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Whither Liberation Theology?

Book Reviews:

Liberation Theology and Its Critics: Toward an Assessment, by Arthur F. McGovern. Orbis, 281, pp., $14.95 paperback.

Liberation Theology at the Crossroads: Democracy or Revolution? by Paul E. Sigmund. Oxford University Press, 257, pp., $29.95.

The coming of perestroika to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-90 has not simply provided occasion to rejoice over newfound freedom from socialist tyrannies. It has tempted many to proclaim the beginning of a worldwide demise of socialist economic practice and an ascendancy of democracy and free-market capitalism.

Accompanying this alleged resurgence has been the suggestion by some that the cultural critics and theologians variously associated with socialism should repent and acknowledge market capitalism as the natural counterpart to democracy. Perhaps no one more than the Latin American liberation theologians have been admonished this way.

But the expectation that perestroika is somehow a political or intellectual defeat for Latin American liberation theologians is an all-too-simple generalization; it is undermined by a more complex understanding of these theologians and of the worlds within which they labor. In fact, when we work through the criticisms it may be more accurate to claim that we might expect an actual resurgence of liberation theology and movements. A careful look at our hemisphere reveals a need for a perestroika that may be just as turbulent and unsettling for the U.S. as perestroika in Eastern Europe was for the U.S.S.R. From the perspective of the poor in the Americas, late state capitalism is as much in need of restructuring as was late state socialism in Eastern Europe.

We have at hand two books that prompt reflection on these matters. In Liberation Theology and Its Critics: Toward an Assessment, Arthur F. McGovern, a Jesuit and a professor of philosophy at the University of Detroit, aims to provide an overview of liberation theology, its background, history and major theological themes. His principal focus, however, is on the political implications of liberation theology which have been so debated in theological circles. Liberation Theology-at the Crossroads: Democracy or Revolution? by Paul E. Sigmund, professor of politics at Princeton, focuses also on the political dimensions. Both authors seek a balanced and fair review of liberation theology and its critics. McGovern achieves this better than Sigmund, in part because Sigmund is more interested in developing a particular argument than in presenting the manifold voices and complexities of liberation theology that McGovern explores. Before examining this difference, however, we should note what the two both do well. Three features shared by the books are especially valuable for any who are prone to facile generalizations.

1. McGovern and Sigmund both insist on understanding liberation theology developmentally. Liberation theology has been a movement in change since at least the 1960s, and both volumes examine this change. The developmental perspective is crucial to Sigmund’s argument. He claims there has been "a movement away from Marxist reductionism to communitarian participatory radicalism in the development of liberation theology over the past twenty years." The first phase of "Marxist reductionism" and "mindless revolutionism" was followed by a second phase wherein liberation theology became oriented to the kind of grass-roots democratic populism embodied in the Christian base-communities. Sigmund celebrates this development, and he presses liberation theologians to move still further away from revolutionary language toward democratic liberalism.

McGovern qualifies Sigmund’s two-phase presentation in significant ways. He too argues that there was a major shift between the liberation theology of the early 1970s and that which began to grow through the 1980s and into the present. This shift was marked, however, not so much by clearly defined phases as by the less frequent occurrence of controversial stands (in favor of socialism, for example) and by a more consistent focus on spirituality. Sigmund overlooks the way Gustavo Gutiérrez and other liberation theologians themselves qualified their relation to Marxism and to revolution, even in the early days. The two-phase view also overlooks the way liberation theologians, according to McGovern, remain for all their changes "fundamentally anticapitalist and still convinced that Latin America suffers from a dependence on the world-capitalist economic system with its center in the North." Liberation theologians have not outgrown this viewpoint.

2. Both McGovern and Sigmund, in different ways, acknowledge the appropriateness of liberation theology’s critique of capitalism. This emerges especially in their assessments of Michael Novak’s defenses of "democratic capitalism." Novak has argued that dynamic free-enterprise systems promote "discovery and entrepreneurship among the poor at the base of society." For McGovern, Novak presents an "idealized picture of capitalism," and McGovern tries to show throughout the volume how many injustices have been created by and amid capitalism, even though Spanish colonialism inaugurated many of the problems.

Sigmund, who is strongly critical of liberationists’ rejections of capitalism, also takes Novak to task for trusting to "the magic of the market" and for being "no more willing to engage in criticism of capitalism than liberation theologians are of socialism." He insists that even those who urge liberation theologians to take capitalism more seriously need to acknowledge that the realities of politics and markets often choke democratic capitalism. Thus, he recognizes the "problem of structural employment and the concentration of landholding" that often are not addressed in the course of praising market economies.

3. McGovern and Sigmund identify and advance major criticisms of liberation theology and regard their criticisms as potentially strengthening for liberation theology. McGovern is exceptional in this regard, first by offering an overview of the different criticisms forged by North Americans, Latin Americans and Europeans. These criticisms are many, and one of the real gems of McGovern’s book is his summary discussion of them. For this alone I highly recommend the book.

McGovern sets his own criticisms within the context of acknowledging liberation theology’s "great significance." I would note two of the several major adjustments that he calls for. He contends, first, that liberation theology should free its social analysis from a preoccupation with global "dependent capitalism" and move toward more specific analyses of land reform and of other pressing needs which would help popular Christian movements be "more politically effective at a national level." Without denying the problem of Latin America’s dependency on North Atlantic capitalism, McGovern urges liberation theology to develop analyses of developments internal to the dependent nations.

Second, McGovern stresses that liberation theology needs to give more attention to the poor themselves, focusing not simply on their need for general "liberation," but also on their values, survival strategies and their need for "explicit ethical norms" to evaluate what "means" are appropriate to Christian change. McGovern helpfully suggests that the very notion of "the poor" can become a shibboleth, and needs to be used with greater precision.

Sigmund also sets his criticisms within an appreciation of liberation theology’s accomplishments. Even when noting these, however, he is more interested in pointing out failings or oversimplifications: liberation theologians’ early "mindless revolutionism"; their continuing support of Castro, the Sandinistas, and the FMLN in El Salvador; their "ignorance of contemporary liberal thought" and "closed-minded attitude" about reforming the market system in Latin America.

According to Sigmund, liberation theology needs to move into a third phase, one of "dialogue with liberalism." For Sigmund this means that liberation theology should shift its focus from making revolution to nurturing democracy. Hence his subtitle. He would like to see liberation theology take its cues from base communities’ populist "grass-roots communitarian democracy" and then extend this "populism" into a liberalism that, contra Marx, offers "democracy and equality to all human beings, regardless of sex, race or social class (Rousseau)" Sigmund’s agenda would purge liberation theology of much of its "early revolutionary fervor," but in its dialogue with liberalism it would still perform "a radical ‘prophetic’ role in reminding complacent elites of the religious obligation of social solidarity, and in combating oppression."

Through a series of brief questions at the end of his book, Sigmund invites liberation theologians to seek ways of fusing capitalist market "efficiency" with the "preferential love for the poor," to consider how private property is not always oppression but may in fact free people from it, to develop liberalism’s ideal of "equal treatment under the law," to nurture the "fragile new democracies" in Latin America, and, finally, to develop "a spirituality of socially concerned democracy, whether capitalist or socialist in its economic form," rather than "denouncing dependency, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation."

Thus, there is a key subtext in Sigmund’s book, a kind of subliminal message to be received by North American readers already caught up in celebrating perestroika: "Come now, liberation theologians, announce this day whom you shall serve, the revolution of old or the democracies that are growing in this bright new day."

Make no mistake: Sigmund is no simple defender of capitalism and its entrepreneurial elites. His text is at points deeply appreciative of liberation theology, not only of its base-community populist group movements but also of particular individuals, like Ignacio Ellacuria, S.J., one of the six Jesuits who was slain by members of the Salvadoran army’s Atlacatl battalion and to whom Sigmund’s book is dedicated. He is critical of naïve endorsements of capitalism and aware also of injustices worked by oppressive markets and politics in Latin America. Many of Sigmund’s admonitions to liberation theology are good ones, and heeding some of these may in fact strengthen liberation theology.

Seen against the background of McGovern’s book, however, Sigmund’s invitation to liberation theologians to make an either-or choice between "revolution or democracy" seems too simple, and in the long run it obscures the kind of fundamental freedoms for which Latin America still awaits. True, liberation theology should not underestimate the democratic openings where they exist. But Sigmund writes as though these "fragile democracies" in themselves are sufficient to begin redressing the suffering and oppression. There have been democratic openings before -- for example, in Guatemala between 1944 and 1954. They have quickly been closed when U.S. economic and political interests were threatened, as when the U.S. ended Guatemala’s democratic project in a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954.

This coup in Guatemala and other cases of U.S. intervention in Latin America signal what Sigmund overlooks: that alleged democratic spaces in Latin America come and go, and almost always within the dominance exercised by the U.S. presence there. Although Sigmund rightly reminds us that not all of Latin America’s suffering is simply the result of external North Atlantic influences, unlike McGovern he hardly acknowledges the problem of U.S. domination and its intentional creation of "low-intensity conflict" in those nations so as to guard U.S. interests.

In this respect, Sigmund’s book reads disturbingly like many U.S. newspapers. It contains no stories drawn from the thousands of mothers, children, labor activists and university workers who have been "disappeared" or slain because of their efforts to improve living conditions. It has almost no structural analysis of the economic, political and military domination of Latin America by the U.S. government or by U.S.-supported business and capital-lending institutions.

McGovern will not let us forget those structural dominations. He reminds us that while U.S. foreign investment is not the sole cause of Latin America’s problems, U.S. transnationals "have aggravated conditions in Latin America, tending to reinforce the maldistribution of wealth and power there." McGovern even uses documents of the IMF and the World Bank to show that Latin American nations are regularly forced to occupy a "subordinate, reacting position" in relation to U.S. economy and policy. Further, he discusses how capital is extracted from Latin America by U.S. business practices, benefiting U.S. companies or other nations’ elites, but rarely addressing the needs of the poor.

McGovern also points out how U.S. economic interests regularly influence U.S. policy in favor of maintaining the political status quo, whether or not that policy serves the common good of Latin American peoples.

In a chapter devoted to Chile in the early 1970s, Sigmund argues that liberation theologians there became too enthusiastic about political revolution in a socialist mode, but he gives little if any attention to U.S. political involvements. Stimulated by IT&T and other U.S. multinationals, the U.S. government first tried to prevent the election of Salvador Allende (a Marxist) , and then financially underwrote the terrorists who murdered his chief military supporter. As McGovern summarizes it, Chile is a key example of the political effect of U.S. economic interests: "The U.S. cut off aid to Chile, influenced international banks to cut off credits and loans, and sought, in President Nixon’s words, to ‘make Chile’s economy suffer."’ How long can we go on being silent about such political interventionism?

Sigmund is also silent on the military dimension of U.S. domination. The U.S. has had a military hold over the countries on its own doorstep for a longer period than the U.S.S.R. dominated Eastern Europe, and the domination is no less disastrous. How can we even plan to celebrate a future freedom for Central and South America when this domination is not even articulated by writers like Sigmund?

One can see the fallout of this domination country-by-country. Since 1806 Mexico has suffered military intervention at least ten times by U.S. troops, and if there are no interventions in the offing now, perhaps it is largely because the U.S. has been shoring up the rule of one party, which wins rigged elections and then fails to challenge U.S. investment and business practices that increase human suffering for campesinos and urban poor there.

In Guatemala, the CIA-organized coup in 1954 began a period of ruthless military rule that still continues. Reagan and to some extent Bush refer to Guatemala as a democracy, but in reality it is a militarily dominated terrorist state which happens to have a constitution and elections. By the government’s own admission, 440 villages -- men, women, children -- were wiped out in the early 1980s. The military along with other elites keeps 60 percent of the country’s population, its Mayan peoples, in abject poverty.

In tiny El Salvador, a country the size of Massachusetts, the U.S. government spent about $700 per minute ($1.4 million per day) , largely on military aid, over the past ten years fueling a deadly civil war and in effect paying the military slayers of the six Jesuits in November 1989. Sigmund glosses over the fact of the U.S.-supplied army’s role in this slaying, although evidence (unavailable to Sigmund at the time the book was written?) pointed to the military as perpetrators of the crime within weeks, if not days, afterward. Sigmund simply says the priests, and their housekeeper and her daughter, were killed by "armed men in uniform."

In Nicaragua the U.S. combined powerful military embargoes with military funding for a private guerrilla force, the contras, thus decimating that country. As McGovern points out, Nicaragua suffered more deaths proportionately in the 1980s than the U.S. did in all its wars of this century.

In Costa Rica, long a beacon of democracy in Latin America, there is now a remilitarizing of society generally, symbolized by the U.S. military exercises taking place in Costa Rica’s national parks, in spite of objections by the Costa Rican government.

The invasion of Panama last December, after already more than ten U.S. military incursions there since 1856, worked horrendous damage to the poor in that country, far out of proportion to the amount of good we claimed to be doing by ousting Noriega. As several studies are showing now, whole civilian barrio communities were razed by the hi-tech military invasion, displacing tens of thousands and killing many more than the 300 the U.S. government admits. Easily, more Panamanian civilians -- unwarned of the invasion and already impoverished -- died in last December’s assault than in China’s Tiananmen Square incident for which we so indignantly fault Chinese leaders. As U.S. leaders self-righteously lash out at Saddam Hussein and ‘Iraqi brutality," we dare not excuse our own brutal record of naked aggression.

While Central American nations on our doorstep are still beaten down -- economically, politically, militarily -- by recurring acts of institutionalized violence like these, there persists a future for liberation theology that names these acts "sin." There persists, further, a need and hope for a comprehensive and liberative restructuring that warrants the name "revolutionary." To be sure, this can be neither a mindless revolutionism nor a search for a socialist utopia. It would be, nevertheless, a full-scale and fundamental challenge to current U.S. government policy and to our market economy. It is unlikely that this challenge could occur without upheaval and pain in North American life. The call to U.S. Christians today is to struggle for this revolutionary restructuring and to prepare our fellow citizens for a painful structural adjustment to Latin Americans’ long-overdue freedom from U.S. exploitation.

In light of this call, we North American Christians perhaps do better to think less about how we would like Latin American liberation theology to change and more about how our Christian practice and theology might give rise to a resistance to those U.S. government policies that decimate not only Latin American peoples but also the growing numbers of poor in this country. In fact, U.S. liberation movements are already under way in women’s groups, community organizing efforts among the poor, the search for freedom by gay and lesbian communities, and in Native American, African American and Hispanic struggles against U.S. racism, and in a host of works for justice, peace and the wholeness of creation.

If perestroika is to come to the Americas, and not just be celebrated "over there" in Eastern Europe, then liberation theology in the U.S. needs to become embodied in coordinated movements of resistance that bring to an end our government’s decades-long rituals of domination in Latin America. Ulrich Duchrow has said rightly in Global Economy: A Confessional Issue for the Churches that the present perversion of economic, political and military institutions puts U.S. Christians in the situation of a status confessionis, a time that calls Christians to a special confession and resistance to the comprehensive wrongdoing in which we all are implicated. Our country, so long hailed as "the leader of the free world," rolls along enslaving other nations and now increasingly is subjecting its own peoples to economic deprivation and want.

In another distorted age, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that "if the coachdriver is drunk, we have to put a spoke in the wheel." Trusting in God’s grace-full activity in our world, we need to try to halt the juggernaut of U.S. policy and redirect it toward liberation -- whether it’s called a "restructuring" or a "revolution" -- for all the Americas. Liberation theology, whether south of the border or north of it, has not ceased -- and dare not cease -- dreaming, thinking and living toward that restructured freedom.

Continuing Incarnation: Evelyn Underhill’s Double Thread of Spirituality

Of all the themes in Evelyn Underhill’s work, none is more important than "continuing incarnation": offering one’s life as the channel for God’s continuing work on earth by weaving together the inner and outer life of the spirit. For Underhill the spiritual life was a life "soaked" by a sense of God’s reality and claim, where "all we do comes from the centre in which we are anchored in God."

Underhill not only wrote on prayer and growth in God, but she continually connected the spiritual with social concerns. For example, she addressed an early conference on politics, economics and Christianity in 1924, and she advocated pacifism in the face of World War II. Throughout her adult life, she spent part of every week in the slums of London.

"We exist for nothing else," she wrote, than to be "effective servants of God, of Christ." And she was convinced that only prayer could make such an outreach possible. She saw that the way to do God’s work is for God to do it through us, and for that to happen we need to be conscious of and connected to God. Underhill called this "adhering" and referred to the Gospel of John where Christ speaks of "abiding": "Abide in me, and I in you. As a branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me" (15:1)

Underhill’s spirituality was not a withdrawal from the world, nor was it unremitting service. From the time she wrote The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today (based on her 1921 lectures at Oxford’s Manchester College) until she died in 1941, her most constant theme was that of bringing in the kingdom through a balanced life of prayer and action. In four recently discovered retreats published under the title The Ways of the Spirit, she writes: "What is sanctity? Just the perfection of our love, its growth toward God and others." Speaking of the truly creative person she says: "Real saints never know how much they are doing. . . . They are . . . continuing the work of incarnation through the perfect self-yielding of the soul to God, making themselves His tools, His channels of revelation to others." Writing on joy, she exults in the wonder of a God who would choose human beings for such a task, and she describes the facets of redeeming love: "Redemption does not mean you and me made safe and popped into heaven. It means that each soul, redeemed from self-interest by The revelation of Divine Love, is taken and used again for the spread of that redeeming work."

When Underhill became angry, it was against extremes, exaggeration and self-centered "commercial spirituality" that attempted to use God for its own good. She wrote repeatedly against a social gospel so exclusively concerned with the world that it considered prayer a selfish activity. She protested both extremes: "When a great truth becomes exaggerated to this extent, and is held to the exclusion of its compensating opposite, it is in a fair way to becoming a lie."

Self-centered spirituality and social service without prayer are perennial tendencies, and they seriously polarize the Christian community. As a result, the 20th century has seen numerous writings about "a new spirituality" that includes love of neighbor. In some quarters that is an important addition, but it is hardly new. Christ withdrew from the crowds not only for love of his father, but in order to serve better. There have always been Christians who saw that to deny either the world or heaven was fruitless. From Underhill’s point of view, Christians were enjoined to abide, but they were also chosen to bear fruit.

People have always misunderstood the concept of detachment, and some ascetics have taken it to such extremes that it mocks what it is supposed to glorify. Underhill is quite clear about detachment. Serving God, she says, will always require outward and inward renunciations. Following Christ entails an element of the cross. But this letting go is not a denigration of God’s world, nor should it be done for its own sake. It is appropriate and necessary, she says, to remove anything that hinders focusing everything on God and God’s will. "But that [detachment] must be combined with such attachment as enables us, with God, to try to love and save the world." Perhaps what is new in spirituality today is that more people are beginning to understand this.

Underhill did not think it was easy to become a tool in the hand of God. Perhaps because of her own spiritual struggles, she fed on the lives of the saints who had struggled before her. A woman who wrote on "The Mastery of Time" because of her own overcommitments, she was acutely aware of the problems of spiritual exhaustion. She too suffered through the changing weather of the spiritual life. And she well knew what it meant to face spiritual dryness. But she was doggedly faithful to her spiritual discipline.

Underhill was particularly sensitive to the clergy’s need for spiritual refreshment and spiritual connectedness. Her respect for them was based on an assumption not that they were superior, but rather that they had made a complete commitment to God and had a unique opportunity. In her retreat Inner Grace and Outward Sign, she says to them: "You have offered yourselves for the most sacrificial, most exacting, most Christ-like of all lives -- to be the agents of God in His work with the souls of others." She demanded authenticity from herself and from them.

The clergy heard her. She was the first woman in the Church of England to give a series of addresses to priests. Her book Concerning the Inner Life came out of that first experience at Water Millock clergy school in 1926. Collected Papers of Evelyn Underhill contains two lectures on "The Parish Priest and the Life of Prayer" first given to the Worcester Diocesan Clergy Convention. We know from Ways of the Spirit that she gave retreats to clergy and other religious professionals in 1927 and 1928.

Sometime around 1929 or 1930 Underhill wrote a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, about the inner life of the clergy. By this she meant "all that conditions the relation of the individual soul with God." She requested that the letter be read at the worldwide meeting of bishops gathered for the Lambeth Conference in 1930, the last such gathering before World War II. There is no way to know if the letter was sent or received. I found it, in handwritten form, along with previously unknown and unpublished retreats, in the Underhill archives in London. In 1988 Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie brought it to the attention of the Lambeth Conference.

Underhill’s concern in this brief message was that some clergy had become so overwhelmed by the multiplicity of their duties that they had lost their grounding in prayer; They were trying to lead their congregations in worship without themselves worshiping . Under-hill pointed out the problem and suggested a solution. One cannot help wondering what the archbishop’s response would have been to her forthright words. Under-hill no doubt was voicing the thoughts of many who were disenchanted with the church but felt powerless to change it. Her suggestion to give courses in devotional life at theological schools was unheard of at the time.

It has taken some time for seminaries to comprehend Underhill’s ideas, and many have not yet done more than present a course on prayer, monasticism or spiritual discipline once every few years. But there are others that have fully understood Underhill’s vision. Catholic institutions, of course, have never lost this focus, although emphases, in some cases, have greatly changed. Protestants are now beginning to realize what they have missed. The curriculum among the schools of the Boston Theological Institute proves an example of these new efforts. Together these schools provided 23 different courses in spirituality in the past academic year, the first one listed being "The Pastor’s Personal Spiritual Life." General Theological Seminary in New York City supports a Center for Christian Spirituality and continually provides courses that relate justice and economics to the life of prayer, discernment and stewardship. Abingdon Press has recently published Spiritual Traditions for the Contemporary Church, based on lectures regarding Catholic and Protestant spiritual traditions under the aegis of Wesley Theological Seminary and the Domincan House of Studies in Washington, D.C. In Philadelphia, Chestnut Hill College is just beginning a master’s program in holistic spirituality and spiritual direction.

There are other signs of double thread being lived out through organizations such as the Center for Action and Contemplation and Socially Concerned Contemplatives. In addition to these there has long been the prayerful outreach of the Society of Friends and the Salvation Army, efforts which Underhill never forgot.

In a recent book titled The Spark of the Soul, Terry Tastard, S.S.F., compares Evelyn Underhill, St. Francis, Meister Eckhart and Thomas Merton, using the theme that "today the test of a spirituality is its ability to help us deepen both our love of God and our commitment to change the face of the earth." Tastard’s words echo those of Underhill in 1926: "Adoration is the prayer in which we turn toward . . . God Himself, for Himself, and for none of His gifts. . . . It is the prayer in which we obey the first and great commandment to love the Lord with all of the heart, soul, and mind -- with all our thought and strength -- with ALL, all, every bit. And the second commandment will only he really well done where the first has the central place."

A Chance to Reaffirm the Law of Nations

When the cold war ended, we Americans found ourselves in an identity crisis. As James Wall noted recently ("Identity Crisis for Policymakers," October 17) , having defined ourselves as militant anti-communists for so long, we don’t know how to conduct ourselves now that communism is no longer a threat. The invasion of Kuwait tempts us "to define ourselves over against an enemy rather than by our ideals as a nation."

However, policymakers do have a tradition to draw on when pondering an American response to the Mideast crisis: the law of nations. This idea, enshrined in our Constitution, was inspired by the Judeo-Christian vision of an impartial tribunal that would allow states to "beat their swords into plowshares," as Isaiah pictured it.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s new book, On the Law of Nations, shows that such law was "the first principle of the American legal system." The Declaration of Independence referred to it as "the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God"; the Constitution explicitly calls for it: "The Congress shall have power. . . To define and punish . . . Offenses against the Law of Nations" (article I, section 8) The Supreme Court has declared that "international law is part of our law," which supports Moynihan’s contention that it "is not higher law or better law; it is existing law." American leaders labored hard in the earlier part of this century to enshrine these principles in the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Charter of the United Nations. Generations of theologians and religious leaders also supported institutional embodiments of the law of nations, including many writers in the Christian Century. They were convinced that the impartial administration of international law could resolve conflicts and ultimately rid the world of the scourge of war.

Religious proponents of international law could draw on the prophets for biblical support: Amos, Hosea, Micah and others discerned Yahweh’s law as both impartial and international, striking against the arrogant pretensions of all people and nations who violate human rights in the belief that God is on their side. Isaiah envisioned Israel’s mission as entailing in part the mediation of conflict among nations under impartial international law; a world court in Zion, judging by truth and justice under due process, would enable warring factions to "beat their swords into plowshares" that is, to give up conflict and concentrate on economic development. This image appears on the walls of the United Nations building in New York.

Moynihan considers the erosion of the American commitment to the law of nations a consequence of the stalemated cold war. In the past decade particularly, cynicism about the International Court of Justice and the UN has become so pervasive that millions of Americans are no longer aware of the crucial role that the concept behind these institutions played in their own heritage: "In the annals of forgetfulness there is nothing quite to compare with the fading from the American mind of the idea of the law of nations." The invasions of Grenada and Panama and the mining of Nicaraguan harbors flatly violated American agreements under international law. Despite the fact that the U.S. made a formal commitment to the International Court in 1946, the Reagan administration withdrew from compulsory jurisdiction in 1985 when the harbor-mining incident was under review.

The next year the court declared that the U.S. had violated international law in a variety of ways in its actions toward Nicaragua -- the "first time in the history of the Court that the United States was found in violation of international law in a matter involving the use of force against another nation," Moynihan notes. He is properly indignant at this abandonment of long-standing commitments: "In two centuries of national existence no more pusillanimous act was ever contemplated, much less carried forward, by American officials responsible for our relations with international tribunals." The zealous components of our American ideals had triumphed over what I would call the tradition of "prophetic realism," our commitment to coexistence under law. Now that the anti-communist crusade is obsolete, those misguided policies in Central America and elsewhere have no further justification. There is now an urgent necessity to recover the legacy of the law of nations.

The invasion of Kuwait presents the first opportunity since the collapse of the cold war to reassert American adherence to the law of nations and its institutions. The astounding international support in condemning this invasion reflects not only the sea change of the end of the cold war but also the awareness that if such aggression is not challenged, no other nation can feel secure. The history of the failure to defend the law of nations in the League of Nations in 1931 (the invasion of Manchuria) and in 1935-36 (the invasion of Ethiopia) is recalled in terms of the most disastrous consequence -- World War II. One does not have to equate Saddam Hussein with Adolf Hitler to understand the cogency of these historical parallels and the crucial significance of the present crisis. Despite our own complicity in leading Iraq to believe there would be no significant response to its invasion of Kuwait, and regardless of our defense of economic interests, the overriding concern of religious communities should be to ensure the viability of the law of nations.

This concern should also govern our attitude toward the broader issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Now that a measure of impartiality is available in the October 12 UN resolution condemning the violence on the Temple Mount, it is possible to insist on compliance with past Security Council resolutions and thus move toward settling the Arab-Israeli conflict. The foundation of Israel, after all, was in a UN decision of 1948, and every war fought in the area since then has expressed a refusal to accept that decision. An evenhanded settlement, enforced by the Security Council, would solidify the authority of the law of nations and justify allegiance to it by Muslims and Israelis who have decried past UN decisions for their partiality. It would incidentally also deprive Iraq of the last shred of justification for remaining in Kuwait.

Drawing on Isaiah’s vision, we should pursue the following strategy: First, while patiently supporting the embargo against Iraq, we should begin placing our armed forces in the Middle East under the Military Staff Committee of the Security Council, as described in chapter VII of the UN Charter. This would allow the Soviets to participate in any military action and would resolve the question of responsibility for military engagement. The U.S. does not have intrinsic enmity toward Iraq and has no justification for unilateral military action. Precipitous action that would pit the U.S. and a few allies against Iraq should particularly be resisted.

In the event that the embargo does not force Iraq to remove its forces from Kuwait, a decision to take military action should be made by the Security Council, requesting assistance from all UN member states. When such a request is made, Congress should make a deliberate decision to comply, so that military action is not a unilateral decision of the executive branch. The nations involved would therefore consider themselves agents of the law of nations rather than merely allies of the U.S. In an effort to avoid the mistakes of recent military engagements, the religious community should insist on adherence to the principles of deliberate, lawful action following the principles of the U.S. Constitution and the UN Charter which express the law of nations.

Any military action against Iraq should involve global military power, working in tandem with Iraq’s neighbors. The amassing of such a military force on the Syrian and Turkish borders, in addition to the forces available in Saudi Arabia, would be a strong deterrent that might lead to a peaceful settlement. While standing up against an unpopular United States may have significant propaganda value, encouraging Iraq to continue resistance, global pressure would be more effective. The symbolic action by the entire UN would be a much better enactment of the principle of the law of nations than the U.S. and a few allies playing the role of global police officers.

While we take this action in regard to Iraq, we should support an impartial settlement of the Arab-Israeli issues, including the proper provision for a homeland for the Palestinian people. We should be prepared to take the same steps in support of the Security Council as we take in the Iraq crisis. The complication of dealing with this issue simultaneously should be accepted as a unique opportunity to demonstrate the potential of international law in the post-cold-war era.

The leadership of the United States should tackle the complex political tasks of creating the institutions to enforce the law of nations in the future. We should promote a permanent Nuremberg Tribunal capable of trying individual offenders against the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter. This would remove the necessity for national vengeance against Iraqi officials; they would be dealt with under international law by an impartial tribunal.

We also should begin to reconfigure U.S. military power to fit the needs of future Security Council engagements. This means abandoning the expensive legacy of unilateral military outreach and reliance on weapons of mass destruction and espionage. The serious budgetary crisis makes this reconfiguration more urgent.

We should support the recent decision to bring up to date our dues to the UN, which are several years in arrears, and we should place ourselves once again under the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. This will serve to recall our foreign policy to its historic foundations of constitutional restraint and lawful process, and should eliminate the possibility of future invasions like that of Grenada or Panama.

Unlike many religious people in the 1920s and ‘30s who held out utopian hopes for the institutions of the law of nations, we should not expect to eliminate conflict in the post-cold-war era. We may face the tragic necessity of imposing international law by force of arms, but we can do so in the hope that once the principles of Isaiah’s vision are enforced, they will be voluntarily accepted. Our own national history gives credence to such a hope: in the wake of our Civil War no state even dreams of resisting the decisions of Congress and the Supreme Court with force. For those of us who believe that the God of history stands behind the Isaianic vision, there is reason to hope that "in days to come" a nonsectarian form of that tribunal will be sufficiently established in justice and equity that nations will not have to "learn war any more.

Zeal Without Understanding: Reflections on Rambo and Oliver North

Twice during this summer’s joint congressional hearings on the Iran-Contra affair, Senator Paul S. Sarbanes (D., Md.) used the words of Justice Louis Brandeis, particularly in connection with the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. The words are engraved in the Capitol Building itself: "The Greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." Sarbanes gave no indication that he recognized the ultimate source of this idea, which the famous Jewish Supreme Court Justice Brandeis evidently had derived from a great Christian theologian -- the Apostle Paul. The words are contained in the dissenting opinion that Brandeis wrote in 1928 limiting the power of the government to wiretap telephone conversations; they follow these sentences:

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers.

What Brandeis warned against -- the abuse of power by idealistic and well-meaning agents of the government -- is at the root of the events uncovered by this summer’s congressional investigation. The crucial issue is zeal. The phrase "zeal without understanding" (Rom. 10:2) was the key to Paul’s interpretation of his former life as a Jewish zealot.

Paul’s reference to such incomplete

zeal occurs in a passage that begins in Romans 9:30, in which the apostle ponders why Israel failed to respond to the revelation of divine righteousness in the Christ event. In the opening verse of chapter 10. Paul describes his anguish over the fact that not all his fellow Jews accepted Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ. He goes on to acknowledge the sincerity and intensity of faithful Jews: "They have zeal for God" (Rom. 10:2) ; that is, they are honest in their passionate devotion. "Zeal" in this instance is the technical term for religious passion in the Jewish religion. It connotes an attitude of such unlimited devotion that no compromises are allowed. Zeal brooks no interference. It will break any law or shatter any taboo to accomplish its goal.

The problem with such uncompromising devotion, as the end of verse 2 states, is that it is misguided and thus counterproductive. When a person is passionately committed to a false cause or a destructive end, no amount of sincerity can rectify the situation. In the context of the argument in Romans, this lack of knowledge and understanding has two dimensions. The first has to do with the revolutionary impact of the Christ event on Jewish passion for the law. In first-century Judaism it was believed that if Israel were sufficiently devoted to the law and to the high principle of the oneness of God, the messiah would appear and all of Israel’s troubles as a colony of Rome would disappear. The zealot movement, in particular, held that passion for God required absolute repudiation of any earthly king, and hence called for revolutionary resistance against Roman rule.

Jesus had rejected such zeal, calling instead for love and understanding of the enemy and coexistence with Rome. He died in place of the zealot Barabbas, having refused, upon being captured, to play the role of the militant messiah and summon a legion of warrior angels. Later he refused to respond to taunts to prove his messiahship by coming down from the cross. His resurrection meant that God had indeed confirmed Jesus as the promised messiah, and that the method of bringing about the messiah’s rule through zealous violence was obsolete. Therefore, to persist in the zeal-oriented tradition is to lack "understanding" of this pivotal event in Israel’s messianic history. To use the words of Romans 10:4, "Christ is the goal of the law." Christ reveals the ultimate purpose of Israel’s law, which is that Israel should live in harmony with its circumstances and not put the world at risk in the quest to be the No. 1 nation.

The second aspect of this lack of knowledge or understanding has to do with law as a form of cultural conformity. Paul’s earlier argument in Romans was that no one is made right by conformity to the law because humans tend to use their obedience as a means of proving their superiority over others. This theme is explicitly stated in Romans 12:2:

"Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind." Zeal is passionate conformity to a particular aspect of the world.

Today we would speak of "cultural conformity," of making oneself measure up to the expectations of a particular group. We recognize this dimension more clearly in others than in ourselves, of course. We readily identify Shi’ite Muslim suicide bombers as zealots who conform without reservation to the teachings of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Paul was making a similar point about the zealots of his day: they were conforming in a mindless, uncritical way to the values and models of their culture. To use the language of earlier chapters of Romans, they were in bondage to the law but failed to comprehend their motivations or the implications of their actions. "Seeking to establish their own righteousness, they did not submit to the righteousness of God" (10:3) when it appeared in the form of Jesus. Their real motivation was a competitive one -- to be more devoted than others so as to gain prestige. The ultimate purpose of divine righteousness is thus lost from sight as one becomes willing, in effect, to blow up the world that the law was intended to preserve. "Zeal without knowledge" ends up destroying the very values and communities it seeks to defend.

It is important to remember that Paul speaks from experience. He had been a violent zealot, unreservedly devoted to the cause of making the messiah’s advent possible through conformity to the Jewish law. He had adhered to the values of his religious tradition out of a desire to compete, claiming at one point to have "advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers" (Gal. 1:14). There was no doubt about his sincerity or his ability to pursue the high cause: he persecuted Christians and other heretics without reservation. But he had lacked understanding, either of his own deeper motivations or of the self-destructive aspect of fanatical zeal itself.

When Paul encountered the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, however, he had to admit that Jesus was being confirmed by God as the promised messiah, and that his own entire campaign had been on the wrong track. He discovered that the Kingdom of God is not going to be ushered in by brute force. He also discovered the unconditional love of Christ, conveyed even to someone like him who had persecuted the Christians. So Paul no longer had to remain rigidly committed to establishing his own righteousness through conformity to the law; he was accepted by Christ just as he was, and was thus set free from conformity.

biblical tradition of militant zeal. From the early Indian massacres through our foreign-war crusades, we have tended to believe that our actions would transform the world, or, in the words of Woodrow Wilson, "make the world safe for democracy." For contemporary Americans, this tradition is most persuasively embodied in tales of cowboys, cops and soldiers who relentlessly pursue the enemy, breaking laws, traducing values or doing whatever else they feel is necessary to achieve their mission. Probably the most relevant current model for the pattern of zealous behavior being investigated by Congress is the film character John Rambo.

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Rambo: First Blood, Part II relates the story of a soldier with superhuman prowess who rescues POWs who have been abandoned by what is depicted as a corrupt democratic system. Since he dares to defy democratic authority, he becomes capable of saving Americans in Vietnam and symbolically winning the long-lost Vietnam war. When Rambo is being briefed about his secret mission in search of a re-education camp in Vietnam, he asks the officer, "Sir, do we get to win this time?" "This time," the officer replies, "it’s up to you." The paranoid notion that degenerate elected officials refused to win the Vietnam war is carried forward in this film -- a notion which reviewers suggested was one of the sources of its enormous popularity. An officer describes Rambo’s soldierly qualities in David Morrell’s novelistic version of the film: "He’s the best combat soldier I’ve ever seen. . . . A genius. He’s got an instinct for fighting, and right now only one desire -- to win a war someone else forced him to lose" (Rambo [Jove, 1985], p. 39).

Rambo is dropped into the Vietnamese jungle to photograph American POWs thought still to be held there. He discovers the POW camp and, having lost his camera because of his superior’s bureaucratic bungling, rescues an American being tortured on a cross. Further developments bring him problems with an unscrupulous CIA officer and a wicked North Vietnamese. Commandeering an antiquated U.S. helicopter; Rambo rescues the bedraggled and forgotten POWs. He also destroys the garrison with bullet and arrow -- true to the frontier tradition. Rambo’s superhuman powers are further demonstrated when he triumphs in a battle with a sleek, new-model Soviet gunship that pursues his decrepit craft. When Rambo returns to the base in Thailand with the rescued men, he turns his copter’s M-60 machine gun on the computers and communication equipment that signify the corrupt command structure of a democratic army. Here is the model for the kind of zeal that has been vigorously acted out by real-life agents.

The fusion of these heroic images into the Rambo model was evident in North’s military appearance. Although he had not worn his marine uniform while working at the White House, he displayed it proudly at the hearings, the rows of medals no doubt to remind the audience of soldierly prowess and bravery in Vietnam. At one point in the hearings, North repeated almost verbatim Rambo’s line about the war that America’s military had not been "allowed to win." Like Rambo, his military exploits were reportedly on the superheroic level; a fellow officer said admiringly that "Ollie could fight his way through a regiment of North Vietnamese regulars armed with nothing but a plastic fork." But the exploits that most captivated the public were, like Rambo’s, efforts to gain the release of American hostages. The accounts of North’s risky journeys, the threats against his life, and his willingness to die to avoid revealing secrets under torture led writer Cheryl Lavin to describe the country’s gushy reactions:

He came across as a hero. Not a phony Hollywood hero. A real hero. In his first week as a witness, North was dazzling. This wasn’t some good-looking actor -- Sean Connery or Roger Moore or Timothy Dalton -- playing James Bond. . . . This wasn’t Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger fighting a play war with catsup blood. This man fought real wars. He dripped real blood. His war didn’t end when the cameras stopped turning. His enemies pursue him into his home. Right this minute they’re after him. And face to face with the scariest terrorist in the world, he doesn’t blink. Any time, any place, he told Abe Nidal. Man to man. One on one. You and me. The country watched transfixed [Chicago Tribune, July 12].

It is as if the real Rambo had suddenly emerged on live television, conforming perfectly to the superheroic ideal.

Although a career officer and an efficient bureaucrat, Oliver North also displayed the kind of contempt for constitutional process that Rambo expressed. The code name for the State Department in North’s memos had been "Wimp." He accused Congress of being "fickle, vacillating, unpredictable" in its policy toward the contras -- an opinion which he used to justify illegal, secret operations. He repeatedly voiced scorn for the Boland Amendment and other attempts on the part of Congress to act as a check and balance against executive power in foreign policy. North admitted -- but without apologizing -- that he had lied to government officials both inside and outside the Reagan administration, that he had shredded vital documents even in the presence of investigators, and that he had participated in falsifying government records. Feisty and tough, proud and humble at the same time, loyal to God and country, "The marine spoke in the language of the zealot," as R. W. Apple, Jr., observed in the July 9 New York Times.

The zealot’s willingness to go outside the law was exemplified in North’s elaborate and secret efforts to circumvent the Boland Amendment in order to aid the Nicaraguan contras by means of profits earned in the illicit sales of arms to Iran. The lawless stance was continued in the destruction of documents and the deception of investigators. A plan to create a "self-sustaining, stand-alone entity" that could carry out such activities "free from normal Congressional oversight and control" was openly acknowledged (New York Times, July 13) The stunning feature of North’s testimony was that these revelations were made without the slightest sense of shame. So long as the American superhero is devoted to the elevated cause, it seems, crimes committed in the course of redemptive crusades are incidental. As Jonathan Alter observed in his Newsweek commentary. "The instant North resolutely admitted to having lied and falsified documents, many viewers thought it unfair to hold him accountable for it. Confession became salvation before the hearings broke for lunch. Rambo too had been a lawbreaker, serving a jail sentence before he was recruited for his redemptive mission -- but his criminal conviction hardly disqualified him.

The idea of lawless, superheroic exploits restoring national honor and symbolically winning a lost war surfaced in the outpouring of public support for North. Among the 120,000 supportive telegrams received during the course of his testimony, there were many that spoke of the restoration of patriotism and pride. USA Today ran an Ollie hot line and received 58,863 calls advocating another medal for his efforts; only 1,756 callers said that he deserved a jail sentence instead. A woman from Beaver Island, Michigan, remarked that people "would like to elect Ollie president, just as soon as he’s out of jail" (reported by columnist David Broder, Chicago Tribune, July 15) After examining the astounding public response to North’s testimony, reporter Wayne King concluded: ‘Alone, Colonel North appears to have transmuted the psychic tenor of the nation from cynicism and suspicion to patriotism and belief’ (New York Times, July II)

•The view that patriotism can be measured by fervid adherence to stereotypical ideals was repudiated by Senator George I. Mitchell (D., Maine) , who told North that "it is possible for an American to disagree with you on aid to the contras and still love God and still love this country just as much as you do. . . . In America, disagreement with the policies of the Government is not evidence of lack of patriotism. Although he’s regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics" (New York Times, July l4)

• The idea that superwarriors should act in secrecy and deny those acts so as not to become accountable to the public was dealt with by Senator William S. Cohen (R., Maine). He expressed skepticism that deception should "be practiced upon Congress by deletion, or official documents reduced to confetti, while false statements are given to public officials" in covert operations (New York Times, July 14). Along with others, Representative Lee H. Hamilton (D., Ind.) pointed to North’s violation of the principle of accountability.

•On the issue of telling the truth -- which zealots believe they can abandon for the sake of the high cause -- there were many testimonies to its necessity in a democratic society. Secretary of State George P. Shultz, for example, strongly agreed with Senator Daniel K. Inouye (D., Hawaii) on the need for truthfulness. Said Shultz: "Public service is a very rewarding and honorable thing, and nobody has to think they need to lie and cheat in order to be a public servant or to work in foreign policy. Quite to the contrary. If you are really going to be effective. . . you have to be straightforward, and you have to conduct yourself in a basically honest way." (New York Times, July 24).

• Finally, in relation to our perception that the Rambo paradigm results in a politics of undemocratic and destructive fervency, Representative Dante Fascell (D., Fla.) contended that the National Security Council had "adopted the methods of a totalitarian government in pursuing democratic goals." North sharply disagreed, and Fascell backed off from this accurate observation with the admission that he was not talking about a "substitution of values." But the substitution was there for all to see.

This theme was reiterated in what, from the perspective of democratic principles, was perhaps the dramatic high-point of the hearings. During his statement at the close of North’s testimony, Senator Inouye argued that military personnel have "an obligation to disobey unlawful orders. This principle was considered so important that we . . . the Government of the United Stated proposed that it be internationally applied in the Nuremberg trials. And so in the Nuremberg trials we said that the fact that the defendant -- "

At this point defense attorney Brendan V. Sullivan rudely interrupted, shouting: "I find this offensive. I find you’re engaging in a personal attack on Colonel North and you’re far removed from the issues of this case. To make reference to the Nuremberg trials I find personally, professionally distasteful and I can no longer sit here and listen to this. . . . Why don’t you listen to the American people and what they’ve said as a result of the last week? There are 20,000 telegrams in our room outside the corridor here that came in this morning. The American people have spoken" (New York Times, July 15). This heated response revealed the profound disparity between what many of the telegrams favored and the American principle of lawful obedience. The reference to Nuremberg infuriated Sullivan because it suggested a similarity between his client’s behavior and a fascist mentality. What the public was allowed to glimpse in this exchange was the fact that pursuit of patriotism of the type popularized by John Rambo and Oliver North is gravely threatening to a constitutional democracy.

When we look to other parts of the world -- to the conflicts in the Persian Gulf, in India, in Northern Ireland, in Lebanon -- it becomes clear that fanatical zeal is a problem of global significance. Those of us who are Christian need to acknowledge that we have contributed more than our share to such destructive passion, and that indeed some of our most devoted Christian brothers and sisters are committed to it today. Oliver North is a devout Christian and he is avidly supported by millions of Christian patriots.

What is required now in our society is to combine zeal with understanding, a process that calls for discussion, argument, debate and clarification. We have an opportunity in the wake of the recent hearings to come to terms with a dangerous virus in our culture -- one that infects religion as well as politics, business as well as education. Those of us who understand what Paul was talking about need to translate it into terms that our co-workers and family members can understand, helping them to enter this discussion with vigor and effectiveness.

Christians need to become far more critical of the realm of popular entertainment, which has filled the minds of our children with the exploits of zealous superheroes who lack understanding. These tales of regeneration through violence, of breaking the law for the sake of the zealot’s ideals, are -- from the Saturday-morning cartoons to Rambo -- unrealistic and dangerous. They erode the standards of decent conduct on which our society depends. They encourage the subversion of our Constitution. Perhaps Paul’s words could be cited in this regard as well: "I bear them witness that they have zeal for God, but not according to understanding."

The Uses of American Power: On a Mission

Books Reviewed

Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana. By Gary Dorrien Routledge, .336 pp.

Saving Christianity from Empire. By Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer Continuum, 192 pp.

Anxious About Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities. Edited by Wes Avram. Brazos Press, 224 pp.

American Providence: A Nation with a Mission. By Stephen H. Webb. Continuum, 208 pp.

"The United States goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy," Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote in 1821. "She is a well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. If the United States took up all foreign affairs, it would become entangled in all the wars of interest and intrigue, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own soul."

Some 80 years later President McKinley, stymied about what to do in the Philippines, went into a late-night, down-on-the-knees prayer session in the White House and emerged with a different vision. It had come to him that he could take all the islands and – "by God’s grace" he said -- educate, uplift, civilize and Christianize the Filipinos. Having received divine endorsement for an imperial military incursion, McKinley put his worries about empire to rest. "I went to bed," he said, "and went to sleep, and slept soundly"

Adams’s warning has gone unheeded, and McKinley’s appeal to a long-standing national belief that America enjoys a special or "exceptionalist" destiny in the history of nations continues to lurk around the edges of many current foreign policy initiatives. The idea that America has received a divinely approved mission to spread freedom, democracy and capitalist prosperity to the world through its economic and military might persists, even as foreign affairs are increasingly preoccupied with the very activities Adams feared -- searching out monsters (terrorists), entangling the nation in wars of interest and intrigue, and becoming an imperial "dictatress." Yet public officials deny any fall into imperialism. Despite preemptive military action, the post-"victory" occupation of Iraq and global involvements elsewhere, America’s present policy makers and public officials insist that the term "empire" simply does not apply.

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer differs. An empire, he contends, is a nation ambitious to exercise control over the political and economic systems of other nations -- and the international order itself -- to the end of preserving, promoting and advancing its own interests. If Nelson-Pallmeyer is right, then the policy makers’ denials are hollow. The U.S. has become an imperial nation.

Nelson-Pallmeyer’s Saving Christianity from Empire and three other recent books subject the idea of American empire to moral and theological reflection. Just as the nation is divided politically over the question of empire, these books expose a moral and theological divide.

In Imperial Designs Gary Dorrien, a prolific author whose writings include two volumes in an acclaimed series on American liberal Christianity and a decade-old book on neoconservative ideology thoroughly rehearses the movement of the ideas and people operating the U.S. foreign policy machinery. In an astonishingly comprehensive discussion of the neoconservatives’ rise to power. Dorrien identifies the major players who devised the grand strategy of unipolarism, which calls for America to assert itself as the preeminent global power in the post-Cold War world.

The neoconservatives, Dorrien explains, are a group of originally liberal intellectuals who became disaffected with McGovernism. They have advocated capitalist economics, a minimal welfare state, and a militantly interventionist, anticommunist, expansionist and nationalistic Americanism. The neocons left the Left in the ‘70s, gravitated to the Reaganite Republican Party in the ‘80s, faded in the ‘90s when the Republicans were out of power and then reemerged with the election of George W. Bush. Dorrien demonstrates how neocons came to influence foreign policy and asserts that 9/11 provided an unexpected opportunity for them to assert a new and aggressive unilateral Americanism as the cornerstone of foreign policy

Although Dorrien attends to important figures who are sympathetic to neoconservative ideology, including President Bush both before and after 9/11. Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his focus is on the neocons, or unipolarists, whose ideas and intellectual biographies he presents against the backdrop of their work inside and outside of government: Paul Wolfowitz, Cohn Powell, Charles Krauthammer, Joshua Muravchik, Max Boot, Ben Wattenberg, William Kristol and Robert Kagan.

For all that the neoconservatives have said publicly about their vision of American power, a coherent narrative of the development of their policy has been needed, and Dorrien provides that account impressively He reveals that the purported reasons for the Iraq invasion (defending America from weapons of mass destruction and spreading democracy and freedom) were a mere gloss intended for public consumption. The neocon position has for over a decade focused on advancing American strategic interests in the oil-rich Middle East and finding ways to establish bases for military operations to protect those interests. Readers will be sobered by Dorrien’s account of Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz arguing that Saddam Hussein would have to be overthrown whether or not a connection to 9/11 was found.

Iraq was a target for Wolfowitz in a grand strategy predating the 9/11 attacks, and it is in light of this strategy that one should understand President Bush’s comment that the Iraq war was justified even though no weapons of mass destruction were found. In the late ‘90s the neocons urged President Clinton to take military action against Iraq; their letter to him is reproduced on the dust jacket of Dorrien’s book. After the neocons came to power, Iraq was the top agenda item at the first National Security Council meeting of George W Bush’s administration.

Because Dorrien presents his narrative without invasive judgmentalism, the story he tells is all the more fascinating. But he does make clear his disagreement with the unipolarist vision, which he claims is "plausible, important, and wrong." Understanding that the neocons vision is imperialistic and that they will not be content to stop at Iraq, Dorrien laments that America’s precious reputation for not being a threatening, colonizing, aggressive power has faded. Heightening American militarism is not the solution to rising anti-Americanism, Dorrien writes; rather, it is "a perfectly self-fulfilling prescription for perpetual war." The hope for world democracy lies not in imperialism but in anti-imperialism.

Though Dorrien offers this critical assessment, the heart of the book is his compelling narrative of the development and coming to power of an expansionist ideology. Even neoconservatives should appreciate the fairness of Dorrien’s presentation and the skill with which he tells their important, world-altering story.

In Anxious about Empire, Yale Divinity School communications professor Wes Avram collects theological perspectives on America’s role in global affairs. He invited 13 essayists to respond to the Bush administration’s September 2002 National Security Strategy document, which is reprinted in the volume.

Robert Bellah’s opening article, "The New American Empire," sets a tone of nervousness. He expresses that America’s Iraq policy and the drive toward hegemonic military control will turn the world against America, and he views the Iraq policy as the latest expression of American pride and the arrogance of power.

Avram himself offers one of the best interpretive engagements in this useful and wide-ranging collection. He critiques the authors of the security strategy document for failing to listen to the many opponents of the policy, and for neglecting to analyze critically the threat to America that is ostensible reason for the document. Avram reminds readers that there is wisdom in listening to one’s enemies and asks why a nation’s power should he equated with military power.

Many of the essays attend to the role of the church. Arthur Paul Boers focuses on pastoral leadership; Lillian Daniel offers a moving reflection on liturgy, a congregation’s division over a war-resolution debate, and a surprising instance of local church triumphalism; and Eugene McCarraher argues that the church is the political community within which Christians must debate war and peace.

Diversity of viewpoint is apparent. Jean Bethke Elshtain is sympathetic to the strategy document, supporting military intervention on the principle of equal regard, though not all situations of clear injustice, or even genocide, require intervention. Elshtain’s "just war" idea is that a justice claim can be made whenever innocents are harmed and are in no position to defend themselves -- there is then a presumptive case in favor of the use of armed force by a powerful state or alliance of states that have the means to intervene, interdict and punish on behalf of those under assault. This is the version of just-war theory that policy makers employ to justify resorting to force when considerations other than equal regard have already decided matters.

Elshtain’s presentation denies "just war" theory its role as a constraint on the use of force. Just war as a moral theory rests on the presumption that force ought not be used to settle conflicts. Lifting that presumption to make an "exception" ought to be difficult. If just-war theory is in poor repute today it is because it has been pressed into service to justify war rather than to prevent or restrain it; rather than being used to advance the cause of peace or justice, the theory has often provided a quickly accessible patina of moral justifiability to disguise aggression and expansionist policy.

Nelson-Pallmeyer’s Saving Christianity from Empire and Stephen Webb’s American Providence present diametrically opposite theological visions of American empire. Nelson-Pallmeyer examines not only neoconservatives and their call for increased American militarization but also the neoliberals of the Clinton era, who emphasized economic globalization as a means to advance American domination in the world. He offers a five-stage history of post-World War II American foreign policy, explaining the rationale for U.S. support of repressive military regimes, the shift toward advancing empire through globalized capitalist expansion, and the current drive for global military supremacy. Drawing on documentary history, he shows how defense planning today is committed to preventing the emergence of any rival to American power. This end is being accomplished by means of unilateralist military and economic policies that aggressively promote American values and interests.

Nelson-Pallmeyer’s description of a foreign policy that has moved from containment to preemptive offensive war is fascinating, troubling and always historically informed. The question at the heart of his book is whether America will be an empire or a republic, and the spiritual issues involved in this question allow him to reflect on the theological meaning of American policy. Even religious people, he explains, are seduced into thinking that violence offers the ultimate way to security. If God is our exemplar of a superior violence, violence itself becomes the object of faith, and religious people then engage in a perpetual holy war that is deemed a valid form of religious expression.

Contending that the empire option dramatically compromises the gospel vision of peace, Nelson-Pallmeyer jettisons just-war theory and advocates reclaiming Jesus’ radical model of nonviolence, He challenges Christians to reject militarism and those aspects of their religious tradition that encourage or endorse violence, and he presents nonviolent alternatives that refuse to sanction violence as part of Cod’s providential care of the world.

Webb, professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College, articulates a very different understanding of God’s providence. He moves from a belief central in Western monotheism, that God acts in history, to claim that American foreign policy can -- and should -- be viewed as an instrument God uses to realize God’s ultimate plan. America is doing more than any other nation to spread the kind of political structures that can best prepare the globe for God’s ultimate work of establishing the final kingdom, Webb contends, and he proceeds to quote from a variety of sources to support a role for providence in contemporary theological thinking while interpreting America’s rise to world power as a divine blessing that comes with special responsibilities. He argues that God has chosen nations other than Israel to accomplish the task God gave Israel, and that the American effort to spread political freedom can be interpreted as a specific geopolitics that advances a providential mission. Webb commends President Bush for recognizing this mission.

A good book ought to be engaging and serious, and Webb’s book is certainly both. However, a good book, even one I am happy to recommend, can seriously promote ideas that are unsound. Providence is itself a troublesome notion with weak scriptural warrants. Theologically providence may mean that God cares as much for all people as he cares for individuals -- a simple yet profound idea. But interpreting providence in light of historical specifics leads to nothing but problems, because one will end up with a God who cares for some people (or peoples) more than others. The logic of a tsunami survivor being spared providentially while thousands of others perish leads to a parallel in which American policy leading to war in Iraq is a providential set-up for a democratic election. Such an invocation of providence ignores what must then be divine complicity in the slaughter of tens of thousand Iraqi civilians, whose deaths were part of a plan for the realization of the kingdom through the Bush doctrine. The doctrine of providence shields a theology of acceptable losses.

The other major problem with Webb’s argument is that he simply does not give attention to the details of foreign policy development that are so important to Dorrien and Nelson-Pallmeyer. The details of that history make providence seem far-fetched as a tool for theo-historical interpretation.

Webb’s position on providence does provoke the important question of how we are to read history in light of God’s acting in that history. How should we interpret providence when what is driving national policy is not the advance of freedom and democratic values but special powers in the form of elite economic cabals or corporate oil moguls? How are we to invoke providence to discern the meaning of setbacks in our foreign policy and of events like the 9/11 attacks? Providentially minded critics of American imperialism could as easily make the case that God in his providence is radically anti-American, that American failures and setbacks are manifestations of God’s judgment on the U.S. Webb is aware of these questions but seems not to entertain them seriously.

There is much in this book that many will find infuriating. Webb sneaks up on a justification for a gospel of wealth; claims that the poor providentially provide an occasion for the wealthy to show charity; discounts pluralism (though with qualification); and fails to attend to the black experience in the American story or to consider the thought of Martin Luther King, who held to a view of providential American exceptionalism yet was critical of military adventurism. Webb lacks critical appreciation for the ways in which the powerful can appeal to providence in self-serving ways, convincing themselves that their hold on power is itself a sign of God’s favor.

Webb’s views reflect a perspective that is deeply held by many Americans, and his use of the standard resources of theology to articulate these views is one of the reasons this book ought not be simply dismissed. If this is what theology is coming to affirm -- that God is working providentially through American foreign policy to advance an ultimate divine plan that is consonant with the interests of an economic elite -- then this is a God who might need to be ushered off the stage. We may be entering a time of theological ferment not unlike that of the ‘60s, when a controversial "death of God" movement arose to push theological thinking away from a problem-solving God, whom many deemed irrelevant and lifeless. Perhaps we are in need of resurrecting a "death of God" position because a God approving this kind of imperial activity has taken the divine eye off the ball. Theological thinking that folds in the face of imperial interests and supports actions that are destructive of people and of hopes for peace in the world -- one definition of demonic religion -- is in need of radical challenge.

Nelson-Pallmeyer is right: Americans face a choice between republic and empire. And religious people confront a decision about how to be religious -- either in the life-affirming way that eschews domination, violence and militarism and espouses nonviolence and forgiveness in accordance with the gospel vision, or in the imperial way that leads to perpetual war and indebtedness. John Quincy Adams foresaw that the temptation to empire puts the soul of the nation in peril. People of faith ought to heed his counsel and see to it that the architects and supporters of imperial policy are denied the sleep of an easy conscience.

The Dangerous God: A Profile of William Hamilton

"In some ways I had the worst possible preparation for becoming a theologian. I grew up in a very bland, very liberal, Yale-Divinity-School-pastor. Baptist, suburban, middle-class parish that bored me silly as soon as I was able to read and write. And I left it."

These remarks by radical theologian William Hamilton tell only part of the story. Hamilton went on to receive the best kind of preparation for becoming a theologian. After graduating from Oberlin College and studying at Union Theological Seminary in the glory days of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, Hamilton was ordained and went on to earn his doctorate at St. Andrew’s in Scotland under Donald M. Baillie. Appointed to the faculty of Colgate Rochester Divinity School where he would soon assume the school’s chair of historical theology, Hamilton established himself by frequently contributing to theological journals and writing Reader’s Guides to the Gospels and short books on theological anthropology, including the well-received New Essence of Christianity. He gained even wider recognition when he hosted a nationally broadcast CBS television series devoted to explaining religion and theology.

In the early 1960s Hamilton was a jewel in the crown of up-and-coming American theologians; the most promising part of a traditional academic theological career was ahead of him. Then, as the philosopher Karl Jaspers liked to say, "something serious happened." With the 1966 publication of Radical Theology and the Death of God, a book he wrote with Thomas Altizer, Hamilton joined several other young theologians in shaking the foundations of the American theological establishment. The wider society looked on in amazement, granting Hamilton more notoriety than theologians have any reason to expect. Before the storm he helped to create passed, Hamilton was featured in a Time magazine cover story, had his chair of theology "removed," and reported receiving death threats.

What brought about this radical change? Hamilton would explain it with characteristic directness: "God died." The radical theologians -- Hamilton, Altizer, Paul van Buren and, from another angle, Richard Rubenstein -- were a small but energetic group. All eventually settled in secular universities to teach, and, for the past 25 years, all have continued to make significant scholarly contributions.

But changes in vision, direction or setting have occurred: van Buren became a leader in Christian-Jewish dialogue, Altizer has been working in a department of English to deconstruct God-talk, and Rubenstein has continued a psycho-sociological inquiry into religion. As for Hamilton, he has been preoccupied for two decades with the work of Herman Melville, and he commands the Melville literature today as he once did that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth.

In 1965 Hamilton was an acknowledged leader of what became known as the "death of God" theology. Altizer once said of Hamilton that he was the "first theologian to break through the barriers of Protestant neo-orthodoxy and formulate a theological acceptance of the death of God," which he accomplished by "entering into an open dialogue with modern culture." Hamilton, Altizer said, had become "the most articulate leader of the death-of-God movement in America."

Altizer’s assessment still holds. Hamilton is still thinking and writing about the death of God, still trying to come to terms with its implications, still working to articulate the project of radical theology. But the movement itself appears to be extinct. The death of God is no longer a topic of conversation in the seminaries or at cocktail parties. All indications are that the death of God has died.

Some say that the radical theology movement died like so many fads of the ‘60s; it was a "theology of the month" that made a flash and disappeared. There is some truth in this, as Hamilton himself is willing to concede. The death of God was a media event and, as Hamilton has written, "Any event the media create they can uncreate." But in another sense death-of-God theology has not disappeared at all; it has simply been transformed. It has entered, or is in the process of entering, mainstream theology.

Explicitly, the death-of-God theology is instrumental in various postmodern or "deconstruction" theological projects, Altizer and Mark C. Taylor being perhaps the best-known examples. Implicitly, the death of God idea has appeared in such repositionings as Gordon Kaufman’s presidential address before the American Academy of Religion. Analyzing the peril of nuclear holocaust, Kaufman found himself dispensing with any notion of divine Providence. He argued that God certainly would not will nuclear destruction, yet we cannot trust God to intervene in history to prevent it: therefore human beings as autonomous and free agents will determine their ultimate destiny. This is a radical rethinking of God’s nature, one that Christians who believe in the meaningfulness and providential course of human history would be hard pressed to accept without affirming in some sense that God, the God of Providence, had died.

But perhaps nowhere is death-of-God thinking more evident today than in aspects of feminist theology. The God who is dead to many women (and men) who still want to identify themselves as Christians is the God who has been imprisoned by culturally bound and contingent patriarchal symbols. Recognizing that their critique has rendered images of God no longer absolute, feminists have discovered that the religious power structure is reluctant to admit that patriarchal symbols for God are culturally influenced (as if God really were male) or contingent (as if use of a feminine symbol to point to a nonrepresentable God is more inadequate or idolatrous than use of a male symbol) To read Mary Daly or Naomi Goldenberg, to consider Rosemary Ruether’s demasculinizing of the Gospel stories or to ponder the renewed attention to "goddess" theology and the development of a lesbian theology is to see the basic language of theological discourse upset and transformed. Hamilton has always contended that the death of God was a language event -- "A lot of my friends kept their seminary jobs by using that way out" -- and a phrase that comes easily to mind when considering the radical changes brought to theology by feminist thinking is this: "God is dead" -- although now one hears above a whisper, "Long live the Goddess."

Remarks Hamilton: "Feminist theologians are coming to the point where they are going to have to deal seriously with the masculine God. Radical theology and feminist theology are going to have to join hands. And that attempt to find a Goddess behind the God is going to fail because they will find that She can castrate just as well as He did, although with different instruments." Hamilton, recognizing that there are feminists who will have to "give up the task of trying to preserve Judaism and Christianity by altering God’s gender or by discovering female images for God in Hosea and Joel," will have to look elsewhere to "find religious shape for our identity." Hamilton believes feminist theology will have to face "the possibility that the idea of God is an absolutely invaluable piece of first-century ideology that we can do without."

Whatever one thinks of Hamilton’s theo-thana-tology, it is clear that few contemporary theologians have been as passionately preoccupied with the God question as Hamilton. He has shifted his emphasis in that preoccupation over the years, particularly with respect to explicating the experience of the death of God. In one approach, which Hamilton has called the "detective" experience, a body is found. The body, of course, is God’s -- God is found dead in the culture, and the theologian must determine how to do "God-talk" in a godless world. In the ‘60s, the revisionists said "secularize" or "reformulate": the radicals said "do without"

In the "detective" scenario, a radical theologian would seek to discover how the body -- the dead God -- got there, who killed it, and what kind of evidence will establish the death given the obvious lack of a corpus delicti. Hamilton worked in the detective mode in his 1974 book On Taking God Out of the Dictionary (McGraw-Hill) a book that went unadvertised, mostly unread and was distinguished for having won an art award for the dust-jacket design. The book is significant, however, not only because it suggests the important role Melville was to play in Hamilton’s theological development, but because the book served as a "reality check" in which Hamilton sought evidence in the culture for what he had been saying. In making the case that the death of God was permanent, the book initiated a wide-ranging and innovative -- some would say undisciplined -- conversation about the nature of post-Christian existence. Hamilton used a self-interview, one-act plays. short stories, a meditation on Norman Mailer and various other devices to think through the question that the death of God was posing to modem men and women. It is no accident that the book is replete with quotations -- few from theologians, since Hamilton was seeking confirmation from the culture for a theological understanding that the theological community had rejected.

Hamilton was ironic and playful in this book. "One of the metaphorical meanings of ‘death of God’ is the end of all absolutes in the spiritual life, so not even the death of God can be treated as an absolute," he wrote. But his deep concern for retaining ethical coherence in a postmodern world was also evident, as was his traditional allegiance to Jesus: "In his baptism, his teaching, his healings, his passion, death and resurrection -- in all of it, there is a demand laid on us, or an offer tendered, and it is the task of the Christian to embody that offer in his world, being as candid as he can about the difference between Jesus’ beliefs and his." For Hamilton, the death of God, rather than rendering Jesus superfluous, makes him all the more indispensable -- for Jesus is a comrade who provides a place to stand.

My sense of movement from faith to unfaith was never at all decisive or clear, and rye never had any difficulty in continuing myself as a Christian whatever other people have said. I think it is because I have always defined ideology as a commitment to comrades. Do you know [Ignazio] Silone’s marvelous piece called "Choice of Companions"? He talks about what we do when communism has died and one cannot be a Catholic in Italy -- what did the refugees do at night? They lit campfires and sat around it and told stories. The most important thing about a person is who are the comrades he or she chooses. So that is the way I define my Christian existence -- and my friends.

For Hamilton, the nature of Jesus’ self-understanding remains beyond our historical reach. It is not the historical Jesus but the Christ of the kerygma whom Hamilton affirms, the Jesus "bringing the Kingdom, the new age, here and now into the midst of ordinary lives" who shows us a "way to be human," who establishes a bond of comradeship, who draws us out of our private lives into the world, who provides us with a place to stand. "What he was is hidden; what he proclaimed, offered, defined, is not." Hamilton has repudiated God, not Jesus -- not the Christ of the kerygma.

In the detective mode, God is found dead, "dead in the souls of one’s contemporaries," as Camus said. But lately Hamilton has moved out of the detective approach and into the "killer" mode: "Now I am more interested in the murderer," he says. Here God is not dead at all, "but very much alive, murderous and needing to be killed. And ‘illustrated’ by your own choice of imams, generals, politicians, TV shills." In the killer mode, a body is not found, a death is required. As Hamilton has written in his latest book, Reading Moby Dick and Other Essays (Peter Lang, 1989) :

Today, the death of God experience in its second coming is less like Angela Lansbury finding an unexpected corpse on Sunday night in her kitchen and more like the murderer who put the corpse there in the first . . . . In its present form, the death of God experience suggests that the God of the great Western monotheistic faiths -- at least in the First and Second Worlds -- is too male, too dangerous, too violent to be allowed to live. Death of God today is not finding a body and figuring out who and why. It is the capture, understanding, and abolition of a dangerous 20th-century ideology.

"Obviously, because of what is going on in Christianity and Islam," Hamilton has concluded, "people with Gods are dangerous. And one of the things you can do to help your brothers and sisters is to take Gods away from people so their weapons won’t be quite so sharp as they are with monotheism."

I asked Hamilton, "Is that the danger of Ahab? Is that the reason for your interest in Melville?"

I got into Melville because I needed to have somebody to look at very carefully who tried and failed to escape from a powerful religious tradition. He just simply could not get rid of it. And bland Nathaniel [Hawthorne] sitting there in his little farmhouse couldn’t figure out why his young friend, 15 years his junior, got so hung up on all these Puritan things. He didn’t understand how Melville got so hot. I’ve always been closer -- in belief or in disbelief -- to the passion of Melville than to that serene [Hawthorne].

Hamilton has found in Melville a difficult but kindred spirit. Melville navigated the waters of death and disbelief in a way that Hamilton believes provides reliable guidance to those who would today seek to understand and explicate our religious situation. Melville has been to Hamilton not only a scholarly preoccupation but also a source of inspiration. The title On Taking God Out of the Dictionary came from a Melville letter – "Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have him in the street." Hamilton used this quote to consider the cultural-linguistic developments in death-of-God thinking, arguing that the word "God" no longer serves to cover the territory it once did. "God" is an instance of archaic usage, and the problem with "God" is lexigraphical.

Hamilton’s command of Melville has led to other developments as well. In 1985 he published Melville and the Gods (Scholars Press) , a scholarly but elegant study that focuses on what Hamilton calls Melville’s pilgrimage through "deconversion." With the death of God providing hermeneutical access, Hamilton explores Melville’s religious quest in a manner befitting traditional "religion and literature" studies. But he drops his most explicit theological reflection in the "killer mode" in a footnote at the end of the "Ahab" chapter: "Perhaps we should say that God became man so that man now no longer needs to become God or even to believe in him. Man may now cease striving for what he is not, making a monster of himself, so he can attend to becoming what he is." Hamilton’s Melville leaves behind the Christian God, for, as Ahab demonstrates in Moby Dick, that God is evil, perhaps mad, and a death-dealer that ought not to be worshiped.

Hamilton argues that Melville finally resolved his theological crisis in an 1888 poem, "Pebbles." "The hurt of which [Melville] is here healed is not only the general hurt of life, but it is also the hurt of faith that God himself inflicted. When God dies, or is finally killed, other gods sometimes mercifully appear if you need them." Melville found healing and resolution in the sea -- the pitiless and inhuman sea, which does not flatter or deceive and that, for all its connections to death, is life. Hamilton ties his religious quest to Melville’s own torturous journey: "When God died, I went to sea with Ishmael, and have gladly remained there."

Hamiton said he had one more Melville book in him, and Reading Moby Dick and Other Essays contains a rollicking guide to Moby Dick in which Melville’s treatment of the "dangerous God" motif is highlighted. Hamilton’s pursuit of death-of-God themes also appears in essays on "Shakespearean Death," "The Conversions of Michelangelo," and a sermon delivered on the text "To Cast Fire Upon the Earth." The essay "God as Monica’s Breast" is worth the price of the volume, and the "Consenting to Die" essay, which discusses suicide and death as something to do" rather than just wait for, breaks into a fictional discussion between a doctor and a cancer patient. This book, his eighth, contains some of Hamilton’s best -- his wittiest and most personal -- writing, and the originality of Hamilton’s work is all the more pronounced because the world hardly has room for one more look at Moby Dick. Hamilton, arguably one of our most innovative and courageous theological minds, demonstrates again, as he did when writing about Dostoevsky or Camus, that he also is one of our most insightful theological interpreters of modern literature.

Having retired from his positions as dean and university professor at Portland State University, Hamilton has settled in Sarasota, Florida. He keeps current on political matters. A former civil rights activist and outspoken opponent of U. S. involvement in Vietnam, he has been greatly disturbed by the success of the Reagan revolution and the values, especially that of privatism, that it has fostered. "I do not think socialism has a future in this country at all, although I suppose instinctively my economics are socialist, as my ethics are conservative and my politics are liberal. My theology is radical -- and I’m just trying to keep those balls up in the air, but they don’t fit."

Hamilton identifies himself as a Protestant who "has always believed relief of the human condition is what we must be doing. You cannot really define the meaning of human life other than to find some particular point at which the relief of the sorrows of the human condition is your business." He makes no apology for this doctrinally empty ethicality: "I’ve never lived or been trained in a tradition that has defined Christian existence in terms of doctrine anyway. Doing Christian thought and action is still the most interesting thing to me."

At one point he remarked:

It seems to me that to find yourself in the midst of the Jewish, Christian or Islamic worlds is to say in a number of different ways -- the religion-politics mix of Islam is one way, the prophetic tradition is another way, the New Testament tradition is another -- that there is one nonnegotiable absolute, an it’s not a principle, it’s not a moral value: it’s an answer to the problem of where you look, where you belong, where you pt your body in this world. Not at the altar, and not in the private realms, but out there in the world at the service of human beings. That’s where you are. That’s what Christianity drive you to; and that for me is the element and the comment of the Western religious traditions which I use to attack the temptations to privatism in myself, in my kids, and in my students.

Hamilton continually challenges other Christians t come to grips with their experience of a godless world, world in which God is either absent altogether or present ii the worst way: in the selfish impulses and evil acts of small minds, so that God comes to represent in fanaticism and hatred death itself. Doing away with God may, Hamilton says, make us more bereft, but it may also make us "more human, more tentative, more able to live easily with both adversaries and friends."

I sometimes wish, especially when I hear colleagues slight Hamilton or his contributions, that they would look more seriously at the Hamilton who has embodied in his passion, his restlessness, his intellectual daring and his care for others something authentic to the heart of the Christian message. When I think of Bill Hamilton I am reminded of Dostoevsky’s comment that if it turned out Jesus were a fraud and wound up in hell, he would rather be in hell with Jesus than in heaven with all the saints. It may turn out that Hamilton will wind up in hell just as many of his critics expect him to; but if so, I hope his critics are prepared for a most surprising development -- that he will be there engaged in animated conversation, with Jesus.

The Listening Point

A friend, called upon to bless a family gathering, misspoke his way into wisdom: "God, keep us needful of the minds of others." Although the need for the minds of others is obvious, much of what human beings strive for -- success, power, self-fulfillment -- seeks to avoid the transformative influence of other minds. Resisting the call of the other to come out of oneself and make oneself available to the other, which is the temptation of self-centered-ness, can itself be countered by performing various activities of openness, none of which is more important than listening.

The ability to listen depends not in the first place on any particular skill or technique, but on a fundamental respect for one’s partner in conversation. Listening is thus a moral act. Listening is an act of attending to the other that discloses the strangeness of otherness, disrupting our comfortable self-images and threatening to undo our everyday experience of ourselves (and others) as familiar and basically unified personalities. Not listening becomes a way of securing ourselves from encounter with the mystery of otherness. Listening exposes us to our own desires not to want to share of ourselves. Listeners are required not only to welcome the strangeness of the other but to risk self-disclosure in the act of listening, for the listener must at some point recognize and then expose to the other his or her own strangeness -- and not only to the other but to one’s own self.

As a college teacher, I often hear colleagues at my own school and at other institutions bemoaning their students poor communication skills, especially their writing skills. Poor writing, however, is a symptom of a deeper problem: students also have difficulty reading. Many students do not love reading or working at reading and therefore have not learned how to engage a text. Many do not listen to those who would speak to them through written words, which is to say they do not understand that they must approach a text, even one they find disagreeable, with respect and the openness of humility. The reading problem, then, is itself a symptom of a problem with listening. Many students do not know how to listen, even to themselves.

After talking about this deeper problem for a long time, my colleague Thomas P. Kasulis and I developed an experimental course called The Listening Point. We took the title from a book by Sigurd Olsen, an environmental poet who believed people must find a "listening point" somewhere because "only when one comes to listen, only when one is aware and still, can things be seen and heard." The Listening Point was an introduction to a philosophy course. It used no books. The premise of the course was that the students would be the texts. They were required to engage one another in conversation, to develop listening skills, and to learn to think through their own and one another’s ideas on such questions as: "What makes people happy? What do you think should make people happy?" "How do we know what we know?" "How is the world different from my world?" "If you could change two things to make this a more just world, what would they he and why?" The range of questions moved through epistemology, aesthetics and ethics, ending finally with this question: "Why is the question, ‘What is a person?’ the appropriate question to ask to pull together all the issues discussed in this course?"

Each week, students were given listening assignments, usually requiring meetings of three students. They would meet outside class to discuss an issue: two people would talk while the third would listen and then report to the class what happened in the discussion. Students were continually called on to summarize the main points of someone else’s remarks, to ask critical questions or seek clarifications about ideas they did not understand: this was how they learned the process of philosophy. Using books was not allowed, though as educators we could not be too upset if students occasionally cheated by going to the library. Several students complained that they got headaches from having to pay attention for the two-hour Monday night class; several others told us that they could not seem to relax after class, and that they kept conversations going into the wee hours. Students were required to meet with the instructors individually. The final exam was to participate in a conversation about a question previously discussed in the course, selected at random. Students were evaluated not only on how well they listened to each other but on how much they helped the other person clarify and articulate his or her positions. That is, they were finally evaluated on how well they helped another person listen to herself.

This course was eye-opening. Students got to know one another and professors got to know students in new ways. Most students found out that they really were interesting texts; others confronted some serious personal issues, turning the discussions in a therapeutic direction -- an allowable move since clear thinking and self-confrontation are essential to both philosophy and therapy. But what was most important was the development of listening skills.

The first stage of listening required that students simply attend to the other person and hear what the person is saying. That required students to eliminate distractions, to he present to the other person, and to stop interfering with communication by anticipating one’s own response before the other person had even finished speaking. Second, students learned to evaluate critically what they heard. Here the test was to be able to repeat what had been said, to summarize the other person’s position to the other person’s satisfaction, then to seek clarification and offer critical response, usually in the direction of seeing how adequately the speaker’s argument could be defended. Imagination was required at this stage of listening, for students had to consider implications and imagine possible problems that might arise from the other person’s thought; they also had to attune themselves to the other and actually try to see things from the other person’s point of view. The third stage, which we rarely saw but occasionally glimpsed, occurred when persons presented themselves before the other and revealed themselves in a true engagement with the other, sharing not only words but gestures and intentions, and being understood so well that another student might actually volunteer to articulate a position or idea better than did the person offering it -- yet without necessarily agreeing with it.

Students seemed most amazed by how much they disagreed -- something they were not finding out from their other classes or even from their social life. They found that their disagreements were very interesting and not cause for alarm or embarrassment or increased defensiveness. Occasionally a student would offer statements like, "The meaning of our words seems to depend on how we use them for certain tasks," thus blurting out an insight the student discovered independently of Wittgenstein, or offering the view -- not from Aristotle but from herself -- that happiness is the highest good of human beings. This third stage was where the speaker was listening to his or her own self, and offering that self to others in an invitation to experience a personal encounter not just with ideas, but with the person. This was astonishing to witness in a classroom -- even humbling.

The Listening Point is not meant to replace traditional education but to make traditional education work -- to make it possible for students and teachers to get to know one another, to approach the strangeness of otherness, whether in a written text or in the presence of another person. This was challenging and exhausting. Seniors, who had a lot invested in the identities they had created in college (and taken out loans for) , were least likely to expose themselves or accept the challenge of listening. Some students were hostile to the process, and the hostility was often projected onto the instructors. Several students dropped the course because of the challenges others presented to their own beliefs and certainties. But many students were positively affected, some deeply. I have come to believe that listening-point opportunities are needed in a variety of educational settings -- in seminaries, law schools, medical schools, graduate schools, and in churches among believers, who often deal with one another not as persons but as strangers.

We are in need of a theology of listening, for a willingness to listen ultimately expresses an attitude of love. Christians believe that Jesus listened to God and to those he encountered in his daily life. We do neither. If we listened to one another we should be inviting one another into new forms of relationship based on openness and respect and a willingness to share ourselves. If we listened for God, we should spend our time not praying for ourselves but listening to our prayers to see what we are saying not to God but to ourselves. The heart is a great mystery. Christians believe that God knows the human heart (and we do not) , for that heart is where God’s omniscience lies. God does not need to be informed about our wants and needs. It is we who need to know what we want, what we fear, what we love.

Listening for God is finally like trying to listen to one’s own self, and that is no easy task. Listening for God requires the listening to the self that makes up any moment of confession and self-examination. Listening for God requires that we learn to be critical of ourselves, since so much of what we want interferes with what our religious traditions tell us God wants, which is simply that we love one another and trust that the spirit of God shall be with us. For the listening point is what Jesus wanted for us -- that place where "they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them" (Matt. 13:15)

Schism Memoirs

Book Review:

Memoirs in Exile: Confessional Hope and Institutional Conflict, by John H. Tietjen. Fortress, 384 pp. paperback.

John H. Tietjen became president of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis on May 19, 1969. Two months later, to Tietjen’s surprise, Jacob A. O. Preus was elected president of the Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod, the denomination which controlled Concordia Seminary. The rest, as they say, is history, or in this case, memory. Tietjen’s long-awaited memoirs remind us in intricate detail of the tragic controversy that consumed the Missouri Synod in the 1970s. The memoirs begin with Tietjen’s election to the presidency of Concordia and conclude in 1987 with the formation of a new denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The denominational debate which enveloped Concordia Seminary subsequently led to Tietjen’s suspension as president, the termination of a large segment of the faculty, and the founding of Seminex, Concordia Seminary in Exile.

Tietjen, now a Lutheran pastor in Fort Worth, Texas, acknowledges that his is not a "definitive history" of the Missouri Synod debacle. Rather, he writes from the perspective of a participant, "describing events unknown to others, presenting information only I have, and sharing my perspective on what happened. But more than that, I have tried to bear witness to the mighty acts of God in my life." He insists that however tragic his story might be, it contains the good news of God’s grace.

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod was an explosion waiting to happen, Tietjen’s mentor Jaroslav Pelikan warned long before the controversy broke. Within the denomination a conflict was brewing between the forces of law and gospel, modernity and tradition, liberalism and fundamentalism. As Tietjen tells it, J. A. O. Preus represented a "conservative" faction in the Missouri Synod concerned that certain segments of the denomination were becoming too liberal in their response to new theological and ecumenical agendas. Preus, for example, was vehemently opposed to the denominational effort to extend fellowship to the American Lutheran Church. He also deplored the use of higher criticism in Missouri Synod schools, particularly at Concordia, the church’s flagship seminary. Preus viewed his election to the church’s presidency as a mandate to purge the denomination of liberalism. Those who opposed Preus’s activities came to be known as "moderates" since, as Tietjen observes, there were no real liberals in the Missouri Synod.

Tietjen believes that the struggle over Concordia Seminary was an essential element of Preus’s plan to solidify his control of the church and impose his brand of orthodoxy on the entire denomination. From the beginning of the controversy Concordia Seminary was at the center of the storm. Following his election, Preus lost no time in beginning an investigation of the Concordia faculty. Indeed, Tietjen first learned of the investigation when Concordia professor Frederick Danker reported having accidentally overheard a conversation between Jacob Preus and his brother Robert, also a member of the Concordia faculty. Robert Preus was among a group of five faculty members who accused certain colleagues of entertaining various doctrinal irregularities.

In September 1970 Preus appointed a fact-finding committee to interview faculty members as to their beliefs regarding Scripture. Lutheran confessions and other theological issues. Those interviews began in December and continued, under faculty protest, until March 1971. Preus’s assessment of the results led him to issue a document euphemistically known as the Blue Book in which he charged that certain unnamed members of the Concordia faculty were teaching false doctrine. That report was received by the Board of Control, the seminary’s governing body, which conducted its own interviews of faculty and announced that it could find no professor guilty of heresy. Tietjen reproduces several verbatims from those interviews as well as a chart delineating the vote count -- to commend, correct or abstain -- for each faculty member. Though some votes were close, no professor was judged to be in need of correction.

Dissatisfied with the Board of Control’s verdict, Preus took the matter to the Missouri Synod’s 1973 annual meeting in New Orleans. The convention adopted a resolution which declared that there was indeed heresy at Concordia Seminary and accepted Preus’s "State of Scriptural and Confessional Principles" for establishing doctrinal parameters for the entire church. Efforts were also begun to remove Tietjen from office. The New Orleans convention called upon the seminary’s Board of Control to deal punitively with the president. In late 1973 the board, now dominated by a pro-Preus majority, voted to suspend Tietjen. When he refused to accept their ruling and threatened legal action, the board delayed its suspension of the president. In other sweeping actions, the board set the mandatory retirement age at 65, thereby removing several long-term faculty members, and required all professors to submit their course syllabi for examination by the governing body.

The controversy intensified with Tietjen’s formal suspension in January 1974. A substantial number of faculty and students then declared a moratorium on all classes, and Concordia Seminary in Exile (Seminex) was soon established. The dissidents vacated the Concordia campus, securing facilities at St. Louis University and Eden Theological Seminary. Tietjen, officially removed from the Concordia presidency in late 1974, was then elected president of Seminex.

At this point in the memoirs, Tietjen describes both the struggle to maintain Seminex, and Preus’s further efforts at consolidating his power throughout the Missouri Synod. These actions produced a dissenting movement which ultimately became the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, formed in 1976 from five synods within the Missouri Synod tradition. Eventually, AELC overtures toward both the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church in America led to the merger of the three bodies in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. As a result of that union, Seminex was absorbed into several Lutheran seminaries and ceased to exist as a separate institution.

Tietjen maintains a surprising degree of objectivity throughout the book, perhaps because he has gained some distance from the traumatic events of the 1970s. The old wounds remain, but much of the shrillness which accompanies such intense controversy seems to have been moderated. He also provides an effective summary of highly complex events. Nonetheless, non-Lutherans may have particular difficulty keeping up with all the issues and individuals, committees and agencies involved in the controversy. Tietjen includes a helpful list of abbreviations for the various church agencies, as well as a chronology of important events.

Tietjen’s memoirs provide insights into the Missouri Synod controversy which can inform our understanding of the nature of controversy and schism within the broader context of American Protestantism. First, Tietjen insists that at the heart of the debate was the question of what it means to be Lutheran, particularly within the Missouri Synod tradition. Moderates, especially those on the Concordia faculty, were convinced that their use of modern methods of biblical scholarship in no way undermined their commitment to Christian faith and Lutheran orthodoxy. Indeed, the accused faculty members continually denied that they were guilty of the charges brought against them, insisting that they were falsely accused. For them the controversy was political, not theological. As Ernestine Tietjen commented after an LCMS convention: "All the words about God are a cover-up for the use of power."

Preus and his supporters, however, argued that the struggle was primarily theological. Those who utilized higher criticism and rejected biblical inerrancy could not be tolerated in Missouri Synod institutions. Doctrinal parameters, as conservatives defined them, were essential for Lutheran orthodoxy. Tietjen quotes longtime Concordia professor Arthur Repp’s observation that "the Preus people . . . think we have to have a system of doctrine that spells out everything in detail to nail down what the Bible teaches. They think they know exactly what the Bible teaches and that they have a right to tell us what we have to believe and teach." Each group in the battle spoke and acted on different levels in assessing the nature of the controversy. That inability to communicate made reconciliation increasingly unlikely.

Second, moderates consistently underestimated the ideological intensity of the Preus party. At various times throughout the conflict Tietjen and others believed that they had secured compromises which would avoid faculty terminations and denominational schism, only to have their hopes dashed when the negotiations went public or when conservatives offered their interpretation of the supposed compromise. Tietjen’s own efforts to defend the faculty and gain a tenable compromise ultimately became grounds for his dismissal on the charge of "allowing and fostering false doctrine." At best, conservatives feared that any hint of compromise was really a form of equivocation on their nonnegotiable doctrinal principles. At worst, they were unwilling to sham power with anyone who refused to conform to their demands. By the time many moderates realized that compromise was impossible, they had already lost the denomination.

Third, as schism became inevitable, only a minority of pastors and congregations were willing to leave the mother denomination. Tietjen observes that "pastors who wanted to join [the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches] could not bring their congregations along because they had neither properly informed them about the events in the Missouri Synod nor adequately prepared them for the formation of a new church." Some wanted to "stay and fight," while others "did not want to risk conflict within the congregation." Many people assured Tietjen that they were "behind him," an affirmation which led Ernestine Tietjen to ask, "But how far behind?" When it finally came down to a choice, most congregations remained within the tradition and found their own ways of coping.

While Tietjen provides some fascinating details of the controversy and its intricacies, some serious questions remain unanswered. Why, for example, did he refuse to take any of these matters to court? Did he feel that he had no real case, or was he simply hesitant to incur the expense and the ordeal involved in a civil case? How did, all this happen in the first place?

In the first chapter, "Context for Conflict," Tietjen acknowledges that "acculturation and Americanization had a profound impact on the Missouri Synod." He notes that the passing of an older generation of leaders created a leadership vacuum in the synod which Preus, schooled in the use of political tactics, was ready to fill. He gives only limited attention, however, to the seminary’s role in the denomination. How extensive was the gap between the people in the pew and the professors in the seminary, and how significant a factor was that in Preus’s success? Tietjen cites Preus’s assertion that the Missouri Synod is made up of Germans and that Germans like to be told what to do. Did the moderates underestimate the depth of ethnicity and tradition in shaping the pro-Preus majority?

Perhaps Tietjen’s best response to these questions is found in his sense of the paradox implicit in all institutional life. He finds it in the Missouri Synod struggle as well as in the difficulties he encountered at Seminex and in the new Lutheran denominations formed out of the controversy. "We cannot do without institution, because it is essential for ministry. We cannot enjoy what is good about institution without experiencing and participating in its subversion." If Tietjen is critical of his opponents, he is also honest about his own inadequacies as president of two seminaries and as a bishop in the new Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (a position from which he resigned). Such honesty lends further credibility to this significant study of one individual’s search for courage and grace in a time of almost unbearable turmoil.

Tietjen’s memoirs serve as an important reminder that no American denomination is immune to the forces of conflict, paranoia and abuse which prevailed in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Those who must endure such ordeals would do well to recall the words of William Stringfellow which Martin Marty cited as a new Lutheran body began to take shape: "In the face of death, live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the Word. Amidst babel . . . . speak the truth." Sound advice for Christians in any communion perched on the edge of schism.

Good News at Wolf Creek

The evening was cold; the ordaining council a relatively standard Baptist gathering of preachers, deacons and other leaders of the Wolf Creek Baptist Church in Wolf Creek, Kentucky. Seated next to the blazing fire, the candidate, a recent graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, seemed adequately prepared for assorted questions about God, the universe, and other things.

After prayer, we began with that basic Baptist inquiry: Describe your conversion to Christ and your call to the ministry. The candidate’s response was vintage Southern Baptist: Born in a Christian home . . . grew up in the church . . . father a pastor . . . converted at age five . . . “walked the aisle” . . . public profession of faith . . . baptized. Nurtured in Baptist organizations: Sunday school . . . youth camps . . . Girl’s Auxiliary . . . revivals. Constantly urged to make total commitment to Christ. . . follow him wherever he might lead. Adolescent rebellion . . . “rededication” to Christian living . . . a growing sense of God’s call to “vocational Christian ministry” . . . a period of struggle . . . finally, a “surrender” to God’s call to ministry. . . a call to preach the gospel.

There it was: a moving account of private call and public response typical of Southern Baptist ordinands since 1845. The difference was the gender of the candidate. Cindy Harp Johnson is a product of Southern Baptist piety. She listened to teachers and preachers, to parents and revivalists, and simply did what they said she must do: commit her life to Christ and follow his will wherever it might take her. She had concluded that faithfulness to God’s will involved a call to pastoral ministry. She asked merely that the people who nurtured her in the faith recognize her response.

The Wolf Creek Baptist Church did just that. The council voted unanimously to recommend her ordination by the congregation. Few Southern Baptist churches would do so. Indeed, the question of women’s ordination may be the catalyst which ultimately brings schism to a diverse and increasingly disoriented denomination. On that issue, questions of Baptist piety and dogmatism collide.

Southern Baptists carry their piety close to the heart. For years, personal experience with Christ transcended doctrinal precision in most SBC congregations. The essential question was not “What do you believe about Jesus,” but “Do you know Jesus, personally, in your heart?” Personal experience, a continuing relationship with Jesus Christ, was the bulwark of Southern Baptist evangelism, against which the gates of hell seemed unable to prevail. “When Jesus asks you to do something you must do it,” Baptists taught their young people. The titles of hymns of invitation tell the story: “I Surrender All,” “Only Trust Him,” “Just as I Am,” “Wherever He Leads, I’ll Go,” and “I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go, Dear Lord.”

It was inevitable that Southern Baptist women, nurtured on this kind of piety, challenged to this kind of commitment, would respond to the call to ministry. None of these women who have sought ordination remembers being told that there was one call they could never hear or one commitment they could never make. Thus Southern Baptists can look to their own teaching and piety for the cause of the increase in the number of women seeking ordination. They have simply taken their Sunday school teachers, pastors and parents at their word: “If you believe God has called you to do something, do it, no matter what others may say.”

Dogmatists are now trying to pass a series of disclaimers through the state and national conventions. “Do whatever God commands.” they insist, “unless you are a woman and feel called to preach.” In the short run, they may succeed in getting such resolutions passed. Given our democratic polity, they have a right to try. My suggestion, however, is that formal resolutions are too little, too late. These proclamations will affect a few seminary graduates and denominational employees. But to deter women’s ordination in the long run, the dogmatists must transform Southern Baptist piety altogether. They must change the way we tell our children about faith, salvation and discipleship. They must bring their disclaimers to bear on Sunday school teachers and youth camp leaders. They must place limitations on the way Southern Baptists describe and live out the ways of God in the lives of human beings. They must teach us to sing “Wherever He Leads I’ll Go, Unless . . .”

And that is why the legalists are doomed to failure. Our piety is too deep, our sense of divine providence too profound. I realized that at Cindy Harp Johnson’s ordination service. Wolf Creek Baptist Church is no liberal, urban congregation peopled with seminary professors and other theological pinkos. It is country -- situated on Kentucky Route 228 just above the Ohio River. Its congregation is hard-core Southern Baptist, meeting in a nice brick building with a picture of the Jordan River painted behind the baptistry. The members are farmers, homemakers and retired people -- and to the last one they voted to ordain Cindy Harp Johnson to the gospel ministry.

The ordination service was a moving experience. Cindy’s sister played the piano, her mother read Scripture, her brother-in-law sang, her father gave the prayer, her husband presented her with a Bible, and two of her professors, one male, one female, preached.

But it was the laying on of hands that convinced me that Southern Baptist piety is stronger than dogmatism. Cindy knelt and the ordained preachers and deacons initiated the rite of the laying on of hands. Then, since the congregation authorizes ordination, all the members were invited to participate in that powerful symbol of “setting aside.” They came, young and old, men and women. The formal laying on of hands turned into emotional embraces. Tears flowed freely. Then I caught sight of an old woman hobbling her way to the front, bracing herself on first one pew, then the next. It was Miss Ethel, the matriarch of the congregation and the personification of Baptist feminine piety. She reached out for Cindy, hugged her close and said, “I love you, honey, and I’ll support you, whatever you do.” There was not a dry eye left in the place.

If they want to stop women from seeking ordination, Southern Baptists must give up much of their devotion. If they do, they may give up something of the Spirit as well.

After the service, we adjourned to the basement for a lunch the likes of which you would expect in a rural church. Leftover hugs and tears went well with fresh green beans and turnips. At lunch I heard the people speak of this woman the way they would of any decent minister: “I don’t know how I would have made it this year if she had not helped me.” “Her sermons mean so much to me.” A deacon said it best: “We don’t think of it as ordaining a woman. We’re just ordaining a minister.” Out at Wolf Creek Baptist Church, just off Kentucky 228, that’s the Good News.

Handicapped and Wholeness

“Daddy, am I handicapped?” my eight-year-old daughter inquired one day recently.

“Who said you were?” I asked, defenses rising.

“The kids at church.”

They were right. She is a multiply handicapped child, and she was bound to hear that word applied to herself sooner or later. Perhaps it was better to hear it at church than somewhere else. Yet I wonder what the children or adults who readily recognize handicaps in my daughter and other people will do next. Is there really a place in the Body of Christ for those with physical and mental deficiencies?

While the church universal idealistically proclaims that people with special needs have a special place within the community of faith, individual churches give limited attention to the complex needs of the handicapped. Relatively few denominations or local churches have developed a strategy for ministering to those with special physical and mental needs. As the parent of an autistic teen-ager recently told me, “If 1 could find one Sunday school, Protestant or Catholic, that would accept my child, I’d go there.”

Many contemporary religious institutions, no less than those of the first century, are uncomfortable with the social and theological questions raised by the presence of handicapped people in the world. What is to be done with them, and why has God caused, or at least permitted, them to be as they are?

With that realization in mind I have returned to some of the healing narratives of the Gospels, particularly those involving children. What were those maladies which, then as now, seemed so demonic and destructive to first century children? Were they suffering from epilepsy, hyperactivity, cerebal palsy? Were there Downs Syndrome or autistic children among the multitudes brought, to Jesus for healing? Were such children among the “many other sufferers” who, as Matthew says, were “flung . . . down at his feet, and he healed them”? (15:30, NEB). We can never know.

Two thousand years later, however, even modern medicine cannot bring healing to most handicapped people. They and their families must learn to live with constant fragmentation and brokenness. Yet the Scripture suggests that the promise of the Kingdom is the promise of wholeness. In the Kingdom of God the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame leap and the speechless speak (Isa. 35:54). Jesus frequently validates his messianic calling through his response to those outside the “normal” or “respectable” framework of life. When the Baptizer inquired, ‘Are you the one or should we wait for another?,” Jesus replied, “Tell John what you hear and see: the blind recover their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are clean, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, . . . [and] the poor are hearing the good news” (Matt. 11:2-6 NEB).

Such activity on Jesus’ part was a sign, an eschatological promise, that in the Kingdom of God there is wholeness. If that promise is withheld from those most broken, it has no real meaning for anyone else. Everyone lacks wholeness, all “see through a glass darkly.” We are all in need of wholeness. Those whose needs are most obvious reveal the absence of wholeness in everyone else. Their place in the Kingdom is a promise for all humanity.

The Apostle Paul’s own struggle for wholeness provides another clue for the church’s response to the handicapped. In II Corinthians he acknowledges his “thorn in the flesh” which neither miracle nor prayer could alleviate. Even his experience on the Damascus road could not end his brokenness.

Thus, to be “saved” is not necessarily to be made whole -- not immediately, not automatically. At best, conversion sets us on a journey toward wholeness while providing grace to live with the absence of wholeness along the way.

- The gospel will not remove all the pain for either handicapped or non-handicapped people. It makes no such promise, contrary to the claims of certain popular preachers. It cannot smooth over all the cracks which life etches in us, ‘‘earthen vessels” that we are. But it must provide a perspective for confronting the pain, and working with those in whom that pain is most acute.

Why, then, for many handicapped people is the church the last place to find serious, long-term response? One reason, I believe, is that American churches, particularly white, middle-class churches, are organized around a theology of normalization -- of getting people to “normalcy” as soon as possible. We are relatively good at dealing with immediate crises: temporary illness, cancer, death, family emergencies, even divorce and depression.

We are good at things we can get people through, after which they will be restored to some type of normalcy.

But the handicapped cannot be normalized. They represent a chronic crisis, and most churches simply are not organized to respond to that type of need. For example, a handicapped child is admitted to a Sunday school class, and after several months and repeated disturbances the teacher says, “He has to go, he’s just not getting any better.” He never will, and that is the issue. With most church programs directed toward normalcy, the chronic crisis of handicapped persons poses serious theological and pastoral difficulties for us.

In some instances, in an effort at securing normalcy, churches will try to perform miracles to do away with the handicaps -- some with sincerity, others for exploitation. If God is good, loving and powerful, surely he can make broken minds and bodies whole; Jesus did. But the demons of Downs Syndrome are not to be exorcised. Prayer and spiritual sustenance are absolutely necessary for the handicapped and their families, but not as an easy answer or a quick fix.

Some churches promote normalcy by leaving the handicapped to the “professionals” -- the therapists, social workers, physicians and other modern healers trained to deal with special-needs persons. Often this approach seems prudent, since most congregations are not staffed or equipped to respond to the handicapped. But it may obscure the church’s call to relate the gospel to all humanity. Further, it may segregate the handicapped, rather than affirm them as members of the Body of Christ. Laity and clergy can be trained to work with the handicapped (where are the seminaries in this field?), and lack of special training is no excuse when it comes to relating as persons to persons.

In response to that challenge, some congregations are re-evaluating their ministry to the handicapped, These churches not only provide access to buildings but also offer Christian nurture, training and service for individuals with special needs. They accept the fact that the handicapped will not be made “normal” by miracle or therapy but must be offered the promise of wholeness through the gracious sign of a beloved community. These congregations do not turn from prayer even though no miracles occur, nor do they idealize the harsh realities of life for the handicapped. They do not flee from service even though they lack technical training. How then can they serve? A basic plan might include the following.

First, churches should develop a strategy of response to the handicapped even when such individuals are not already present in the congregation. Then they may aggressively (dare we say evangelistically?) seek out special-needs people in the community. “We don’t have any handicapped is a pathetic excuse for failing to develop strategies which will make the church a place where those with special needs may experience acceptance and offer their own unique gifts.

Second, in formulating those strategies, churches must recognize that diversity of needs requires a diversity of programs. Worship services, church-school classes and other gatherings must be adapted to an increasingly varied special-needs population. One all-inclusive class for all the handicapped is an inadequate -- perhaps even inappropriate -- response. Learning disabilities, multiple handicaps, hearing and visual impairments all necessitate a personalized approach.

Thus, programs cannot be ironclad but must be adapted to fit the unique needs of each handicapped individual. Consistency may also be a problem. People who endure a barrage of teachers, therapists, physicians and other specialists five or six days a week may need a day of rest from all such activity. Some Sundays a trip to church is more hassle than help for the handicapped, yet they need religious nurture nonetheless. Can churches understand and respond creatively?

Third, local congregations should consider ways to provide services for the handicapped who live in the community but who may never affiliate with the church. Such a response is increasingly crucial in a time when federal and state funds are being withdrawn from entitlement programs for the handicapped. Could a church, for example, hire a therapist to serve handicapped preschoolers? (Such programs have been among the first to suffer in federal cutbacks.) Recreation and music therapy might be a means for offering handicapped youth both practical help and religious nurture.

Finally, churches must provide an environment in which the handicapped and their families can express a wide range of emotions regarding their condition. In their obsession with normalcy, churches often want to hurry the handicapped to wholeness without making room for the anger, doubt and fear which are also a part of their special situation. Liberals often imply that a change in language will turn the handicapped into more normal human beings -- a worthy but sadly superficial response. Conservatives want to protect divine sovereignty at all costs by insisting that normalcy is enhanced when the handicapped learn to “praise God for their weakness,” or to see themselves as the gift of God. That response fosters needless guilt in those who cannot praise.

Church must be a place where the handicapped can confront the reality of their situation and vent their accompanying anger creatively, without guilt. Sometimes there is praise, sometimes anger; always there is the reality of life and struggle. Always there remain those hard questions which the handicapped and the rest of us must ask together as people of God: What does their presence suggest about the nature of God and the reality of suffering? Is there a difference between viewing the handicapped as gifts of God and viewing their handicaps as God-given gifts? What is the role of Word and sacrament for those who cannot conceptualize but who need the signs of grace nonetheless?

What is the nature of wholeness for all those waiting on the Kingdom? And we continue to ask, “Are you the One, or should we wait for another?” And turning quietly toward the leper, Jesus of Nazareth replies . . .