-ending mistrust.

Israel’s call to be a covenant community is the call to be a community possessed of an alternative consciousness and pattern of life in the world. Shalom is the word used in covenantal contexts to describe the goal of Israel’s mission as God’s people. Shalom is what results when God’s justice, compassion and righteousness, seen clearly in God’s deliverance of Israel from the Egyptian oppressor, is echoed by Israel’s justice, compassion and righteousness lived out as its vocation in the world. The prophets Deutero-Isaiah and Ezekiel actually term this relationship with Yahweh a "covenant of peace" (Isa. 54:10; Ezek. 37:26). In effect, the vocation of faithful community is as witness to the possibilities of shalom in the world and to the source of such shalom possibilities in God.

The character of the faithful community and of its life in the world is determined by its experience of and response to God’s character. Israel’s covenant God is characterized by freedom, vulnerability and fidelity.

The fortunes of Yahweh, unlike those of the gods of other ancient Near Eastern religions, do not rise and fall with the fortunes of kings. This God is properly understood as not tied to the fate of any nation or group -- precisely because this God is both Creator of all things and sovereign over all history. This God is free to manifest divine power where the world sees only powerlessness -- as with the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. It is from divine freedom that the gifts of grace come, not from claims of obligation or ownership laid on God. Even to those who have known God’s grace, God warns, "I will be merciful to whom I will be merciful" (Exod. 33:19; cf. also Amos 9:7), and even perfect righteousness creates no special obligation on God’s part (cf. Job). Such a God may appear as grace active in the most surprising places, and is in no way limited to institutionally approved, socially acceptable or religiously orthodox manifestations (cf. Deutero-Isaiah’s understanding of Cyrus as God’s messiah [45:1] -- and, of course, Jesus himself).

God is not only free from but free for, choosing freely to become vulnerable to the world’s pain and suffering. God says to Moses. "I know [experience] their suffering" (Exod. 3:7). Thus, the God of covenant is especially present in the midst of human need and especially caring of the poor, the oppressed and the hurting. The quality of God frequently used to describe this divinely chosen vulnerability is compassion (rehem), a word derived from the Hebrew word for womb or uterus. God’s compassion is a metaphor of the womb, expressive of the tender oneness yet separateness shared between a mother and the child she is carrying.

God’s fidelity is expressed in a refrain from Psalm 136, "For God’s steadfast love endures forever." God’s commitment is to the covenant of shalom without reservation or limits. Steadfast love (hesed) is made present in the world by justice (mishpat) and righteousness (tsadeqah), exercised in their full integrity without compromise, with no loyalty to any authority save the vocation of bringing shalom into a broken world.

Israel, the community of covenant faith, is explicitly called by God to reflect these same qualities in its life. It is to be "in the world but not of the world," free from all claims to ultimate loyalty except the vocation of witness to God’s shalom. It is not a freedom to manifest an aloof disregard for the world; it is a freedom to enable a constant and consistent predisposition on the part of the faithful for identifying with the world’s need -- special care for the victims of injustice, oppression, poverty, war, hunger, disease and loss. Faithfulness in this task of being vulnerable to the world’s suffering comes from the pursuit of justice and righteousness by the community in its own life, in its treatment of the stranger and the sojourner and in its relationship to the nations.

Central to Israel’s story is the witness to God’s defeat of Pharaoh and the Egyptians in order to bring about the liberation of the Hebrew slaves. In the Exodus tradition it becomes clear that God’s presence in history entails an implacable opposition to oppression and injustice -- forces that work toward chaos and against God’s shalom. Such evil brings suffering on the powerless, and God’s judgment is committed to vanquishing that evil. Thus, against such forces of chaos "Yahweh is a man of war" (Exod. 15:3). Israel, however, must recognize that although such judgment is within God’s power, it is not appropriate to Israel’s own human power. In the face of Pharoah’s armies Israel is told, "The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still" (Exod. 14:14).

In Israel’s earliest traditions Yahweh is frequently portrayed as a warrior -- an image that has been deeply troubling to many thoughtful Christians opposed to war. But it is possible that we have not fully understood the meaning of this God imagery. Interestingly, two pacifist biblical scholars, Millard C. Lind (Mennonite) and Vernard Eller (Church of the Brethren), have argued independently -- Lind in Yahweh Is a Warrior (Herald, 1980) and Eller in War and Peace from Genesis to Revelation (Herald, 1981) -- that Israel’s eventual entanglement in war and war’s devastation resulted from failure to trust enough in this early tradition of Yahweh as warrior. In a world where other nations constructed the machinery of war in an attempt to achieve their own security, it was Israel’s trust in Yahweh as warrior that freed the community of faith from taking part in arms races and saber-rattling.

All of Israel’s earliest traditions point to a concern to de-emphasize human participation in war. God as warrior could be trusted to oppose those forces that destroy shalom and bring chaos, but human warriors could not. Hence, early Israel had no professional military and no standing army. When war’s violence was forced upon Israel, war became a sacral, not a sacred, matter -- meaning that the decisive power and guidance was seen as divine. Even in defensive emergencies the Hebrew people were assiduously to seek God’s guidance as the key rather than to rely on human power and agency as central. This stance sometimes led to strategies deemed unrealistic, even foolish, by the ancient world’s power standards (e.g., Gideon’s lamps and horns).

In one of the most misunderstood verses in the Bible, Yahweh declares, "Vengeance is mine" (Deut. 32:35). This verse is not a witness to a divinity bent on doing violence. Rather, addressed to the people of God, it means that vengeance is not to be theirs. As for God, while it is certain that God’s judgment will be felt by evil in the world, this same God declared in the establishment of covenant, "I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy" (Exod. 33:19), and promised through Abraham a blessing to "all the families of the earth" (Gen. 12:3). Vengeance in human hands issues only in violence, but, left to God, it judges evil and chaotic forces so that shalom may be restored to all.

Complex historical and literary issues are involved here, but a consensus exists for viewing the genocidal violence recounted in many of the stories in Joshua and Judges as the product of a royal period in which kings were attempting to justify their own nationalistic ideologies by appeal to divine favor. The prophets, who served as spokesmen for normative covenant faith in this period, had only contempt for such notions of God and God’s people.

In fact, the ominous turning point in the story of Israel’s experience with war came when its elders asked the prophet Samuel to provide a king like that of other nations. "Give us a king to govern us . . that we might be like all the nations and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight all our battles" (I Sam. 8:6, 20). What followed in the history of royally ruled Israel might be said to be the secularization of war. Standing armies and professional militia were established. Kings built fortresses and chariot forces. The machinery of war was constructed in the name of state security, but before long the armies were being used to expand the frontiers and to enforce national policy on weaker neighbors.

Ironically, most Christians feel more comfortable with this secularized concept of war. The move away from reliance on Yahweh as warrior toward state military institutions is often seen today as a step toward more civilized behavior, but in the biblical view it was clearly a move toward chaos and away from shalom.

The dismal record of Israel’s kings and the violent role that war played in their nationalistic ideologies can only briefly be suggested here. The covenant model of community was replaced by a royal model based on oppressive power in support of an economics of privilege. War became an instrument of state policy designed to quell dissent on the part of the oppressed, to expand territory imperialistically, or to maintain sources of privileged wealth. Even by the account of Israel’s own historians, only three kings in Israel or Judah measured up to covenantal standards. Most tellingly, the radically free God of covenant, the divine warrior who opposes chaotic evil wherever it appears, was replaced by a domesticated god who was little more than a nationalistic yes-man. It is small wonder that the prophets who preserved the traditions of a covenant God felt compelled to announce that the chaotic evil and violence which Yahweh opposes in the world were now to be found in Israel itself.

In their indictment of war as waged in the time of the monarchy, the prophets charged that Israel had abandoned trust in Yahweh for the sake of trust in its own powers, and had abandoned Yahweh’s goal of shalom for all in favor of the pursuit of prosperity and power for a few. Such misplaced trust and lost vocation were, in the prophets’ view, no security at all. Under the kings, Israel, in the belief that it could create its own security, was in reality flirting with chaos. War to secure power and territory risked war as the instrument of Israel’s own destruction. "You have plowed iniquity, you have reaped injustice, you have eaten the fruit of lies. Because you have trusted in your chariots and in the multitude of your warriors, therefore the tumult of war shall arise among your people. . ." (Hos. 10:13-14). "Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the Lord" (Isa. 31:1).

Such an assessment of the prophets may at first glance seem idealistic, but actually it is exceedingly realistic in the nuclear age. Reliance on nuclear armaments without reliance on the vision of shalom and the One who gives it is to accept an apparent immediate security while bringing ultimate chaos closer to hand. Israel ultimately brought chaos upon itself in the catastrophic destruction of Jerusalem and in the Babylonian exile. In the nuclear age a repeat of that mistake may mean the end of all human life on the planet.

To use a nonbiblical image from a well-known children’s story, exile times may be those in which we learn that the emperor has no clothes. In the story the people participate in the illusion, fearful of losing the security represented by belief in the rulers’ wisdom. They, however, risked only embarrassment; in a time of potential exile in a nuclear age, we risk far more. It seems increasingly evident that the security promised by nuclear deterrence is illusory. Someone has to be willing to declare that the emperor has no clothes and to act in light of that fact before the illusion collapses in a nuclear conflagration. To warn of exile, to judge human illusions, and to call for hopeful return to trust in God’s shalom was the prophetic task in the Old Testament.

In the midst of exile dangers, we must, as the church, live in the hope that a way out of the nuclear stalemate is possible. For resources we would turn to the great prophets of the exile, Ezekial and Deutero-Isaiah. They reaffirm God’s creation and redemption as universal in scope. They repudiate nationalism and see God working on the broadest scale in human history. Deutero-Isaiah, in particular, holds up servanthood as an especially hopeful path to shalom.

It is also from the prophets that we receive the great gift of the visionary images of shalom toward which God is moving us: swords into plowshares, peaceable kingdoms, joy and peace such that the trees clap their hands, new covenants written on the heart. For those who trust in the "chariots" of our time, such visions constitute idealistic romanticism. But as expressions of the shalom for which we were created and to which we are to witness, these visions are what people of faith live out even when the world refuses such visions.

We live in a nuclear age. Some of us prefer not to face this reality. We want to "carry big sticks," fight and win righteous wars, or return to an earlier age of heroes (Rambo style?). But in our world the sticks we brandish are nuclear, and the wars fought with them can have no winners. Jeremiah had a word for us. He advised the exiles in Babylon to "seek the welfare [shalom] of the city where you are, for in its welfare [shalom] you will find your welfare [shalom]" (Jer. 29:7). We cannot act in our world out of wishful nostalgia for a world we would like to have. We must seek the shalom of the nuclear world we do have.

Hunger, Poverty and Biblical Religion

The stark realities of the world food crisis have made hunger a priority item on the agenda of American churches. With television bringing the hollow faces of starving children into our living rooms, it has become impossible for the community of faith to remain silent or unresponsive. It is tragic that millions must die before the crisis will capture the attention of the more prosperous peoples of the world; it will be doubly tragic if the church’s response remains at the superficial level of self-righteous charity.

The congregation that fasts, contributes money and studies hunger during Lent may feel that it has discharged its obligation of concern, but the meaning of the church as the people of God is much more intimately tied to the welfare of the hungry, the poor, the needy and the oppressed. What is demanded is no less than a renewed understanding of the church’s biblical and theological resources so that we might be in the vanguard of the movement to reorder values and priorities in a suffering world. As we respond to the crisis, we must also challenge the biblical and theological assumptions which have allowed the church to participate uncritically in structures that contribute to the root causes of global hunger and poverty. Only then will the church be free to join the attack on those underlying causes as it ministers to the immediate victims.

The biblical word on the relation of the community of faith to hunger and poverty is clear and unambiguous. It is therefore all the more surprising that in calling upon local churches to respond to hunger issues so little recourse has been made to biblical materials. What imperatives for concern with hunger and poverty are given to the community of faith in the biblical witness? What understandings from biblical theology should inform our acting out of that concern?

God’s Love for the Poor

Hunger and poverty cannot be separated in analyzing the biblical material. Hunger accompanies poverty. Famine can strike an entire land, rich and poor alike, but it is still the poor who go hungry while the well-to-do buy food from other lands (cf. Gen. 12:10; 42:1-2). In both the Old and New Testaments hunger is linked with other terms describing those who have been forced by societal conditions into a marginal existence -- the poor, the needy, the widow, the orphan, the oppressed.

God especially loves and cares for the poor: "‘Because the poor are despoiled, because the needy groan, I will now arise,’ says the Lord; ‘I will place him in the safety for which he longs’" (Ps. 12:5). "The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the Lord and the poor among men shall exult in the Holy One of Israel" (Isa. 29:19). "For thou hast been a stronghold to the poor, a stronghold to the needy in his distress" (Isa. 25:4). God will not forget or forsake the poor or the needy (Ps. 9:12, 17-18, 10:12; Isa. 41:17).

It is important to note that God’s love for the poor does not imply an acceptance of their condition. He loves them in order to deliver them from poverty. It is regarded as an evil (Prov. 15: 15), and God’s response is to deliver his people from it. God promises not merely to love the poor and the hungry but to be active in their behalf: "I will satisfy her poor with bread" (Ps. 132:15).

The Responsibility of the Privileged

Because God has identified himself with the poor, so too the community of faith is called to special concern for these persons. In Israel care of the needy was not regarded as an act of voluntary benevolence. The poor were entitled to such benefits. Underlying this practice was the assumption that poverty and need were due to a breakdown in the equitable distribution of community resources or to a social status over which an individual had no control (widows, orphans). Thus, the responsibility for action lay with the privileged rather than with the poor themselves. By contrast, in our society it is commonly assumed that the poor and the hungry of the world ought to bear the major burdens of bettering their own condition.

The rights of the poor are delineated most clearly in the law codes of the Old Testament; here concern for the poor is taken out of the realm of voluntary charity. The clearest statement appears in Deuteronomy 15:

There will be no poor among you . . if only you will obey the voice of the Lord your God. . . . If there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren, in any of your towns within your land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him, and lend him sufficient for his need. . . . You shall give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging. . . . For the poor will never cease out of the land; therefore, I command you, You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor . . .

This passage suggests that if the demands of the covenant were fully embodied there would be no poverty, but since Israel, like all human communities, is a "stiff-necked people," some of its inhabitants will inevitably be poor. Therefore, God’s people are commanded to care for them. This task is part of what it means to be the people of God, and it is not an optional activity.

All of the Israelite law codes provide for the protection of the poor. Persons were urged to lend money to the poor (Deut. 15:78), but the law prohibited the taking of interest. "If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be to him as a creditor, and you shall not exact interest from him" (Exod. 22:25). Garments or other items necessary for survival, if taken from the poor as security for debts, were to be returned each night so that a man might not have to face the night without a cloak (Exod. 22:26-27; Deut. 24:10-13). So that the poor would not remain permanently in debt, the law called for the remission of all debts every seventh year (Deut. 15: 1-2; Lev. 25:1 ff.). If a poor man had sold himself into servitude because of debts, he was to be given freedom in the seventh year (Lev. 25:39-55), and he should not then be sent out empty-handed but given provision from the flocks and the harvest (Deut. 15:12-15). Israel’s people were reminded that they too had once been slaves in Egypt and in need. Too often in prosperity the community of faith forgets that it was not always affluent.

Laws protected the poor man from losing his family property and ensured that no one could accumulate an inordinate amount of land (Lev. 25:10, 13, 25-34). The poor person was protected from exploitation by the rich (Ex. 22:22-23; Deut. 24:14-15; Lev. 19:13). Special emphasis was placed also on assuring the poor of justice against the rich in the law courts, though partiality was not to be given unfairly to the poor (Exod. 23:3; Deut. 27:19, 25).

The Witness of the Prophets

Major attention is given to provision of food for those in need. The poor could pluck grain or pick grapes when passing by a field (Deut. 23:25). They also had the right to glean in fields and vineyards and to take any sheaves left behind. Owners were urged, for the sake of the poor, not to be too efficient in their harvest (Deut. 24:19; Lev. 19:9-10; 23:22; Ruth 2:1-3). Anything that grew up in fallow fields belonged to the poor (Exod. 23:10-11), and they were to receive the tithe of every third year (Deut. 14:28-29; 26-12).

It has been suggested that these laws were idealistic and that they surely were never put into extensive practice. To be sure, actual practice fell far short of these demands, but it would be a mistake to dismiss them so lightly. We know of two instances when some of the more radical provisions of the law were obeyed. In Jeremiah 34:8-9, persons were freed from servitude in accordance with the law; Jeremiah later condemned the people for enslaving the former servants once again when the threat of danger had passed. In Nehemiah 5:6-11, however, an extensive reform is launched to return to the poor the land taken from them in payment of debts, as well as goods exacted in interest.

Even stronger evidence of the seriousness with which the Old Testament takes the rights of the poor is the strong advocacy of these rights in the prophetic literature. Time after time the prophets announce judgment because justice has been perverted and the rights of the poor have been denied. "Therefore, because you trample upon the poor and take from him exactions of wheat, you have built houses of hewn stone but you shall not dwell in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine" (Amos 5:11). The prophets call for repentance and urge a program of justice and equity that will demonstrate concern for the poor, the needy, the oppressed, the widow and the orphan (Isa. 1:16-17; Amos 5:24). They announce God’s special concern and care for the helpless (Isa. 25:4). Ezekiel’s picture of the righteous man indicates that "[he] does not oppress any one, but restores to the debtor his pledge, commits no robbery, gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with a garment, does not lend at interest or take any increase" (18:7-8).

Nowhere is God’s concern for the poor and the hungry made clearer by the prophets than in Isaiah 58. A better text for preaching on the church’s response to the hunger crisis could not be found:

"Why have we fasted, and thou seest it not?

Why have we humbled ourselves, and thou takest no knowledge of it?"

Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure and oppress all your workers

Fasting like yours this day will not make your voice to be heard on high.

Is such the fast that I choose, a day for a man to humble himself?

Is it to bow down his head like a rush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him?

Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the Lord?

Is not this the fast that I choose:

to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house;

When you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

If you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,

Then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday.

The Hazards of Wealth

Old Testament attitudes toward property and wealth go hand in hand with concern for the poor. Land is regarded as belonging to God. There is no absolute human right of ownership. "The land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me (Lev. 25:23). God bestows the land as a gift. At first this is understood as the gift of the Promised Land (Gen. 12:7; Exod. 3:8, 32:13), but it is later broadened to apply to all the earth. "The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein" (Ps. 24: 1). Man is but the steward, not the owner; hence, one s land is at the service of its rightful owner, God himself. Since God is the champion of the poor, their rights take precedence over those of private property.

Wealth, on the other hand, is regarded at best as an impediment to righteousness and at worst as a positive evil. Of course, the Old Testament expresses the hope that the faithful shall enjoy success and prosperity, but such prosperity does not extend to the accumulation of great wealth. Part of the resistance to kingship was the well-founded fear that it would create a wealthy, privileged class (Deut. 17:14-20; I Sam. 8:11-18). In Israel’s tradition it was assumed that great wealth was gathered at the expense of others in the community. Hence, one could not be exceedingly wealthy and still fulfill one’s obligation to care for the poor and the needy. It was the gathering of riches that created poverty (Mic. 2:2).

The prophets repeatedly characterize wealth as leading to indifference or to complicity in oppression. "Woe to those who lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, and calves from the midst of the stall; who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David invent for themselves instruments of music; who drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves, with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!" (Amos 6:4-6). The parable Nathan tells David about the rich man and the poor man (II Sam. 12:1-4) is a good example of the temptations wealth was thought to bring.

Jesus’ Radicalization of the Tradition

Much of the New Testament witness in regard to the poor and the hungry is a reflection or development of the tradition of Israel. Jesus could well be said to have radicalized that tradition. From the very beginning Jesus identifies his ministry with the poor and the oppressed. In Luke 4:16-19, at the inauguration of his public ministry, Jesus preaches at Nazareth and chooses as his text Isaiah 61:1-2:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

Jesus often associated himself with the poor and with society’s outcasts and was criticized for it (Matt. 11:19; Luke 7:34). It would seem that Jesus and the disciples in fact adopted the life style of the poor. In an incident recorded in all three Synoptic Gospels (Matt. 12:1-8; Mark 2:23-28; Luke 6:1-5) Jesus’ disciples pluck grain to eat while passing through the fields. Although the issue here is that of the Sabbath law, the disciples seem to be exercising the rights of the poor, and even the breaking of the Sabbath law is defended on the grounds that the needs of hunger outweigh legal strictures. When Jesus sent the disciples out, he required them to go in extreme poverty (Luke 9:3; 10:4).

In his preaching, Jesus often spoke with concern for the poor and indicated that they were especially blessed by God. "Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh" (Luke 6:20-21). The parable of the banquet (Luke 14:16 ff.) indicates that the poor may inherit the kingdom before those of position in society. Perhaps most striking in this regard is the passage on the great judgment in Matthew 25:31-46:

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.

Jesus makes clear that he is identified with the poor and the needy to the extent that acceptance of him is equated with ministering to their needs. "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.

Jesus’ attitude toward wealth is correspondingly negative. Riches are at least an impediment to the kingdom and at worst a damnation. Along with the Lucan beatitudes quoted above are included the woes: "Woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger. Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep" (Luke 6:24-26). The accumulation of goods stands as a goal opposed to the service of God. "No one can serve two masters. . . . You cannot serve God and mammon" (Matt. 6:24; Luke 16:13). The rich man is depicted as a fool in the parable of the wealthy farmer (Luke 12:16-21). "Delight in riches" is one of the thorns that choke out the seed of the Word in Mark 4:19. The parable of the rich man and poor Lazarus effectively sums up Jesus’ teachings on the rich and the poor (Luke 16:19-31). Finally, there is the harsh saying, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:25).

Naturally Jesus demanded much of those who would enter the kingdom of God. He appears as a prophetic figure confronting his hearers with the radical demands of God’s service. Jesus’ teachings in this regard are too often rationalized or dismissed as excessively idealistic. Those who would seek the kingdom of God must renounce their anxiety over earthly goods and trust in God (Matt. 6:24-33; Luke 12:22-32). "Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well" (Matt 6:33). They are to lay up treasures not on earth but in heaven (Matt. 6:19-21). Those who would become disciples must be willing to leave all possessions behind (Mark : 1:16 ff.; 10:28 ff.).

The giving up of possessions is not, however, a righteous deed in itself. Jesus ‘makes clear that this renunciation enables a life of service to the poor, the needy and the helpless. This concept is seen most clearly in his admonition to the rich young ruler: "You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come follow me" (Mark 10:21). Despite our apparent desire to serve in the present world food crisis we are often like the rich young ruler who "went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions."

‘Love Communism’

The early church continued Jesus’ stress on concern for the poor and the needy and his view of individual wealth as an impediment to die kingdom. The early church in Jerusalem as described in the Book of Acts has often been characterized as an embodiment of "love communism": "And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need" (Acts 2:44-45). "No one said that any of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had everything in common" (Acts 4:32). This sharing was intended to enable the community to better serve those in need. "There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were possessors of lands ‘or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet; and distribution was made to each as any had need" (Acts 4:34-35). This early Jerusalem community adopted the life style of poverty as appropriate to its mission and is referred to by the term "the poor" (Gal. 2:10; Rom. 15:26). The Ebionites (a word meaning "the poor") were a later Jewish Christian group in Palestine that continued to follow such an ideal.

Outside of Jerusalem the church did not adopt such a radical practice of sharing communal resources, but the special concern for the poor was continued. Paul himself adopted the life style of the poor and gave up personal possessions for the sake of, his mission: "As poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything" (II Cor. 6: 10). He reports that he was exhorted by the church in Jerusalem to remember the poor and that he was eager to do so (Gal. 2:10). Indeed, when the church in Jerusalem found itself in special need, Paul undertook an extensive collection for its relief (I Cor. 16:4; II Cor. 8-9). In this regard Paul refers to the special care of God for the poor and to the poverty of Christ (II Cor. 9:9; 8:9). He relates this service to the following principle: "That as a matter of equality your abundance at the present time should supply their want, so that their abundance may supply your want, that there may be equality" (II Cor. 8:14). The Macedonian church, although in "extreme poverty" itself, joyfully participated in assistance to others who were poor (II Cor. 8:1-3).

Elsewhere in the New Testament there are numerous exhortations to share resources (e.g., Heb. 13:16), but perhaps the clearest statement of the continuing need for the community of faith to identify itself with the poor, even as has God, is to be found in James 2:1-7. In this passage it is clear that even in the early church the temptation to identify with wealth and status had appeared. This neglected passage should serve as a judgment on all generations of the church that succumb to that temptation.

If a man with gold rings and in fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, "Have a seat here, please," while you say to the poor man, Stand there," or, "Sit at my feet," have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? . . . Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you, is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme that honorable name by which you are called?

The witness of both Old and New Testaments makes clear that concern for those forced to live a marginal existence is not-an optional activity for the people of God, nor is it only a minor requirement. Identification with these persons is at the heart of what it means to be the community of faith.

A Crisis for the Church

If the biblical imperatives concerning the poor and the hungry are clear, it has been less clear how those imperatives are to be acted upon in the life of the church. Most of our efforts in dealing with hunger, as with other issues, have been expended in discussion and implementation of programs or strategies. The churches have failed to see that the challenge of world hunger (and the whole complex of related peace, liberation and development issues) constitutes a theological crisis for the church as well as a political, social and economic crisis for the world. This is, in part, what liberation theologians of the Third World have been trying to tell us. If the presuppositions of American influence are to be re-examined in light of current world problems, so too must the theological presuppositions of the American churches be scrutinized. Only with a renewed theological vision can the church in the U.S. become a moral force in the resetting of national priorities. There is a massive amount of biblical and theological work to be done simultaneously with our practical response to such pressing issues as global hunger. A new biblical vision might directly affect the way we respond to world hunger.

The dominant model of Old Testament theology for several decades, owing largely to the influence of Gerhard von Rad, has been that of salvation history (Heilsgeschichte). The focus is on God’s actions in history to redeem his people. The central event, of course, is the crossing of the sea. This Exodus event becomes paradigmatic for Israel’s life and faith. Stress is placed on the situations of distress in which the community constantly finds itself, and on the community’s inability to deliver itself. Although God may judge his people, the community can ultimately put trust and hope in the assurance of God’s deliverance. The community responds in covenant service to this redemptive action on its behalf.

This theological picture can be found in large portions of the Old Testament, in the Pentateuch, the prophets, the Deuteronomic writers, and the Psalms. This theme of God’s working in history to effect salvation which the community of faith cannot effect for itself has had a powerful influence in theology through the middle decades of the 20th century. It is currently finding powerful new expression in the Third World liberation theologies, in which Old Testament salvation history themes occupy a central position. It is an exceedingly appropriate biblical model for theologies founded in the suffering and oppression of the world’s marginal peoples. Deliverance, redemption and salvation, effected by God’s intervention against the world’s hostile forces, provide the basis for hope in seemingly hopeless situations.

The model of salvation history seems much less appropriate for the current theological situation of the church in America, particularly in its efforts to respond to global issues. The language of liberation, with its salvation history themes, seems hollow and hypocritical in our mouths, bespeaking a new form of American theological triumphalism. Too often our proclamation that God is acting in history appears to place us in the immodest role of God’s agents bringing deliverance and salvation, particularly when our efforts seem bent on creating the best program, offering the most viable strategy or pouring in the most money. Salvation history in the Old Testament is a theology for the powerless. Our job in the American church may be to find in our biblical resources the substance of a theology that speaks to the powerful.

A Theology of Blessing

Salvation history is not the only theological model in the Old Testament. Recent years have seen a rediscovery of the wisdom literature and a reassessment of its theological importance. The influence of the wisdom perspective goes far beyond the Book of Proverbs. In addition to the work of the wise teachers, the theological interests of wisdom are also to be found in the Yahwist prehistory of Genesis 2-11, the Succession Narrative in II Samuel and in numerous prophetic books. Significantly, the beginnings of wisdom schools, the writing of the Yahwist epic and the Succession Narrative all come from that period at the height of Israel’s power and prestige which we call the Solomonic Enlightenment. Thus, there is a sense in which the perspective of these diverse Old Testament materials represents one way in which Israel tried to reflect theologically on its own prosperity. It is increasingly clear that these materials share an alternative theological viewpoint to that of salvation history.

That alternative viewpoint might be called a theology of blessing, as opposed to a theology of saving. It tends not to stress history as the arena of God’s activity. God appears as Creator and Sustainer rather than as Redeemer. Humanity is pictured not as helpless and in distress, but as sharing responsibility for the well-being of the created order.

A number of insights from this theological perspective might be helpful for us.

First, the presence of God is as order, not as act. For this reason stress is placed on the picture of God as Creator. Creation provides for the orderly parameters in which human existence is lived out. Creation is affirmed as benevolent, embodying the possibility of goodness. Salvation is found as the people recognize and actualize the potential for wholeness already inherent in the created order. Emphasis is placed on the continuity of God’s presence in creation rather than on the discontinuity created by his intervention in history. Our attention is diverted from the hope for God’s redemptive intervention to the effort to discern the just order which God intended as the arena of human existence. Within this order humanity has a special place. We are given authority within the creation, and our existence requires us to interact with it.

Second, within the order of creation the purpose of human existence is life. Whatever does not contribute to bringing life is characterized as death. Life is intrinsic in the created order and needs only to become actualized in its fullness for each individual. Hence, the emphasis in wisdom is often on what seem like mundane matters. The wholeness (shalom) of human existence is already present as the promise of God’s blessing on those who seek life.

In salvation history, existence is given its center of meaning by the intervention of God in a particular history. In the hands of a prosperous people, whether ancient Israel or America, this notion has tended to foster a concept of election that claims a corner on God’s presence. Wisdom, on the other hand, stresses seeking after life as seeking after the welfare of the whole human community to which one is related. For a global society there are obvious implications. In the Old Testament this theme served as a constant corrective to exclusivism and triumphalism in Israel. The seeking after life in the wisdom theology is never solely an individual matter but is the concern of the whole community. "When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices . . ." (Prov. 11:10).

Third, great importance is placed on human freedom and responsibility in the wisdom literature. Persons are accorded a greater role in determining their own destiny. In Proverbs, in the Yahwist epic and in the Succession Narrative a central role is given to the notion that persons have choices to make. Each must decide responsibly by choosing life or death. If he chooses foolishly rather than wisely, then he must bear the consequences of that choice, but it is by no means assumed that he is destined always to make the sinful choice.

Salvation history, on the other hand, assumes the helplessness of humanity, the inability to effect a change in the human situation and, therefore, the need for God’s deliverance. The long legacy of Western theology has stressed this biblical theme in its doctrine of fallen man. Is it little wonder that the response in U.S. churches to global suffering is superficial when the theological tradition of those churches has emphasized human incapacity to do anything about the human condition? We have been taught that deliverance is solely in the hands of God. We pray for peace and justice; we do not work for it. Wisdom stresses the trust God has placed in his human creatures and their responsibility and capacity to make decisions that will bring life and blessing into the created order.

There are limits to human potential, and persons are called upon to acknowledge their creaturely status. The limits are defined by the order of creation. To attempt to transcend those limits and become "like God" (Gen. 3:5) is to violate God’s creation. God is present in the potential for life as Creator and Sustainer, and he is present in the limits of choices. There are limits to human capacity, but within those creation as Judge, exacting the consequences of sinful limits persons are not incapacitated, and much is expected of them. Such a biblical understanding provides a more fruitful base for reflecting on the use of power than does salvation history, with its stress on human powerlessness.

Fourth, God intends the fullness of life for the human community to be a present goal, not the endpoint of history. The eschatological elements of the salvation history theme have implied that the fullness of life lies only in the future; consequently, American churches have often responded to human suffering in the present by pointing the sufferer to God’s future. Waiting and hoping have been advocated as primary virtues to marginal peoples by comfortable church people who have not had to do much of either. Stress on the coming kingdom has led us to devalue the present world as of little ultimate consequence. The old hymn "This world is not my home; I’m just a-passing through" reflects a sentiment still with us, and it is the source of considerable indifference in the church. If God’s coming kingdom will establish justice, how can we be too concerned that justice is often absent in the present? Wisdom stresses God’s will that his creatures experience the abundant life in the here and now.

Application to the Hunger Issue

If wisdom theology were taken seriously, it could be applied to the world hunger issue in many ways:

1. We would be called upon to abandon the aid or charity approach to hunger -- the rescuer-on-a-white-horse mentality that does not succeed in bringing life out of death in any ongoing fashion but is merely an intervention of the moment.

2.We would be impelled to work for the establishment of a more just and harmonious order in the world. A concern to actualize the fullness of life for all humankind would demand re-examination of root causes and the reordering of values and priorities. These are long-term goals requiring the continuous presence of God’s guidance and not his dramatic deliverance.

3. We would need to place greater importance on our role as bringers of life or death in the human order by the decisions we make. Our role in patterns that have created the suffering of world poverty and hunger would be exposed, and the church could be called to repentance for its participation. At the same time, the church would find itself theologically empowered to direct its energy and resources to new patterns of moral discernment in the global community. It need not accept world suffering merely as evidence of the broken human condition, and therefore opt to minister only to the victims of sin without addressing sin’s sources.

4. Finally, we would be required as the church to recognize the destiny we share with all humanity. Wisdom stresses the communal character of blessing and life. We share this potential with the whole human family as God’s creatures, and where abundant life is not possible, it is a loss we each share. To be the community of faith is to acknowledge our interrelationship with all of creation. Too often the church has taken a stance of concern for the world, but has understood itself as a delivered community having little ultimate stake in the fate of the world.

Although there are many insights in the wisdom perspective that can provide an alternative to the salvation history theology, wisdom cannot be promoted as the new hermeneutical key. It is one among many theological alternatives presented in the Old Testament, and it is the constant critique arid corrective that these perspectives provide in relation to one another which make the Scriptures such a rich resource for the church. We are not left with only one arrow in our theological quiver. We are not called upon to discard completely the important salvation history themes of the Old Testament, but as the church in America we may find some other viewpoints more helpful in current contexts. Our choice of biblical foundations ought to be made as carefully as our choice of ethical strategies.

If the church is to participate in the moral renewal of the world order, then it must find its own theological renewal. The richness and diversity of the biblical material represent an invaluable resource, and for the church to recognize and appropriate these scriptural insights is to begin the renewal of our theological perspective.

Energy Ethics Reaches the Church’s Agenda

Unlike concerns for food and hunger, attention to energy issues has not been highly visible in U.S. churches. With the exception of some statements by denominational boards and agencies, there has been a notable lack of programs and materials designed to sensitize local congregations to energy as an area of Christian moral concern.

The reasons for this inattention are many. The dramatic urgency of starving families is hard to duplicate in presenting energy issues. No picture can show radiation from improperly stored nuclear wastes contaminating the soil. Congregations cannot send shipments of electricity to relieve the poor from rapidly escalating utilities costs. More important, many church people are not convinced that an "energy crisis" exists. They reflect the confusion of the national debate over the nature and extent of the "energy crisis" and the remedies needed. But many of those willing to list energy as an extremely important societal issue tend to define it solely in managerial terms. How do we produce and distribute more? Seldom are the complexities of energy issues seen in moral terms, and seldom does energy appear high on the church’s ethical agenda, especially within the local congregation.

A Wide-Ranging Study

The Energy Study Process of the National Council of Churches has been a fortunate exception to this lack of attention. The NCC’s concern for energy issues dates back to fall 1974 when the Division of Church and Society (DCS) asked Margaret Mead and René Dubos to chair a study of the implications of using plutonium as fuel in the nuclear cycle. The resulting report, "The Plutonium Economy: A Statement of Concern," forcefully questioned the advisability of proceeding with plutonium use without further investigation and public discussion of the risks involved. A proposed policy statement based on this report became the center of immediate and vigorous debate. The controversy began to make clear the impossibility of separating the plutonium issue from the broader energy picture. In March 1976 the DCS adopted a resolution calling for a moratorium on the commercial use of plutonium and mandated a broad study on the ethical dimensions of energy issues.

The product of this study is a "Proposed Policy Statement on the Ethical Implications of Energy Production and Use." It was presented to the NCC Governing Board for a first reading in May 1978; if adopted by the board at its November meeting, it will become official NCC policy.

The process that produced this policy statement was remarkable for its scope. An energy study panel of 120 members was assembled, representing a wide array of disciplines: theology, ethics, labor, energy industries, technical sciences, social sciences, economics, and environmental and consumer interests. At its center was a committee on energy policy with responsibility for receiving information from the panel and drafting a proposed policy statement.

Throughout 1977 DCS staff, working with the panel, collected data on energy use and production, generated papers representing different points of view on basic energy questions, and held smaller consultations with subgroupings in the larger panel. In October 1977 the entire panel was assembled for an Energy Ethics Consultation, at which an effort was made to assess technologies and policies for energy use and production in terms of their consistency with Christian ethical concern for the social impact. This consultation’s reports left a clear mark on the subsequent policy statement proposed to the NCC Governing Board,

Urgent Questions

The energy study process and the final consultation were not without significant areas of conflict. One oft-expressed fear was that the final document would betray an antitechnology bias, objecting pointlessly to the realities of a world dependent on technology. Some were uneasy lest the statement slight concerns for justice -- such as employment, majority/minority rights, or Third World development -- in favor of a major stress on environmental or life-style issues related to energy. Others simply feared that the final policy would be expressed in such broad general terms that no forceful position would be taken.

The policy statement itself does not seem to justify these fears. The document is not antitechnological but stresses the responsible use of technology. The forceful and insistent linking of environmental and justice concerns makes clear the drafters’ conviction that these cannot be dealt with separately. Finally, the document does not waffle on the hard issues, nor has there been an attempt to please everyone with generalized statements of concern. It has tried instead to develop and put forward ethical criteria, rooted in the Christian theological tradition, and to begin the process of applying those criteria to energy issues in a straightforward and responsible manner.

The proposed policy statement will certainly be a controversial document, but it is also certain to stimulate a long-overdue discussion in the churches on the matter of energy. Let us look at some of its contents.

1. Although acknowledging the considerable confusion and disagreement over factual energy data, the document leaves no doubt that an energy crisis exists and that energy questions are urgent. Two differing perspectives on the nature of that crisis and its appropriate remedies emerge. One view argues that a shortage of gas and oil, whether resulting from an embargo or from a longer-term depletion, "would produce severe economic and social dislocations." These would likely fall most heavily on the poor. This view is "pessimistic about the prospects of solar energy" and argues for the "substitution of nuclear energy and coal for oil and gas."

A second perspective maintains that "nuclear energy, and to a lesser extent coal, have such severe social and environmental impacts that they not only threaten serious economic and social dislocations, but also place at risk the entire life-support system (the biosphere) on which all people depend." The argument holds that "this is a time for implementing measures for wider and more just distribution of material benefits and for rapid commercialization of solar energy and other benign energy sources and mixes."

Regardless of one’s perspective, energy issues are urgent and demand serious attention from church and society. "Both perspectives share the view that society and its energy systems are interrelated and the concern that inaction or wrong decisions will result in disaster."

The policy statement’s case does not rest on socioeconomic grounds alone, insisting that energy issues involve ethical choices and therefore concern us not only as citizens but also as Christians. "Energy decisions must be based . . . on values concerning the future of the world which human beings wish to inhabit. . . For Christians, the ultimate objectives of society are based on the biblical witness to creation, redemption, stewardship, justice and hope."

Accountable Stewards

2. The drafters of the policy statement have considered the theological framework for their approach to energy issues with unusual seriousness. A section titled "Theological Dimensions of the Energy Situation" is a direct response to the anticipated questions, "Why should the church be involved in these matters?" and "What could the biblical tradition possibly have to say with respect to energy issues?"

In the biblical theme of creation we are reminded of the interconnectedness of humanity with all of creation -- organic and inorganic. Within that creation, humanity has a distinctive role. "Persons are unique in their capacity to respond to God with faith, to their human neighbors with love, and to the nonhuman part of creation with respect and responsible care." Humanity has been given a commission to act as "accountable stewards of the whole earth and as bold advocates for fairness and freedom in the human community." This understanding grounds energy ethics in the widest possible concern for wholeness in the human and natural community. It is a concern epitomized by the Hebrew word shalom, which means wholeness and harmonious relationship in creation and in community. Energy technologies and their use can be measured by their ability to build shalom.

But the biblical tradition speaks also of sin, the distortion of the divine commission and the breaking of shalom. The policy statement refers to sin as the "perversion of dominion into domination." The desire of some to dominate nature (including energy resources) without regard to wholeness is related to the domination of some groups of humans over others without their participation or consent. Sin as domination is also sin as injustice. Energy technology systems can become instruments of economic and social domination no less easily than other instruments of power.

Sin can also find expression in the form of idolatry. "When faith in the Creator is replaced by faith in human ability to solve all problems by technological means, humanity has fallen into the sin of idolatry . . . distorted trust for our salvation in other sources of power." A crucial task for the church must surely be to assess whether energy technology is being used in accordance with God’s will for wholeness in creation or distorted into a deity in its own right whose service demands sacrificing the welfare of some segment of the whole creation.

For Christians struggling with energy issues, Jesus Christ is the good news that God has acted redemptively in human society to restore the wholeness of creation. The church participates in that redemptive activity as it seeks to promote social, economic and environmental justice in energy decisions. "In Christ, we are freed from preoccupation with our own rights and needs so that we can give ourselves to the securing of justice for our neighbors in their need."

It is at the point of a radicalized notion of the neighbor that this theological perspective comes clear in terms of its implications for energy production and use. "Our understanding of ‘neighbor’ is now being radically expanded to encompass all humans in past, present and future generations, as well as the rest of creation." In general discussions of energy issues, we commonly find a very narrow definition of human concern. We are likely to place our own immediate interests above those of the environment, the rest of the human family outside our own national boundaries or economic class, and even our own unborn generations.

The church enters the energy debate with a different frame of reference. If we take our own theology seriously, we cannot accept any prior limitations to the interrelationships for which we seek to care. The scope of relationship must extend to the human and the nonhuman. The geography of relationship is not bounded by political barrier or economic class. The duration of relationship is not limited by time; we care for the generations of humanity yet unborn and the generations of the earth which must endure. Such a broadening of human interest and responsibility will change the operative methodologies for making energy decisions, urging that power not be used in its own immediate interests. There are few entities less powerful than the poor of our planet, an unborn infant or a tree, but it is within a definition of our neighbor which includes these powerless ones that the church must wield what actual and moral power it possesses.

Ecological Justice

3. Perhaps the policy statement’s most substantive contribution to the churches’ discussion of energy ethics is its development of an "ethic of ecological justice." The phrase itself is symbolic of the document’s intention to counter the false dichotomy often drawn between environmental and social justice. Ecological justice stresses the interrelationship of these concerns. For example, those who argue for allowing the risk of serious environmental damage in order to produce more energy contend that this course of action will produce sufficient supplies to ensure energy for the poor. Their argument ignores the common practice of imposing environmental risks on one group (usually poorer, less powerful, and often rural) for the benefit of others who suffer none of the environmental risks.

In Black Mesa, Arizona, the proposal to construct six large, coal-burning electric plants and three strip mines meant that the health risks of air and water pollution would be suffered by a predominantly native American population, but the power generated would be distributed to distant urban areas. The welfare of the human community, of even the most powerless, is tied to the welfare of the biosphere on which we all depend for basic life needs. Any energy policy which tries to play one area of concern against the other cannot be encompassed in an ethic of ecological justice.

In concrete fashion the document advances three values against which energy policies and technologies may be measured for their consistency with the goal of ecological justice: sustainability, equity and participation.

Sustainability refers to the earth’s limited capacity to provide resources and to absorb the pollution resulting from their use. Sustainability requires that biological and social systems which nurture and support life be neither depleted nor poisoned. Sustain-ability provides the boundaries within which all participate in the equitable satisfaction of needs.

Equity refers to a fair distribution of resources on the basis of need. Equity embodies the rights of today’s generation and those yet unborn. A central concern of energy policy is the equitable distribution of positive and negative impacts of energy production and use. This distribution is difficult because what is beneficial to one group of people often is detrimental to another; because frequently those who receive the benefits are not those who pay the costs; and because there is a considerable time lag between the imposition of either costs or benefits and the realization of long-term effects. Energy equity questions include: Energy for whom? Energy for how long and for what? How much and what kind of energy?

Participation is a basis of equity in that the individual community member must have the opportunity to be involved in determining public policy and the hierarchy of values which guide that policy. Participation includes representation of the interests of future generations.

Using these three value areas as a measure of ecological justice, the policy statement turns to an assessment of specific issues. It does so with the apt warning that energy policies must be evaluated in terms not only of their objectives but also of the means used to achieve those objectives. The social and economic costs of particular technologies and the ways in which they are used can undermine otherwise desirable ends.

A Concern for Equity

We can only briefly highlight some of the issues addressed by the policy statement in this area of ecological justice. All are approached from within that framework of concern.

A section on "Ethics, Energy and Risks" makes clear that all energy technologies involve some element of risk. Nevertheless, the judgment is made that a coal- and nuclear-fission-based energy policy is centered on high-risk technologies. The level of risk approaches the unacceptable because there is the very real possibility of irreversible damage to the biosphere itself; further, many of the social costs of such high-risk technologies are postponed to future generations while the benefits accrue to the present generation. Plutonium technologies are judged a particularly unacceptable risk because of the extreme toxicity of plutonium, its capability for use in nuclear weapons, and the unusual safeguards necessary for its security and error-free use. Such high stakes force those concerned for ecological justice to seek the development and use of lower-risk technologies such as solar energy.

The need for equity leads to sections addressing such topics as these:

• The guarantee of adequate energy supplies to the poor at proportionate economic cost.

• The protection of minority rights in the face of majority energy needs.

• The social impact of energy development in rural areas which produces a "boomtown syndrome" and its accompanying social and economic dislocations.

• The importance of assuring a fair share of energy supplies to developing Third World nations, and the availability of technologies appropriate to Third World needs and economies.

The policy statement zeroes in on ecological justice’s demand for appropriate patterns of energy use. "The United States, with 5.8 per cent of the world’s population, consumes 33 per cent of the world’s commercial energy." Current efforts at energy conservation are inadequate; while the need for more appropriate patterns of individual and corporate energy consumption is clear, the statement also recognizes the necessity of avoiding unnecessary economic and social dislocations in the transition to energy efficiency (e.g., unemployment or increased costs due to lowered volume). The document appeals for the creation of an ethic of sharing as the expression of ecological justice in the area of energy use. Energy waste and inefficiency have become so endemic in the U.S. that this appeal to a principle most Christians profess to affirm sounds almost radical.

The U.S. and the World

In an important Section on government energy policy, the statement reiterates the values of sustainability, equity and participation, arguing strongly that these can realistically be applied in the formulation of an alternative national policy. No attempt is made to set forth particulars; instead, a convincing case is made that, in ignoring elements of sustainability, equity or participation, we open ourselves up to the risk of serious and unavoidable consequences.

In regard to the decision-making process in matters of energy policy, the document calls for "a national commitment to anticipate serious threats posed by certain technologies to the quality of the community of life and to design appropriate energy policy. The process of anticipating threats must include Technology Assessment and Social Impact Assessment." Technology assessment would analyze the effects- of particular energy technologies on society, the environment or the economy. Social-impact assessment would measure the effect of particular energy policies and decisions in "at least the areas of community development, employment, industrial development, land use, health and community services." One gathers that these are modeled on the success of environmental impact statements, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970. It is to be hoped that the National Council staff will develop this proposal in detail as a follow-up to the distribution of the policy statement.

Challenging the Churches

4. Having advanced the ideal of ecological justice based on the ethical implications of the Christian tradition, the statement concludes with a challenge to the churches -- one that is appropriately set in visionary terms. After all, the church is heir to the visions and dreams of prophets and apostles.

The summons is for the church to join in "shaping an ecologically just society." The dream of such a society is best shared in the language of the document itself:

Such a society will respect the limits of creation -- the fallibility of human beings, the finite supply of resources, the inability of the natural world endlessly to absorb unnatural substances, and the reality that every thing and every one is connected with every other thing and every other one in the community of life.

Such a society will respond to the demands of equitable distribution by ensuring that finite resources are thoughtfully conserved so that they may be equitably shared to meet the needs of all persons, now and in the future.

Such a society will ensure that satisfaction of human needs takes immediate priority over the satisfaction of anyone’s desires, and that the dignity of each individual is honored by providing opportunity for all persons to participate responsibly in decisions which will affect their individual lives and the common good.

It is fitting that, even in dealing with a subject as complex and difficult as energy production and use, the church should end on a note of vision and hope. The "NCC Policy Statement on the Ethical Implications of Energy Production and Use" will surely meet with some disagreement and controversy, but if it provokes the churches to join the debate, we can only be grateful. The recognition is long overdue that energy issues should be of particular concern to the church since we have inherited a divine mandate to work for the welfare of the whole of God’s creation.

His Majesty: the President of the United States

Step by step, the Bush administration is marching this nation toward an imperial presidency— a presidency with unchecked power. And Congress has shown neither the resolve, nor the gumption to block the dangerous road President Bush has taken.

Step by secret step, the administration usurps power that belongs to Congress, the judiciary and the people. Since our first retaliatory strikes against terrorist camps in Afghanistan, the administration has

severely restricted American journalists from covering that war, as well as the domestic war on terrorism. There is too much we simply do not know about the war and the conduct of the war, or even how many civilian casualties there have been.

In November, Bush issued an order that creates military tribunals with a far greater sweep of authority than the military tribunal created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to conduct a secret trial of eight known Nazi saboteurs, who had confessed. Roosevelt’s tribunals were limited to trying persons from "any nation at war with the United States."

Bush’s tribunals can be used against "any individual who is not a United States citizen." There are approximately 20 million noncitizens, including resident aliens, living in the United States. They are all put at risk to be tried in secret, found guilty and have no right to appeal in any court. The judicial branch of government has no authority here, according to Bush.

The founders of this nation distrusted military justice dispensed by authority which is unchecked by civil power. They saw such proceedings as essentially lawless.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft rounded up more than 1,200 non-citizens in November, most of Middle East backgrounds, and held a number of them incommunicado for weeks and months so they could not be contacted by attorneys or their families. Hundreds are still detained.

Ashcroft, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee — the committee which has oversight authority over the Department of Justice — refused to answer pertinent questions about the detentions. With a truculent show of arrogance, he told the senators their oversight authority had limits. In that same testimony, Ashcroft equated dissenters with traitors. In other words, the government knows what is right. The people don’t. The people’s elected representatives in Congress don’t, either.

Last month, Bush unilaterally —without consultation with the Senate, which has an advice and consent role regarding treaties — terminated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, effective in six months from his announced intention.

And the march of autocratic presidential decisions continues. On Dec. 28, Bush signed the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002 (HR 2883) into law — but on the same day issued an executive memorandum which declared that he will ignore Section 305 of the act.

Section 305 of the act amends the National Security Act of 1947 and states, in part: "Any report relating to a significant anticipated inteffigence activity or a significant intelligence failure that is submitted to the intelligence committees shall be in writing, and shall contain the following: (1) A concise statement of any facts pertinent to such report and (2) An explanation of the significance of the intelligence activity or intelligence failure covered by such report."

The Intelligence Authorization Act passed overwhelmingly by voice vote in the House and by unanimous vote in the Senate.

David G. Adler, professor of political science at Idaho State University and the editor-author of "The Constitution and the Conduct of American Foreign Policy," considers the Bush memo regarding the act "the continuation of the exercise of the imperial presidency."

Adler points out: "What Bush is saying is that Section 305 encroaches on his authority as president to determine what information Congress is entitled to. In fact, he’s claiming the right to impose secrecy, to determine what Congress will be informed about. And that’s very dangerous.

"To begin with, Congress is actually the senior partner in the conduct of foreign policy, not the executive. The executive role in foreign affairs, at least under the Constitution, pales in comparison to that of Congress. And because Congress is the senior partner, it makes sense that Congress should be entitled to all information so that it can make good decisions in the area of foreign affairs.

"Section 305 is quite reasonable. It is eminently reasonable for Congress to have access to information about inteffigence activities."

In 1996, Congress tried to give away its constitutionally mandated authority by passing the Line Item Veto Act. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not grant the president the authority to ignore- portions of legislation that Congress had passed and the president had signed into law. If Congress cannot give away that authority, certainly a president cannot take it.

When Bush signed the Intelligence Authorization Act into law, he signed the entire act into law, not portions of it. And under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution;the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed"—whether he agrees with them or not. Once a president signs a bill into law, he’s under an constitutional obligation to duly enforce the law.

Adler suggests that congressional leaders could meet with the president formally and tell him how important it is to Congress to have that intelligence information.

"Secondly," Adler said, "if the president won’t budge, the Congress could threaten to withhold funding for any of the intelligence activities about which it will not be informed. That would bring real muscle to the field. It’s not likely now, because Congress has caved in since Sept. 11, in very dangerous ways. It’s unlikely that Congress will assert itself.

"What this means is that the president will conduct this war in greater secrecy and not even Congress will be informed about obviously important developments and our efforts in the war on terrorism."

In his assault on the U.S. Constitution, the Bush administration is really saying that it doesn’t trust Congress, the elected representatives of the people, nor does it trust the people themselves.

What could be more dangerous to our form of government?

America, the War, and Israel

(The following is a reply to a number of letters to the Editors, including one by Prof. Louise Weinberg, following Mr. Judt's November article "America and the War," replies which were critical of Judt's views on Israel.)

Please note that my article was about the problem of widespread international anti-Americanism. It did not directly address the Israel-Palestine questions, which took up just two paragraphs.

There are three distinct issues here. First, is the crisis in Israel and the occupied territories the source of the modern Middle Eastern Question? No. Arab states have their own problems, many of their own making; Osama bin Laden is one of them. And American involvement in the region, like British before it, takes in Iran, Iraq, the Arabian peninsula, the Gulf, and North Africa, for reasons that reach back many decades and have more to do with securing oil supply than protecting the Jewish state.

Second, is the Israel—Palestine conflict a major contributor to modern anti-American feeling? I believe so. US loyalty to Israel is everywhere perceived as unwavering and uncritical. Accordingly, Israeli behavior directly affects the way people think about America. I did not reach this conclusion by burying myself in the editorial pages of a!Ahram: even the moderate newspapers of our strongest allies in Europe see things this way and admonish Washington for its refusal to rein in its friends in Israel. "So what?" Professor Weinberg might respond. If the Israelis are in the right we should keep backing them to the hilt, whatever foreigners think. But that raises my third issue.

Is Israel behaving irresponsibly? Many people think so, me included. That doesn’t make us anti-Semites. To condemn, for example, the settlements (why "settlements," Professor Weinberg—they exist, don’t they?) is not the same thing as feeling "rage," much less "hatred" against Israel. I don’t deny that commentary on Israel, and not only in the Middle East, is often driven by anti-Semitism. I have heard young Palestinian students at major American research universities earnestly discussing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I have seen well-known European academics couch their palpable distaste for Jews in respectable "anti-Zionist" rhetoric, and this tendency seems to be growing stronger. But what follows from this?

What follows, I think, is that we must stick to the facts. This ought to be an acceptable procedure—Israelis have long believed in creating "facts." According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the second intifada that began in September 2000 has so far resulted in 172 Israeli civilian deaths, 89 of them in Israel proper. In the same period 592 Palestinian civilians have been killed. According to B’Tselem, 2,194 Israelis have been injured (soldiers and policemen included); according to the Red Crescent, injured Palestinians number nearly 17,000. (These numbers were announced as of December 16.)

It is the disproportions that are striking in these figures. Even if Israelis were somehow winning their "war against terrorism"

—they are not—the scale of death and injury that they are inflicting on civilians is fast undermining their case. They are losing the moral high ground and, despite the appalling efforts of Palestinian suicide bombers, they have lost the war of image and propaganda. Sooner or later those conflicts merge and Israel’s tactics become a "fact" in themselves and an impediment to future solutions. More facts: the assassination of Rehavem Zeevi, the occasion for the latest Israeli exercise in collective punishment and extra-judicial execution (30 "suspects" killed during the recent occupation of six Palestinian towns) was what it was: murder. But Zeevi was by his own admission an enthusiastic practitioner of ethnic cleansing and cheerleader for a racially "pure" Greater Israel. Had he been born Serb or Hutu we in America might have a better understanding of why he inspired such hatred. His presence in the government of Israel said much about the current state of affairs there.

And then there is the prime minister. Ariel Sharon cynically marched up the Temple Mount on September 28, 2000, and in doing so helped to set off the present cycle of anger and death in the Middle East. His invasion of Lebanon twenty years ago was a military and moral disaster—not just for the Arab victims of Lebanese phalangists in Sabra and Shatila but for a generation of young Israeli soldiers, some of whom abandoned promising military careers rather than be associated with Sharon’s reckless adventures. He is the author of the 1992 "Sharon Plan," under which Israel would annex 50 percent of the occupied territories and create eleven isolated "cantons" for the unenfranchised Palestinian residents. Ariel Sharon, like the settlements he so avidly endorses, is an impediment both to peace in the Middle East and to America’s battle with terrorists everywhere.

None of this implies that the Palestinian leaders are guiltless. Like his Israeli counterparts Yasser Arafat has taken almost every opportunity to miss a chance. In particular, the PLO threw away a real occasion to forge an alliance with the peace party in Israel. Palestinian rhetoric has often been inflammatory and deluded. And yes, this didn’t all start in 1967. I lived for a while in pre—Six Day War Israel under the shadow of Syrian guns on the Golan Heights and I recall the well-advertised Arab intention to "push the Jews into the sea." But Professor Weinberg is wrong about one thing: before 1967 there was a lot less "terror" on both sides.

Before the present occupation, Palestinian Arabs often despised Israelis and denied Israel’s right to exist. But Israelis reciprocated in kind. I recollect being scolded by Mrs. Golda Meir in 1965 for using the word "Palestinian" in a public discussion: "There is no such thing as a ‘Palestinian," she admonished me. "There is no ‘Palestinian nation.’ There never will be." Whether the future prime minister of Israel was right then is beside the point. She is wrong now— there surely is a Palestinian nation, another fact that Israel has helped create. It is behaving in ways sometimes reminiscent of other stateless peoples of the recent past— De Valera and the nationalists in Ireland before 1922, the Mau-Mau rebels in Kenya during the early 1950s, the Jews in Palestine before 1948. And like them it will sooner or later have its claim recognized and the terrorists Mr. Sharon would like to eradicate under the cloak of America’s revenge for September 11 will become, like Sharon’s own political mentors and sometime terrorists Itzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, tomorrow’s political interlocutors. Some such outcome may even be imposed upon the two sides by a frustrated United States—as many Israelis and Palestinians tacitly concede and half hope.

My article raised hackles, I suppose, because of its timing—many people find it offensive even to discuss American or Israeli failings at such a moment. We are still burying Osama bin Laden’s victims and it is dismaying to acknowledge that there are people out there who like to see Americans die. But surely this is the moment for such a discussion, because violence against America and Americans is not about to stop and we need to understand it better if we are to fight back effectively. And if America and Israel really are in this together, as many of my correspondents insist, then that is all the more reason for asking why Israel too attracts such opprobrium. What is gained by placing Israel beyond censure and charging its critics with anti-Semitism? Is this to be the patriotic response to the crisis of our generation? That is the patriotism of the ostrich.

Military Bases Boost Capability but Fuel Anger

Washington -- Behind a veil of secret agreements, the United States is creating a ring of new and expanded military bases that encircle Afghanistan and enhance the armed forces' ability to strike targets through much of the Muslim world.

Since Sept. 11, according to Pentagon sources, military tent cities have spring up at 13 locations in nine countries neighboring Afghanistan, substantially extending the network of bases in the region. All together, from Bulgaria and Uzbekistan to Turkey, Kuwait and beyond, more than 60,000 U.S. Military personnel now live and work at these forward bases. Hundreds of aircraft fly in and out of so-called "expeditionary airfields."

While these bases make it easier for the United d States to project its power, they may also increase prospects for renewed terrorist attacks on Americans.

The new buildup is occurring with almost no public discussion. Indeed, it has passed virtually unnoticed outside the region -- in part because of operational security and force protection considerations in Afghanistan and in part because of agreements between Washington and host governments not to discuss the bases in public.

But the reasoning behind these agreements underscores the risk. Though Washington has obtained the support of the ruling regimes, including some inside the former Soviet Union, virtually all the bases are in countries where an American military presence stirs resentment among Islamic extremists.

"I swear to God that America will not live in peace before all the army of infidels depart the land of the prophet Muhammad," Osama bin Laden said in his first video recording released after Sept. 11.

U.S. policymakers have tended to dismiss such statements as propaganda, but some analysts think they reflect widespread Muslim sensitivities that the United States has been slow to appreciate.

In the view not only of Bin Laden but also of many Islamic sympathizers, the continued presence of American forces in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states after the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 constituted "defilement" Muslim holy places.

Without accepting this view as a justification for terrorism, some analysts believe U.S. officials underestimate the impact that prolonged stationing of American forces may have in the Muslim world especially since it is highly visible there, though it has attracted little attention in the West. The Arab press in particular is filled with speculation and conspiracy theories about the ultimate purpose of the U.S. Presence.

Many see it as evidence of an American desire for hegemony and control.

"The old basing structure, honed to fight the Soviet Union," is gone, says defense analyst James Blaker, author of a seminal Pentagon study of overseas bases. "But does the new one open us up to counteractions?"

The American buildup in the region began long before Sept. 11, and it has been paralleled by a shift in the focus of terrorist groups.

As the United States built a network of facilities in a half-dozen Persian Gulf states after the Gulf War, terrorism increasingly focused on large U.S. targets, from the bombing of the Khobar Towers In Saudi Arabia and the destroyer Cole in Yemen to the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

In the words of novelist John le Carre, who has studied the Muslim world extensively and set some of is stories there, "What America longs for at this moment, even above retribution, is more friends and fewer enemies."

Instead, "what America is storing up for herself is yet more enemies," he said in an essay that appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail. "Because after all the bribes, threats and promises that have patched together this rickety coalition, we cannot prevent another suicide bomber being born -- and nobody can tell us how to dodge this devil’s cycle of despair, hatred and, yet again, revenge."

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military presence overseas has changed profoundly. A 1999 Army War College study found, "While permanent overseas presence has decreased dramatically, operational deployments have increased exponentially."

The Pentagon pulled out of 700 facilities in Europe and abandoned the containment ring of bases around the old Soviet Union. In sheer numbers, it reduced the overseas presence to about 60% of what it was when Ronald Reagan took office.

Most of the numerical reduction took place in Germany, as forces were demobilized and the military shrank its Cold War size there by fully two-thirds.

The far more significant change, however, came in the way troops were used abroad. In earlier times, members of the armed forces were routinely "stationed" overseas, usually for tours of several years and often accompanied by their families. Now they are "deployed," with the length of tour more uncertain and dependents almost never allowed.

The deployments are both frequent and lengthy, however. On any given day before Sept. 11, according to the Defense Department, more than 60,000 military personnel were conducting temporary operations and exercises in about 100 countries.

While the mammoth European installations have been cut back, Defense Department records show that the new operational mode calls military personnel away from home about 135 days a year for the Army.

Six Principles of Christian Catechesis after Rwanda

The genocide which occurred in Rwanda during 1994 was the one of worst outbreaks of violence in the 20th century. Many members of the ethnic group known as the "Hutus," spurred on by the government, massacred approximately 800,000 "Tutsis" in less than a year. At its most frenzied, the pace of the killings exceeded the destruction of the Jews by the Nazis. 1994 was the high point among many other episodes of violence in Rwanda and neighboring countries before and since then, which included massacres of Hutus by Tutsis. If you are not familiar with this situation, I recommend Philip Gourevitch's excellent journalistic account We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998).

One of the most jarring aspects of the genocide in Rwanda is the fact that due to the ostensible success of Christian missionary efforts in that country during the 20th century, it had become one of the most thoroughly Christianized countries in Africa. Estimates before the genocide put the number of Christians in Rwanda at almost 90% of the population. The idea that a nation comprised largely of Christian people would become a killing field where neighbors are slaughtering each other in huge numbers, where grown men who attend church regularly would pick up machetes and hack to death entire families, including the children, should strike us as utterly bizarre. How could people who are supposedly followers of Jesus, attending church, listening to sermons, and receiving Christian education, act in this way? There is a gap here between the designation "Christian" and the behavior of the individuals so described that is so huge as to constitute a chasm. It is obvious that the efforts of the missionaries did not include a catechesis in basic Christian ethics that was effective in precluding the possibility of such massacres. What would such a catechesis look like? This is the question I seek to address.

What are the basic principles that need to anchor Christian behavior in a violent world? These are my suggestions:

1) "We must obey God rather than men." Acts 5:29 One must take one's orders from God, not from earthly authorities, if those authorities are asking one to commit crimes. While the institution of government has a role in God's ordering of the world, that does not mean that every government that exists is an expression of God's will. It can and quite often does occur that a particular government's policies contradict God's will, which seeks the protection and enhancement of human life. When a government gives its citizens orders that are immoral, then those orders must not be obeyed by Christians. A key test that can be used if you are unsure whether or not a government order is immoral is to ask if this order is one that Christ would approve of.

2) "Do not fear those who kill the body." Matt. 10:28 If the authorities are threatening to kill you if you do not obey them, be willing to give up your life. Realize that for a Christian being a martyr is preferable to being a murderer. One's life on this earth is not an absolute value, only a relative one. By extension, realize that God does not want you to kill other people's children to save your own. The foundation on which your life as a Christian must be built is not fear but faith in God.

3) "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Matt. 22:39 Make the great commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," the basis of how you relate to your fellow human beings. This entails seeing all people as the neighbor whom God calls you to love. Put the other way around, you must be the neighbor to those who need your help, just as the Good Samaritan acted as the neighbor of the man lying by the side of the road. Loving your neighbor is the exact opposite of killing your neighbor. You should live in the way Christ commands you to live, not in defiance of that way.

4) "There is neither Jew nor Greek ... for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Gal. 3:28 Realize that labels such as "Hutu" and "Tutsi" (and their correlates in other cultural situations around the world) are human constructs that can become idols or anti-idols. (Idols are products of the human imagination that are worshiped in place of God; anti-idols are products of the human imagination that are feared, hated, and attacked.) Always remember that all human beings are creatures of God. When your social environment is encouraging you to make these labels the basis for loving some people and hating others, criticize your social environment and seek to change it.

5) "And they cried out again, 'Crucify him'." Mark 15:13 Remember that there have been many situations in human history in which a crowd mentality seized people and they began to behave unethically. Remember the crowd that cried out for the crucifixion of Christ, and be sensitive to the temptation presented to you to join such a crowd. When you feel that temptation, have the courage to separate yourself from the crowd and live as an individual who has a spiritual and ethical backbone.

6) "And they came to Jesus, and saw the demoniac sitting there, clothed and in his right mind." Mark 5:15 Christ's ministry is a healing ministry that works effectively to help people become sane. If your social environment has gone insane and become a scene of rampant paranoia, do not simply jump into the rushing waters and join the paranoia. Be a beacon of sanity in a sea of darkness. Learn how to recognize paranoia, resist it's temptation, and be a co-worker with Christ in helping your fellow human beings to regain their sanity.