Mennonite Peace Theology

Bijbelbespreking Ter Apel (1)

2012-01-14T04:04:00.001-08:00

Samenvatting van de eerste Bijbelbespreking in de Protestantse Gemeente Ter Apel.

Onderwerp was Romeinen 1:1 - 4

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Abstract and concrete

2011-01-16T15:28:00.001-08:00

Brief explanation of the terms abstract and concrete in Hegel's philosophy.

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Peace Studies Berkely :

2010-12-07T12:49:00.000-08:00

Introduction to Nonviolence - Fall 2006. An introduction to the science of nonviolence, mainly as seen through the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi. Historical overview of nonviolence East and the West up to the American Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., with emphasis on the ideal of principled nonviolence and the reality of mixed or strategic nonviolence in practice, especially as applied to problems of social justice and defense.

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BEELDEN VAN DE ISLAM

2010-10-05T16:06:00.001-07:00

Kijk maar eens naar onderstaande beelden, zo van het internet geplukt. Wat voor beeld van de islam roepen deze beelden bij je op?

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Ethics of the Present Lordship

2010-08-03T06:02:00.000-07:00

Beker in his book on Paul – see previous posts - considers the ethical necessity for Christians as closely linked to the apocalyptic expectation of the divine indicative, which he sees in Käsemann’s correction to Bultmann’s existentialist approach.

But to Beker, Christian ethics is definitely aimed at the future cosmic-theocentric affirmation of Christ in the final redemption. All of the activity that Christians are commanded to do is defined as redemptive activity, pointing toward its final consummation in the future kingdom. So it is not the indicative itself that motivates obedience, but more precisely the indicative and “pattern” of the eschatological judgment, and the imperative of Christian obedience serves as a pathway to the final indicative of the glory of God. The soteriological effects of Christ’s victory in the future are the telos of Christian obedience, but not its motivating ground. Christian obedience does not stand on the basis of a present reality; it has the character of hope.

Beker sees his view confirmed in Romans 12. The use of the term “bodies” here refers, in his view, to the ontological solidarity between Christians and a world still under the power of death. At the same time, the “body” suggests the ethical seriousness of life in the Spirit “because believers are called to challenge the power of death in the world.”[1] Christian obedience is therefore determined by solidarity with the world and proleptic faithfulness to the new life that God has ordained for his creation. The Christological indicative does not completely fill up the apocalyptic indicative: the last judgment is still there as a reminder of the seriousness of the need for solidarity with a fallen world.

The problem with Beker’s approach is that if eschatology grounds ethics, all ethics of necessity becomes an interim ethic (the final indicative even swallowing up the imperative), and man simply has to await the coming of the new kingdom to see his obedience evaporate into thin air, along of course with any thought of merit. The imperative then has meaning only as long as Christians are still living within the old world, and only for that world. Christian ethics can then easily become the ethics of the present age, to which the element of a redemptive scheme provides only the hermeneutic and the motivational background. That is so because it is held at the same time that the apocalyptic vision of the future kingdom cannot be expressed in terms of precise behavior or values. Congruence between ethical acts today and the apocalyptic indicative cannot be established with certainty, only some tendencies or probabilities might be construed that give some direction to ethics.

The basic flaw in this scheme of things is this: to Paul the righteousness of God is revealed in the faithfulness of Christ to the God of the covenant. Jesus’ dedication to God’s kingdom was therefore firmly rooted in His dedication to God as the One who promised ultimate redemption. [2]

So our dedication in obedience to Christ must be rooted primarily in dedication to God. It is not based on any specific character of God’s revelation to us, but only modified by it. Christian ethics, we contend, is not rooted in the eschatology of God’s future redemption, and is not rooted in the present soteriology of Christ’s Spirit as reality in us, but it is established in the Cross as the basic symbol of complete dedication to God.

In other words, Christian ethics is the ethics of the present Lord Jesus Christ who showed in his humiliation and death the way that God provides to become righteous.

[1] J.C. Beker Paul, p. 289.

[2] Cf. Thomas Finger, Christian Theology (1985) II, p. 93.

Indicative versus Imperative

2010-08-02T06:00:00.000-07:00

This connection between indicative and imperative is meant as a polemical stance towards Jews and Jewish Christians because it “eradicates the works of the law and any fearful striving for acceptance in the last judgment, as if the Messiah had not already come.” [1] If the nature of righteousness is at stake, as in Romans and Galatians, Paul will emphasize the indicative, but where there is danger of the exaggeration of the “exclusive celebration of the indicative.” Paul stresses the imperative, as in 1 Cor.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to see Paul’s ethic only in this tension between indicative and imperative. Beker explains this issue by making reference to the debate between Bultmann and Käsemann:

“Ernst Käsemann has inserted a new dimension into the discussions. With Bultmann, he locates the heart of Paul’s gospel in " the righteousness of God," but he disputes Bultmann’s interpretation of it. ’The righteousness of God’ has an apocalyptic derivation and denotes both God’s power and His gift. It expresses God’s cosmic claim on the world, which is proleptically made manifest in the lordship of Christ and in which the believer participates through obedience.

The lordship of Christ, however, does not rob believers of their volition; they are not simply pawns in a cosmic struggle, because their obedience demonstrates their allegiance to God’s sovereign will for his creation. According to Käsemann, the obedience of Christians must be viewed in the context of their solidarity with the created order, which comes to expression in Paul’s definition of "the body" (sooma).

In other words, Käsemann advances the discussion of the relation of the indicative and imperative in Paul, which had heretofore been dominated by Bultmann’s definition of "the body" as a person’s relation to himself. This existentialist definition of "the body" neglects its cosmic-historical character and spiritualizes a person’s relation to the world. It causes an existentialist narrowing of both the indicative and imperative, because indicative and imperative are here construed as an antinomy or paradox in which God’s gift in Christ is simultaneously an appeal to our decision to become bearers of the cross in each moment of time.

The problem is that a precise explication of this antinomy or dialectic remains hermeneutically vague. Bultmann defined it in terms of possibility and actualization and so not only endangered Paul’s emphasis on the actuality of God’s act of salvation in Christ but also overemphasized the human will.”[2]

[1] J.C. Beker , Paul p. 255.

[2] J.C. Beker, Paul, p. 263

The Effect of Paul’s Exhortation

2010-08-01T05:57:00.000-07:00

We must come now to the question of what kind of response Paul expected from his paraenesis, what kind of obedience is implied in all these specifications of the commandment of love.

In general, we have found both in Galatians and in Romans that the way of life of Christians is determined by a threefold freedom: freedom from sin, from death, and from (an incorrect interpretation of) the law. It is not freedom from all restraints, since the believer is liberated to a new service. But this service seems to be rather paradoxical. “The servant of Christ” is at the same time a freedman of the Lord (1 Cor. 7:22). We are freed as was Israel: in order to obey. For Christians more particularly: to lead a life in the Spirit that allows God through us to fulfill the claim the law has on us (Rom. 8:3).

What character does this new Christian imperative have? Bultmann and others have argued that, to Paul, the imperative follows the indicative. Let’s use this idea for a moment. In our passage we might look at 12:1 as a case in point.

The exhortation is motivated “by the mercies of God”; the “sacrifice” is reference to Christ’s sacrifice for us (Rom. 5). The “indicative” of what God has done in Christ not only serves as a motivating force; it also expresses a reality in which we already share. The gift of the Spirit turns an eschatological future into a present reality.

The spirit therefore can be expressed both as the power by which the believer can act in obedience and the standard by which he measures his acts, combining indicative and imperative. Gal. 5:25 expresses this duality: “If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.”

Is the State the Same as the Kings and Dignitaries?

2010-07-31T05:54:00.000-07:00

Yoder presupposed that the authorities mentioned in Romans 13:1 (and the parallel passages in 1 Tim. 2 and 1 Peter 2) refer to the state as such. Romans 13, of course, has been most often interpreted like that, and we have quoted another solution above. But how can we possibly identify the “kings and people in high places” in 1 Tim. 2 with the state?

1 Peter 2:13 speaks about human institutions and mentions the emperor or his governors. Again, with Käsemann, we must say at least that the powers are personalized, though we prefer to state that the powers are being seen on the level where they are represented by individuals.

In Romans 13, we would have to accept that Paul changes from his perspective on Christian morality, the application of love for the enemy, to the perspective of the state. But we find the position persuasive that the terminology of Romans 13 points toward the embodiment of the state in bearers of authority who continue the intersubjective framework of chapter 12.

The point might be, then, that we never accept the state as such, but always and only specific people who use power, on the presumption that they do so with the object of doing good.

It would mean that the state, per se, is mentioned only in Revelation 13 in the typical language of apocalyptic prophecy: the beast coming from the sea. The powers that govern the world are personalized, and only when the system dominates all the people in it and the intersubjective perspective of Romans 13 cannot be employed any longer, the state is envisioned as “beastified,” in the language of the Apocalypse.

Lord of the Church and Lord of History

2010-07-30T05:52:00.000-07:00

“Christ is not only the Head of the Church; he is at the same time Lord of History, reigning at the right hand of God over the principalities and powers. The old eon, representative of human history under the mark of sin, has also been brought under the reign of Christ (which is not identical with the consummate kingdom of God, 1 Cor. 15:24).”[1]

We may therefore expect that the evil, which is inherent in the power of the state does not simply create chaos but is made subservient to God’s purpose. In Yoder’s words:

“The characteristic of the reign of Christ is that evil, without being blotted out, is channeled by God, in spite of itself, to serve God’s purposes.”

So we would confirm the state, not as created or instituted by God, but at least as a means by which God brings order and gives “room for growth and work of the Church.” Yoder may say that in such a way the violence of the state is not redeemed or made good, but is made subservient to God’s purposes. It may ultimately serve some good, and in that respect at least it earns some legitimacy.

However, this will only be true, Yoder explains, for a given state if it does not add to the evil already there. The state has on some occasions subscribed to a moral value, punishing the guilty and saving the innocent. Then evil is used for a good purpose, though it in itself remains evil.

The demoniac state, however, denies all moral responsibility, punishing the innocent and rewarding the guilty, as in Revelation 13. The state as such therefore cannot be called good, but some of its actions though can be called good to the extent that they do not add to the evil already there!

[1] Cf. J.H. Yoder, Royal Priesthood, p. 149

Is It Now Or Ever? The Present versus the Coming Kingdom.

2010-07-27T05:44:00.000-07:00

So it is all right to pay the taxes needed to provide police and judicial functions within society, while at the same time Jesus commands us not to make use of that force and those rights under law.

In Matthew 5:38 we find that we should not resist those who perpetrate evil. We should “love the enemy,” i.e., present our left cheek to those who smite us on the right cheek. Nonresistance and love for the enemy are correlative, and the point of this nonresistance is expressed by Paul in Rom. 12:21 to be no less than the victory of good over evil.

But is all of this connected to the expectation of the immediate coming of the Kingdom? Are we right to argue that the main perspective is the Kingdom that has already been established instead of the referring to the eschatological expectation.

Goppelt argues that though nonresistance is in direct conformity to the coming kingdom, there is now, under the present conditions, also reason for resistance. Because the Kingdom of God is still invisible, “history must be maintained with respect to its hidden and its visible coming.” Now there is a new character to resistance: one who has found the freedom not to resist will resist injustice with the aid of power and law without hating or despising the enemy:

“He suffers because he has to resist. This new way to resist is also a behavior in conformity with the sermon on the Mount.”^[1]

If the coming kingdom, instead of the present rule of God as visible in the Church, is relied on as the motivation for obedience to the command to love the enemy, then in actual fact the commandment loses its strength altogether.

Now it is the situation that determines when it is proper to resist and when not to. Can Goppelt accept that Jesus only acted in nonresistance and still acknowledge the application of justice and power, both “fundamentally” and “practically”? [2]

“The cross is the extreme demonstration that agape seeks neither effectiveness nor justice and is willing to suffer any loss or seeming defeat for the sake of obedience.”[3] Goppelt calls it a “conformity with the sermon on the mount” to resist evil by seeking an effective response or to use violent means in order to establish justice, because the “old world” still is there and the Kingdom is hidden. The individual can do so because he is part of the society around him, and Christ’s mission is to effect salvation, and His commandments are only “indirectly” realized through the process of salvation from within the society. So the new eon, according to Goppelt, is not entirely separated from the old. Jesus’ demand for a new kind of life is balanced by His acceptance of the legality of the old. Basically Goppelt defends this view because of an exegesis in which Jesus taught that the imperial taxes should simply be accepted.

Part of the problem might be that Goppelt envisions an individual in this situation and asks whether it is possible for any single human being to act in conformity with Christ. But the call for the kingdom does not address the individual alone, and the point of the taxes is without merit in this context.

The paying of taxes is not an affirmation of the old order nor of the state, as we have seen from Romans 13; it is a proleptic affirmation of the new one, changing our perspective on what is important and what is not within the remnants of the old world. In the context of Jesus’ saying, we can put it like this: if our dedication is fully to God it becomes immaterial whether we pay our taxes to the government, and if we use the system, why complain about that one element of it through which some good on an individual level can arise? We pay taxes, not because we affirm the state, but because we affirm the possible goodness in those people who use those taxes for the good of all, to the degree that this is what happens.

[1] L. Goppelt, Theologie des Neuen Testamentes, 1976, p. 165

[2] Goppelt finds fault with Karl Barth for emphasizing the presence of God’s kingdom at the expense of the Kingdom that is still to be fully realized. According to Goppelt, Jesus wants the ”total conversion” of human beings, but the complete fulfillment of His commandments can never be a requirement for all, it has the character of an exception that acts as a sign pointing toward a kingdom in which it will be possible for all to obey. The reality of the present kingdom, one might oppose to Goppelt, is then reduced to an ideal without effectiveness in the present.

[3] J.H. Yoder, Royal Priesthood p. 147

Giving Caesar what is Caesar’s: Why the moral Order Supersedes the Political

2010-07-26T05:39:00.000-07:00

The Zealot option - we talked about that in a previous post - was not reversed because of a denial of the legitimacy of human rule where only God should be sovereign Lord.

Submission to the state is not part of a forbidden acceptance of the old order if it had been reversed to become submission to the people who represent the state.

The concrete alternative to Zealot violence, was the proleptic dealing with officials as if God already had established his Kingdom – which in Christ He already had in the view of the Church.

This is a vital point: it is not the state itself that is acknowledged, but its legitimacy is reduced to the domain where neighborly love, the good of the individual, the love for one’s enemy rules. The moral order supersedes the political order. Such a submission is revolutionary in nature and far from constituting acquiescence to the status quo. It looks upon the representative of the state with respect to the good he achieves to the extent that he works toward the good that the powers of the state are supposed to accomplish. We do not see the state in the man we encounter, but we do see the function by which such an official is commissioned to further the well-being of others. In a way, such an acknowledgment treats the state official in a way analogous to that in which the members of the Church are to behave toward one another.

In this respect, the Pauline exhortation proves to be similar in nature to the parenetical material that the Church ascribed to Jesus. In Mark 12:13-17 we find such paraenesis embedded in a controversy between Jesus and the Zealots. By this procedure of “embedding” the question, whatever Jesus was teaching becomes connected to the Church’s question as to who was handing down that teaching.

And they send to him certain of the Pharisees and of the Herodians, that they might catch him in speaking. And they come and say to him, Teacher, we know that thou art true, and carest not for any one; for thou regardest not men's person, but teachest the way of God with truth: Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar or not? Should we give, or should we not give? But he knowing their hypocrisy said unto them, Why tempt ye me? Bring me a denarius that I may see it . And they brought it . And he says to them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said to him, Caesar's. And Jesus answering said to them, Pay what is Caesar's to Caesar, and what is God's to God. And they wondered at him. Mark 12:13-17

The Zealots were refusing to pay the taxes because to do so would mean acknowledging the Roman Emperor as their sovereign. Jesus’ reply aims at rejecting the presuppositions of that approach. The coin with the emperor’s face on it makes trade possible, and only the Emperor has the authority to mint coins. God, however, mints people, because all have been created in his image. It is therefore in vain to refuse to render the coin back to Caesar, who has made that coin in the first place and in that sense is entitled to it as an “object,” and at the same time also to refuse to render unto God what is rightfully His, i.e., to reject the image of God in every man and to kill to further political goals.

To kill people in the name of God is absurd, and so is refusing to pay taxes when you are participating in an economy that was made possible by that same Emperor. So the point is not that we should give all to God because of the radical understanding of the coming kingdom but that we are caught up in an absurd paradox if we kill the image-bearer of God in His name for political reasons, and refuse to pay taxes on the profits that were made possible by the very imperial power that we seek to oppose.

The Refutation of Zelotist Politics

2010-07-24T05:34:00.000-07:00

The presentation of Paul’s ethical exhortation with regard to the powers of the state as state-officials does not contradict Yoder’s claim that Christianity is a social ethic.

It only brings us closer to understanding that Paul in his presentation of that ethic did not construct an abstract ontology of the state, but tried to put into the language of politics the very fundamental demand of love for one’s enemy as taught by Jesus Himself.

The passage can be understood as a refutation of Zealotism. [1] Political rebellion against Rome was based upon affirmation of God’s rule as the concrete alternative to human rule, i.e., as in basic conflict with it.

The Maccabean revolt, which was its forerunner, was justified with the argument that when the religious existence of the people of Israel was threatened, a rebellion against foreign powers was the only way to be faithful. The Zealots applied that principle to the political independence of Israel, perhaps because they saw in it a means to obtain and secure the former. So if Rome governed the world, then God was excluded, and only human action could reinstate God in His rightful place. Human government was always an occupying power where only God could rule. For the same reason, the Zealots called it an injustice to pay taxes to such a “foreign” government.

The opposite of that position would be the acceptance of worldly rule without reservation. But Paul did not just reverse the Zealot position, and neither had Jesus. His argument against the Zealots is that God already does rule, albeit without deposing a faulty human government, and without establishing the perfect state of the coming Kingdom.

But the governmental powers are still subject to God’s judgment and are under God’s control insofar as they provide the basic conditions of a stable society. That, however, is not the reason for their acceptance. Christians do not deal politically with the state; they deal with it morally, in their dealings with the representatives of the state. [2]

The Zealots could try to make a case for justified killing of Roman officials as part of a just war scenario: when they killed even their own countrymen to further their political goals, this was to be accepted because they themselves accepted the principle of politics that the end justifies the means.

[1] Schlatter stated that it was not impossible that Paul had received messages that the Zealots were influencing the synagogues and Churches in Rome. Even without such a historical incentive, it would still be necessary for Paul to discuss the issue (Schlatter [Der Römerbrief, 1935], p. 350).

[2] So we have a reversal here of the situation in which Judas Maccabeus decided to kill his countryman for obeying the command to sacrifice to the Greek god, and the representative of the Greek king who came to his home town to enforce the state’s demand. That representative was killed because he was identified with the state, and the state was a power to be opposed (1 Macc. 2).

Romans 13 again…

2010-07-23T05:29:00.000-07:00

Let every soul be subject to the authorities that are above him . For there is no authority except from God; and those that exist are set up by God. So that he that sets himself in opposition to the authority resists the ordinance of God; and they who thus resist shall bring sentence of guilt on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to a good work, but to an evil one . Dost thou desire then not to be afraid of the authority? practise what is good, and thou shalt have praise from it; for it is God's minister to thee for good. But if thou practisest evil, fear; for it bears not the sword in vain; for it is God's minister, an avenger for wrath to him that does evil. Wherefore it is necessary to be subject, not only on account of wrath, but also on account of conscience. For on this account ye pay tribute also; for they are God's officers, attending continually on this very thing.

Submission to the functionaries of the State can be seen as an applied case of the love for the enemy in Romans 12:20-21.

Their presence is not simply affirmed as an empirical reality, though the powers “are” simply there, as 13:2 states, with the word "being" implying a moral neutrality, but they are seen as a means to act proleptically according to the values of the coming kingdom.

That God has set them in their place does not mean that there is any kind of moral legitimacy to their being there, nor does it mean that the principle of statehood in itself is affirmed, but only its existence within the context of the coming Kingdom which is already a present reality.

The Church should, by accepting this reality of the state only insofar as there are persons acting under its principle, accept the situation in which God has set her. If resistance against such bearers of authority, in whom “the powers are concretized personally” (Käsemann), is motivated by the effort to become emancipated either individually or collectively, such authorities become obstacles to political autonomy or social emancipation.

If the Church does resist violently because she judges the state to be less than adequate, she is in fact showing hatred for the “enemy,” since every effort to emancipate politically will immediately make the officers of the state into enemies, which will make it necessary to resist them violently, even though she might argue that the necessity for violence results from their behavior and attitude, in order to achieve political goals.

Read in that way, on the level of encounter with the representatives of government, political and violent resistance is not simply forbidden by the legitimacy of the state but is per se impossible for the Church. It is the commandment to love the enemy that prohibits violence to the officials of the state. It is not an acquiescence in the legitimacy of that state in so far as it does not hinder the practice of religion.

State and State-official

2010-07-23T05:15:00.000-07:00

It is vital to make the distinction between the abstract concept of state and the notion of the state-official. Strobel, quoted in Käsemann’s commentary (p. 338), argued that Paul used specific terminology of Hellenistic political life that would imply that Paul is not talking about the state, but about its representatives. The “governing authorities” (verse 1) [1] specifically refers to Roman officers of state.

The expression “rulers” in verse 3 perhaps refers to magisterial power, and “ministers” refers to appointed representatives of an authority. If that is so, the jus gladii, the power, or better, right of the sword, in verse 6, refers to control over life and death, i.e., (capital) punishment, but also to the system of rewards and privileges that went along with that power in the emperor’s representatives. It refers in Roman perspective, therefore, to judicial power as it is put into the hands of officials. The word itself therefore points to a basis for the legitimacy of actions to the benefit of others or against others that otherwise would be acts of violence.

If the language that characterizes the authority is in this sense morally neutral (it refers to individual acts in a political perspective), then by contrast the references to obedience (submission as hupotassesthai is to fulfill an existing duty) and to the goal of government, the “good” cannot be political but must indicate a moral response. The application of love for the enemy to the civil servant in a way detaches this servant from his own political order of legitimacy and looks upon him as a possible resident of the Kingdom of God.

In the same vein, the ”servant who executes wrath” (RSV) or the “agent of wrath,” might be the prosecutor or district attorney in a legal sense, and the concept of the legitimacy of the state’s violence would be far removed from Paul’s thought. This would fit in very well with the general intent behind the passage to show how life within a hostile society is possible. It also makes the part about tax collection fit in nicely with the rest: the tax is paid because we recognize proleptically the intent of its collector to do good to all.

And finally, this interpretation makes sense of the “all” in verse 7: this must refer to the officials themselves.

^{^[1]} The Greek exousia refers to delegated power, the fact that one can exercise the power given him as if it were his own, but it can also be used for the persons carrying that power, so in this case: rulers, officials. Its usage as equivalent to power would be a Semitism; cf. Hebrew reshut, domination, authority, domain.

What Are The Powers?

2010-07-21T05:14:00.000-07:00

When the New Testament refers to the state it never uses the abstract term polis which is reserved as the common term for a township or local community. The state is meant when it refers to the emperor (Mt. 22:17) or the king (1 Pt. 2:13, 17; 1 Tim. 2:2), or when Paul speaks about “authorities” or exousiai.

The philosophical background of the term polis can be assumed to be lacking in New Testament discourse on the state, and instead the notions of power and order come to the fore. It must be an anachronism therefore, to read back into the New Testament the notion of the modern state as it evolved since the Renaissance and has undoubtedly influenced the theological reflection of the 16th century Reformation. The proper strategy for reading “backwards” can only be found when we remember that after all the reality of the state is present not when we argue that the state is a “divine institution of ordering power” [1](Brunner) because all authority is from God. Power has been given to the state to serve the order, the community and justice.

To apply the concept of the modern state, with its centralized power and the right to warfare and death penalty, to the submission to the “authorities” in Romans 13 has long been the standard practice. We propose a different avenue, by starting from the assumption that the reality of the state is nowhere else to be found as in the specific actions of individuals who act in conformity with the standard of the state and in a way produce its reality by doing so. The state is present whenever an individual justifies acts of government over others on the basis of the concept of the state, i.e. on the basis of the idea that a particular action is both necessary for the preservation of the state and beneficial to the wellbeing of a particular (national) community and serves their interests. If we start from the idea that the state is a reality only in specific actions of individuals, we can begin to understand the moral weight of the exhortation that Paul addressed to the Romans on this subject. Only then can we find the biblical foundation for the Mennonites’ insistence, that the “state”, far from expressing a divinely ordained political order in which all human beings live and are required to give their allegiance to, is actually a framework of justification for specific individual actions that may or may not be at odds with Christ’s teachings. An institution outside the perfection of Christ. Ultimately the political order must be measured by the moral order that grounds its reality.^[2]

[1] Emil Brunner, Das Gebot, p. 484

[2] Cf. also Emmanuel Levinas, e.g. in “Liberté et Comandement”, in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 58, p. 266 (1953) who argues that the discourse of the encounter (i.e. the moral order) constitutes a relationship between individuals that precedes the institution of the rational law and is the effort to involve someone in a dialogue without using violence. The – exercise of violence and power rest precisely on the refusal to join in that dialogue.

Against Statism As a Pacifist Position

2010-07-20T05:12:00.000-07:00

Mennonites broke away from the idea that the state was coterminous with the Church.

Instead they argued that state and Church each had their own distinct and exclusive membership, and their own standards of behavior.

The Church was a voluntary separation of society because of the assumption of a different standard.
The sword of justice was necessary to punish evildoers and maintain order in society.

So there were two standards of morality for the state and the Church and only if the state turned evil could it be argued that Christians should not obey its official representatives.

It followed from this principle that Christians were not allowed to serve in government, even if they could affirm the state’s right to use the power of the sword. Even though there was a social justification for the existence of the state, Christians were morally denied access to political power.

Nonresistance to evil, the love for the enemy and the acceptance of repentance of all evil-doers were the positive requirements of any Christian that were inconsistent with the application of worldly power.

Warfare and capital punishment were equally incompatible with the other elements of the function of national states: to defend by force the political unity of a community and to restrain the evil-doers by the ultimate violence of death.

In sum: the state could never be Christian.

The Church Witnesses to the State – against Luther and Calvin

2010-07-19T05:09:00.000-07:00

In general the Christian witness to the State is simply identical to its being the Church. A nonviolent society with the service to the State by solving social problems without violence, by refuting the idolatry of the state in its worship of Christ, and by denying to withdraw from society by participating in the social life whenever possible. We might call that the implicit witness to the State of the Church.

In of all of this a theoretical understanding of the state is presupposed. A common theological position derives from Romans 13 the notion of the divine institution of the state, as if it were a particular act of creation.

The positivist position of Martin Luther holds, that any State that is there, is instituted by God as such, and must therefore be seen as representing the will of God in its own domain.

The only difference between Luther and contemporary Lutherans, is the replacement of the Prince of the 16th century by the professional politician of our day and age.

And then we have the legitimist position of John Calvin, that holds that Romans 13 provides us with a set of conditions that must be met by the state in order for it to be legitimate. Both Luther and Calvin take Romans 13 as a document about the institution of the state by God.

The separation of Church and State

2010-07-18T05:08:00.000-07:00

The separation of church and state goes beyond the denial of the Church as a political power institution.

It also means that the Church can have no part in the social, legal or political structure of society. Decisions in Church should be the expression of a consensus based on conviction that is freely reached because of a common labor of exploration within the community of the faithful. Communal discernment, i.e. the application of scriptural commandments in a given context as a response to a specific issue, is the basis for all church authority. That is very different from the principle of democracy.

The idolatrous shape of democracy claims it to be an expression of a humanist social contract that presupposes the good nature of all men. That is in direct opposition to the teachings of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Even the exercise of power in a democracy is a result of the rebellion of the powers against Christ.

Nevertheless, democracy can be a realistic way to exercise a cautious supervision over the authority that has been entrusted to individuals. The witness of the Church implies, that it is the unity of the community and not a numerical majority of voters that have not been part of the deliberation itself, is the true an expression of the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The separation of church and state, however, does not a exclude a conscientious participation in the life of society. It is obvious that Christians may assist in the solution of problems. It is obvious that Christians might contribute to the creation of a healthy mentality in the context of labor. And finally, it is obvious that Christians may participate in any informal organization of the community in which there is no exercise of violence.

Boring Anselm

2010-07-17T08:08:00.001-07:00

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6805269/

Posted via email from Hegelpodcast

Christ is Lord over the State

2010-07-16T05:07:00.000-07:00

What does it mean that the Lordship of Christ includes his Lordship over the State? It does not mean that the State is a servant of Christ. It does not mean that the State, including its use of violence, is an extension of divine authority. It does mean that there is an order of providence where Christ rules over man's disobedience, not withstanding the rebellious opposition to his authority. There is an order in which the state functions as an instrument of divine providence.

Moreover, this order of the restraint of human disobedience is subservient to the order of redemption in which Christ rules by means of the obedience of his disciples Christ’s Lordship over the powers is manifest by this structure or logic of human conduct. Violence will ultimately turn against it self, he who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. The violence of the state is directed against the violence of people, constituting an order that is a condition of a society that is peaceful enough for the Church to obey Christ. Society exists on behalf of the Church in which the meaning of history is incarnated. The Church is the chosen generation, the royal priesthood, the holy nation.

The prayer for the representatives of power, the prayer for kings and people in high places, is motivated by 1 Timothy 2 with the fact that God wants to be the savior of all people. It does not mean that we pray even for kings because they are the worst of men but we pray for kings in order for them to create the social structures in which the Church can flourish. The state, therefore, has a function in Gods dealing with humanity. That same state however, makes a claim for worship as soon as it claims to be the bearer of the meaning of history. Any nation that sees itself with a historic mission to lead the world is idolatrous.

The Church is not a part of the state it is itself a separate society and that demonstrates what Love can mean in social relations. The first level of loyalty of the Church is its obedience to the standard of discipleship. Its primary obligation toward society is identical to its primary obligation to Christ. Discipleship is a social ethics. Although ultimately church and world will become the same kingdom, in the present era the Church should strive for social self sufficiency. The lesson from 1 Corinthians 6 teaches us, that Christians should not make use of the legal system that enforces justice with violence, but should make their own legal procedures.

Pacifism and Jesus’ Lordship

2010-07-15T05:05:00.000-07:00

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The acceptance of the Lordship of Christ is exclusive. For the Church there can be no other authority. Based on the authority of Christ the Church must obey the commandment not to use violence. The rejection of lethal force is an absolute obligation for Christians, derived from the example and the teaching of Christ. However, the New Testament also teaches two other things about Lordship.
First, it teaches that Jesus Christ is also Lord of the world. The State and the non-Christian society are also part of his realm. The Church witnesses to the world of the necessity to obey Christ.
Secondly, the New Testament teaches that in this world there are thrones, powers, archangels and governments that visibly and invisibly determine human events. The notion of power used in the New Testament is roughly the equivalent of the modern word structure. Notions like scientific law, fate, historic necessity, humanity, decency, nation, social laws etc. are expressions of structures that govern human societies in a very real sense. The surface structure of the state, the visible representatives of power, and the ideologies that explain and legitimize the use of force can be seen as an expression of these invisible realities. The New Testament teaches that such powers beyond human control are in effect under the authority of Christ. Jesus Christ is also Lord over these powers.

Renewal and Non-conformity

2010-07-14T06:06:00.001-07:00

Beker’s argument in connection with the expression sooma (body) in Rom. 12:1 overlooks the obvious.

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the compassions of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your intelligent service.

If we are called to a reasonable service not in conformity to this world, and to a renewal of our thoughts which makes us “prove what is the will of God, the good, the acceptable and the perfect,” then our “imperative” is rooted in the character of God’s will and not partly based on our solidarity with the present world while hoping for a better one. The latter would constitute a principle of obedience besides that of God’s relating to humanity through the Cross of Jesus Christ and would invoke a separate source of motivation for ethics.

To put it in the simplest of words: we obey God because Christ died for us, and in our obedience we constitute a separate community of the faithful, dedicated to obedience, accepting suffering, maintaining Christ’s position in this world as nonviolent love. At the Cross, solidarity with the present world is expressed as suffering love, not as moral dedication to improve it. There can be no solidarity with the world without going through its judgment.

The expression “compassions of God” is also, as we have explained earlier, not so much a reference to the deeds of God, even if surely God’s revelation of righteousness in Christ reveals that character, but a name of God taken from the Old Testament. So chapter 12:1-3, if understood in the scheme of indicative/imperative, grounds our obedience in the God who chose to be Mercy and not in any particular activity of God with reference to this world, present or future. It does not allow us to posit solidarity with the world as our main motivation for ethics. Instead we must look to ethics as a way to define the particular community that is called upon to express its redemption in a concrete way of life in the midst of the old order.

The Obligation of the State

2010-07-14T05:06:00.001-07:00

Based on Christ’s Lordship over the world, the Church derives an obligation for the State to serve God by encouraging the good and restraining evil. The state has an obligation to serve peace. Within society it is called to promote social order. The state is called to preserve that order without excessive use of force. It is a premise of the New Testament doctrine of the powers, that it is impossible for the state to preserve social or other without violence.

At the same time, it is a basic commandment for Christians not to apply violence for any reason. The Church after all accepts the authority of Christ, while it acknowledges that not everything is submitted to him. 1 Corinthians 15:20 - 28 shows that Christ's Lordship will be visible in two ways. First of all the will be a kingdom of the father at the end of present history. Second, the Church is now already the social manifestation of the ultimate triumph of God in the kingdom of the father. But the Church manifests Gods kinship in a world that is still rebellious, evil though it has been submitted to the kingdom of the Son.

This rebellion of the state shows itself precisely in the fact that it has to use the sword, i.e. the violence of war, sanction, coercion and a hierarchy of power in order to preserve the cohesion. A society is organized by the state with the use of force, making that sovereign power to use force a representation of the ultimate authority, legitimized by the notion that the State represents the highest value within any society. The State, even though it is outside the perfection of Christ, is still called to maintain order by exercising restraint. However, it is rebellious insofar as this restraint is exercised through violence and because the survival of the state itself becomes a separate value, demanding the highest sacrifice of its citizens. In this respect, any State can be considered idolatrous.

The Position of the Historic Peace Churches

2010-07-14T04:57:00.001-07:00

The following text is a draft for a chapter on Peace Theology that I wrote in 2004.

The expression "Historic Peace Churches" is used since 1935 to refer to the collective pacifist persuasions of the Quakers, the Church of the Brethren and the Mennonites. Within the World Council of churches they have spoken on behalf of a Christian Peace witness. In 1935 a conference was held in Newton, Kan., in which the position of the peace churches was defined for the first time. The nucleus of this position is no doubt the sixth proposition that opens with the statement that war is sin. There is a simple moral consequence: "Therefore, we cannot support or engage in any war or conflict between nations, classes or groups."

This statement of principle is surrounded by arguments that tried to express the foundations of these convictions or to reject misunderstandings. The foundation of Christian Peace witness is expressed as a Christocentric theology in the first proposition. It says: "1. Our peace principles are rooted in Christ and his word." Secondarily, there is a role for the tradition, in line with the idea that we are dealing with historic Peace Churches, that have an analogous or shared history. It says: "... remembering in gratitude to God ,the historic or testimony of our churches... in absolute renunciation of war..."

In the section that deals with misunderstandings, the idea is discussed that the position of pacifism can be seen as a lack of patriotism. They found it important to declare that the position taken here was an expression of radical patriotism. "... we are determined to follow Christ in all things. In this determination we believe we are serving the interests of our country, and are truly loyal to our nation." In a positive sense pacifism or Christian Peace is present as a "spirit of sacrificial service, love and goodwill," and only thus can the welfare of the country be served.

In the series of conferences that followed this first meeting a number of principles are presented that have subsequently determined the discourse of Christian pacifism. In 1937, in Oxford, we find the ecclesiological notion of the Church as "a universal brotherhood, a society with a unity so deep as to be indestructible by earthly divisions of race or nation or class."

The main principle that is connected to the peace witness by these representatives of the Historic Peace Churches, is the authority and the example of Christ. Only Christ is Lord and only his life is normative for human conduct. His commandment to love the neighbor but also the enemy, is absolute because of his authority.

It seems self evident that Christians in other traditions will also obey the ultimate commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself. It also seems clear that they would take this commandment to be absolute in all situations and circumstances. It is not clear whether such a consensus exists with regard to the commandment to love the enemy and the exhortation "if possible, as far as depends on you, live in peace with all men and do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to wrath; for it is written, Vengeance belongs to me, I will recompense, saith the Lord." (Rom. 12:18, 19) With regard to the problem of war a major disunity among Christians comes to light, that weakens their common witness.

Roughly we can discern three different positions:

1. Some will take the reality of sin or moral weakness in this world as their starting point.

They do expect Christians to contribute to the reduction of violence in the world, without that leading to a position of strict pacifism. The State is an institution ordained by God, that is called to guarantee a just social order. If the state is threatened, it is a Christian duty to defend it by force. The only exception to that rule might be when a state starts a war of aggression.

2. Some would like to limit the involvement of Christians in war to the exceptional case of a justified war. That would imply a specific doctrine of what constitutes acceptable occasion and means of war. This so-called theory of the justifiable war and goes back to Augustine, was modified by Luther and has continued to be used in a secular context. The theological doctrine of war has a specific set of conditions in order for it to be justified:

war should be purely defensive.
its object should be the protection of the population.
it must lead to a durable peace.
it must be waged with limited force.
It cannot be a result of a preparation for war.

With in a secular context, a more simple definition of a justifiable war arose. A sixth condition was already formulated by Luther: a justifiable war must be declared by the proper authority. The secular version states that all wars are justified if declared by the State.

A more complex version of this doctrine argues that a war may be justified if it expresses the will of the international community. Police actions and the use of so-called Peace Forces would constitute justifiable war violence.

The decision of the United States to use force against Iraq in the Gulf Wars is acceptable if the state has the final word, but no longer acceptable if support from the United Nations was lacking. It is obvious that the five conditions for in the tradition of Augustine and Luther were not met in this case.

3. Some, however, will argue that war is a sin in every age and despite its goal. It is seen to be in conflict with the intentions of the creator. Peace however, is ingrained in the universe and war is a perversion of our own nature. The role of the Church in Society stands or falls with her peace witness. Instead of preparing for, the society would be best served with extensive piece of labor.

The World Council of Churches adopted the notion of peace witness as part of its agenda in 1948. It argued that war is a consequence of sin and not inevitable; God's providential power makes it possible to further the cause of peace with success. The difference of opinion among Christians is reflected in the two positions that are mentioned in the 1948 council documents: (1) modern warfare cannot be an act of justice because of the massive destruction that goes along with it, and (2) military involvement is the ultimate sanction employed by the power of justice and it is necessary to defend the social order, even by violence. It is somewhat remarkable that we find a plea for the position of Immanuel Kant that only an international order of justice can guarantee peace among nations. In order to achieve that, the state must give up part of its national sovereignty. Institutions should be created in which conflicts between states are resolved by arbitration and by which the causes of armed conflict are dealt with as a basis for such an international order of justice the World Council appeals to the notion of human rights and fundamental rights of liberty.

The term pacifism has not been used in the documents of 1946. in 1951 however, in the Dutch town of Zeist A conference was held by the historic peace churches (Quakers, Hutterites, Mennonites) and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. It intended to formulate a response to the position of the World Council of churches in 1948. The text opens with two paragraphs that emphasize not only God's providence, but also the revelation in Christ. First we hear:

"... God is seeking to express his will in relation to international affairs... "

The World Council of churches had invoked the notion of providence to argue that seeking peace was possible, on the basis of the self evident notion that war is a result of sin. The document of Zeist, however, tries to express the content of God's will as something specific. In the next paragraph we hear:

"The will God was made known in the life of Christ..." From this dual perspective a stronger theological declaration becomes possible:

"We are convinced that Christian pacifism and nonresistance is the true interpretation of the teaching and example of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament... we believe that this is the only principle consistent with the gospel and we desire to lay it upon the consciousness of all."

This joint declaration was appended by the representatives of the Mennonite Church with a statement that expressed other theological foundations. What is so remarkable in that appendix, are the so-called added grounds. Apart from arguments from biblical theology, it seems that the Mennonite theologians in Zeist wanted to present support from experience. Among the things mentioned are the impossibility to control or limit violence on the scale of war " as demonstrated in human experience" (p. 51); the destructive force of hatred; the illusion and deception of victory that turns the victor into an oppressor. Some of these elements have an obvious similarity to conditions of be justified war. The necessity of limited violence, and the imperative to conclude war with a lasting peace, i.e. a genuine reconciliation. But even the arguments taken from experience do not constitute an analogy with secular pacifism. The concluding point of the appendix is the rejection of humanitarianism as a valid expression of this particular Christocentric pacifism. Christian pacifism is not based on faith in "the simple power of man's good will and humane action to transform human nature and thus to make the use of force unnecessary in society."

In all of the declarations that have been made over the years by Mennonites, Brethren and Quakers, much was said in an unreflective manner. It became more and more necessary to give a precise meaning to the terminology that was developed to express peace witness. The first World Council of Churches had already made an appeal to the theologians: "...we believe that there is a special call for theologians to consider the theological problems involved." In the witness of the Historic Peace Churches the idea of a supranational unity of the Church, without any room for national and racial opposition, was used frequently. The people of God testify to peace in the context of a society that is beyond its control. The notion of a free Church becomes important here. What exactly is the relationship between the Church of Christ and the national State? In some of the positions that were represented in the World Council of churches, a positive relationship between Christians and the state was implied. For many it was a Christian duty to defend the state at any cost. The notion of the Free Church, defined as "any Church without an organic relationship with a government" suggested that the historic peace churches just happened to find themselves in a situation without a positive and affirmative relation to politics. The word "free" in this context would mean "without connection by accident."

In 1965 John Howard Yoder used the word in a deeper sense in an article with the title " Church and State according to a Free Church tradition." Now he word refers to an adequate vision of the freedom of the entire Church of Jesus Christ. In essence, the liberty of the Church is expressed in the fact that its relationship to government is not defined by the state, so that the historical changes of the state do not determine correlative changes in the attitude of the Church. Of third the age of constant times there is a common assumption among Christians that the duties of a Christian as a member of the political community are identical to the duties of a government. That means that the vision of the state also defines the standards for Christian behavior. From constant time on, Christians see themselves as responsible agents of State decision and action.

Starting from a biblical position, Yoder argues that Jesus affirms and accepts the fact that the State exists. They should render unto Caesar that is Caesar's. But in the same context his disciples are admonished that they are to be different. Instead of trying to rule and govern their bound by the example of Christ's servanthood. based on Christ Lordship, Christians should accept people in office and submit to imperial power.

The second argument is derived from the peculiar nature of the Church if the building of the Church is the primary political fact of history, then the Church or rather Christ as the head of the Church is the only source for ethics. If the Church is the nearest thing to true polis or state, if the Church is the visible manifestation of a viable society, then the Church sets the standard for the state and not the other way around.

Finally, within the New Testament, in the Book of revelation in particular, the state is seen in its demonical nature. there is no empirical difference between the State that is presupposed in Romans 13 and the State in revelations 13. All of which means, of that what ever the New Testament is teaching on the issue of the state, it is not teaching that the conduct of Christians can be defined by their by the state, or by the relationship between the church and state.

One might argue that decisive changes in the nature of the state over the centuries, would require a new doctrine of Church state relations. In early Christian theology, the definition of the state, and an appreciation of the State as something with a value of its own became dominant in defining Church state relations. It became self evident that the obligations of a Christian toward the State were defined by the goals and standards of the State itself. Especially when the State has changed because the majority of its citizens are now Christians, it seems necessary to change the external acceptance and submission from the New Testament era to a more positive ethical political participation in the exercise of State power. As we will see, in particular the notion that the Democratic State is a product of Christianity, give rise to the idea that in our the relationship modern era to the State is completely different from that of the New Testament church.

It is certainly true that in New Testament does not have a doctrine of the state. But this should be seen as a positive statement. The New Testament teaches that no doctrine of the state is required to express the Christian duty toward the state. A Christian duty toward the State, therefore, is not derived from the nature of the state. It is a consequence of the Lordship of Christ. That is why the New Testament does not consider any theory on just war, just rebellion or crusades. Not only do we not need a doctrine of the state, having one might obscure the fundamental moral teaching of the New Testament.

If that is the case, the social and political changes in the character of the state, wouldn't really matter. A majority Christian society, would still have to be treated as a secular state, precisely because the character of being Christian has changed as well. In a Christian society, being a Christian means belonging to a specific religion, and it does not mean being a voluntary disciple of Christ. A society in which the Church is approved by the political authorities, such as happened in the constant time era, does not have the right to the tendon the values of the Church. The New Testament does not conceive of the attitude of the Church toward the State on the basis of the hostility of the civil authorities. The change in attitude on the part of the state cannot determine therefore, the attitude of the Church. The same goes for the modern ideal of a sovereignty of the people or a Democratic state. Democracy is a myth or ideology that has only descriptive value for a small village. And certainly does not mean that members of a democracy, including Christians, have a higher responsibility for their state, than citizens in any other form of state. And finally, since the 19th century the social and economic function of the state has been unequaled in history. The welfare state, that has provided a far greater guarantee for survival to the majority of its citizens than any other state in any other period before it, does so with the same kind of power, exercised by some over others. In the New Testament perspective, the main phenomenon connected to the State, is the exercise of power of one human being over an other by persuasion, threat or violence. The main principle is, that the Church should not expect such a power nor strife for it. The vision of the Free Church is the ideal to be free from all social structures that require power and violence for their existence. Apiece peace witness of the Free Church is simply the consequence of its being a community and that shares in Christ's death and suffering, and that takes the context of its ethical decisions from the gospel and the gospel alone.

In particular this proposition, that the relationship of the Church to the State, and the attitude of the Church to the exercise of power and violence of the state should not in any way be modified by the historical change in both institutions, is the thesis that needs to be examined. After all, the historical context of the teachings of the New Testament are a primitive Roman state, and a Christian church that had no guidance in the teachings of its master to do anything but endure the present era in order to enjoy the coming of the New World in the near future. And can it be maintained that the only relevance of history is the relevance and meaning of the Church, that defines the authentic meaning of all human events. Can we truly maintain that the Church is the primary political fact of history? Can it be so self evident, as John Yoder seems to think it is, that the fall of the Church is the fusion of church and state in the era of Constantine?

The Impossibility of Heresy or Why is Dogmatics Necessary?

2010-07-13T04:47:00.001-07:00

One of the first issues that needs to be decided, is the criterion of the knowledge that any dogmatics claims to be. There is a need to discuss the legitimacy of the dogmatic claim to know the truth of faith. That need is grounded in history. There is such a thing as a conflict of faith with or within itself. This conflict is basically the paradoxical fact of heresy.

Heresy as Contradiction
Although heresy is a shape of Christian faith and a possibility of interpretation that arises within the life of the Church, it is in truth to be considered a contradiction to faith. A contradiction to faith that claims to be the true faith, that tries to establish itself as the legitimate way of being Church. Heresy always starts as a contradiction to what already has been established. It is however not coming from the outside. Its motivation, its possibility is grounded in the content of faith.
It's quite common to find that an heresy emphasizes certain aspects of faith to the extent that others are lost out of sight. Yet, even if a heresy establishes itself successfully as a church or even establishes itself as the dominant and universal Church, it would still be contradiction, a deviation from the true shape of Christian faith. At least one can argue that basically this is the meaning of heresy. Any deviation of traditional faith, that is grounded upon a long Christian principle of understanding and seeks to refute and replace traditional face and ventures to base a separate church on it. That is a heresy. That implies that individual believers may be wrong or unclear about the criterion of face them deviates from the common confession or may entertain points of view that our difference, contradictory or downright hostile to the contents of the Gospel. But as long as they do not consider their points of view to be of such validity that others should follow them or if they do not try to ground a church on their opinions, they themselves would not be seen as heretics and neither would their doctrines be considered heretical.

Roman Catholicism and Modernism
Karl Barth established two points of view as basically heretical. The first one is Catholicism and the other is modernism. By discussing a twofold shape of Christian heresy, the question about the criterion of dogmatic knowledge has to be raised. In other words the questions what his revelation? And the question how do we use revelation to express the truth of faith. These questions can be on search in the context of discussion of this twofold heresy.
We have said that heresy is a contradiction to faith that claims to be the true faith. So how do these heresies themselves express the criterion of the truths of faith? By examining the way in which a heresy claims to be truthful, the status of the criterion is made clear.

Modernism
First of all we need to take a look at modernism. The Christian religion is conceived as a particular shape of a universal religion. A general understanding of human beings and their existence in the world, that is not specifically determined by the contents of Christian faith, is the starting point here. This assumption is not a philosophical understanding of the world would be logically prior to an understanding based on faith. The particularity of Christian faith will then be a secondary determination of a general possibility. All humans have some degree of religion. Religiousness is a universal trait of humanity. Christianity by default is just one way in which this universal religion becomes manifest. Christianity is just one of the ways in which human beings try to express their inner religion.

Roman Catholicism
Roman Catholicism is the second type of heresy that Karl Barth discusses. The point of origin for this heresy is not a universal outside church, but instead the particularity of the Church. Now it is argued that the meaning of the gospel can only be established and discerned from within the life of the Church. In a way revelation is now completely bound up with the institutions of the Church. As he explains: "the being of the Church, Jesus Christ, is no longer the sovereign Lord of its existence, but is totally bound up within the existence of the Church." Revelation becomes identified with the tradition of the Church.

The true criterion
In the examination of these two heresies it becomes clear what the real criterion of faith and dogmatics actually is. It is not an universal philosophy of the nature of humanity. It is not the priority of the traditions and institutions of the Church. Jesus Christ is not a symbol for a particular type of religious faith, nor is he identical to the church that he grounded. Jesus Christ is the Lord of humanity and the Lord of the Church. That means that his particularity has priority over both philosophy and the Church. He is the revelation of God. Jesus is God's self expression. Therefore he is not only the criterion of dogmatics, but also in a very full sense of the word the wisdom that supersedes philosophy and the sovereign spirit that rules the Church.
The criterion of dogmatics is the Word of God. Why is that the case? Because the being of the Church is Jesus Christ who is the Word of God. The church was called into existence by Jesus, and that existence in response to the call is only valid in as far as its reflects its origin.

That leads to a discussion of the threefold status of the Word of God. We will talk about that next time.

Teaching by Podcast

2010-07-06T04:49:00.001-07:00

Coming soon! In the mean time, check out the main site: http://HegelCourses.com.

Posted via email from Hegelpodcast

A Messy Bible and the Art of Comments

2010-06-29T08:58:00.001-07:00

Dinah is raped and Jacob's sons exterminate the people of Shechem. Kanaanites are being slaughtered because God commanded it. Families of Israel's enemies are being killed for the sins of their fathers. daniels accusers were thrown into the pit with the lions, as well as their wives and children for their crime against Daniel. The God of the (hebrew) Bible is vindictive and cruel.

That is a powerful attack on the integrity on the Bible. So much so, that there is hardly a reason left to read and study it. Something that most people don't do anyway. Not anymore. The bible thumpers read their New Testament or interpret the Old testament allegorically or as preparation of the New Testament of love and forgiveness. In all these cases - whether you turn to atheism, remain a Jew and turn to the Talmud or just live according to ancient tradition, become a Baptist or evangelical, the Old Testament is lost. isolated as a holy relic or critically judged as a Bronze Age expression of cruelty. Apart from some stories in Genesis, the message of the Hebrew Bible is lost.

There maybe a Jewish way out. According to David Plotz one needs to understand that the Bible is a book to be argued with. It wants to evoke commentary and argument. This jewish dialogue over the centuries is far more important than the Book itself. Bible commentary and Talmud are products of a living dialogue, Whereas the Bible is in most of its parts a weird book that we need to go beyond. Plotz in writing the book simply called The Good Book, wanted to take a look at the Bible as someone who had no commentary, no teachers, just as someone who wanted to read a book without any expectations. This fresh look at the Bible was then blogged and ultimately produced this book.

One of the comments at the Fora.TV channel neatly summarized the point:

I would say that the old testament writings were compiled and perpetuated by an extreme authoritarian patriarchal elite of hebrew society. This served to consolidate power and frighten a weak and lazy population into some sort of social cohesion. The success of their society we see today, for those of us who are the result of it. An illiterate inbred tribe who rose to greatness and influenced the world, it is a pretty unusual story in the history of anthropology.

"The Bible" continues to be a glimpse into the relationship of a weak childish majority led by a strong mature minority. Rebelling against that authority has been a Jewish pastime for millenia, resulting in a constant supply of genetic and philosophical apostasy. We, the Jews, are the "Sons of Seth", and The Bible has been the ox-goad that inspires us to be the contrarians we are.

You are getting the drift.

Now I fully agree that the Bible is a book to be argued with. Argument and conversation is an intrinsic part of the way the Bible has functioned over the centuries. Not just in Jewish culture. But there is a problem here.

When confronted with a religious tradition in a society, there are basically two ways to deal with its authority. Against the simple acceptance and enforcement of that tradition one can choose the 'reflected life.' In stead of using the argument of authority, we make an appeal to reason and that means ultimately, consent. That is the path of Socratic philosophy, epitomized - though it would have surprised Socrates himself I'm sure - in the Politeia by Plato. That huge dialog is basically a conversation about Justice, a philosophical analysis of the tradition of social ethics and why a more rational approach is superior. Tradition is set aside, we move beyond it, and find a new source of authority. So we do what someone remarked during the David Plotz lecture: move beyond it, give it up.

Plato tried to enforce this rational solution in Syracuse, but it wouldn't work. The people resisted it, the King was not as persistent as he should have been, and there was a quarrel about the way to implement Plato's wonderful political solutions. The point of this being, that Plato represented the power and the majority that were supposed to deliver the groundwork of his political edifice. Still it didn't work.

Next to that is a different kind of solution that Plato never had to envision. What if you're a minority in a large society that has a totally different mindset and culture than your own? Plato's solution of the 'reflected life' wouldn't work here to maintain identity and guarantee survival. Israel would have been totally assimilated within Babylonian culture if it had tried to do so - it it ever had been a real possibility of course.

But what if you maintain the old traditions by writing them down, fixing in a way the religious culture that you have, but immediately set up a culture of debate, a 'legal' culture, which is directed towards the practical demands of every day life?

The Biblical texts are there, because there was a context in which they were edited and re-written, that was from the start contradictory to the original context of the stories. Setting them in the new context of the canon, making them part of a literature that is set up like a three story house: Torah - ground-floor, prophets - first floor, and then the Writings, second floor. All of that means that the moment and occasion of their publication lies in the communal conversation that existed between laymen, Priests and Levites, who ached for a return to the home land they had lost qwhen jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. They never functioned within the life of the people apart from the process of commentary. Maybe there were parts of Leviticus active for the priests when there was a Temple in Jerusalem. Maybe there were the stories of Genesis as retold by the Scribes. Only late in history we find reference to the book of Deuteronomy. Compared to the centuries in which the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings were part of a commentating, criticizing and arguing culture, the life span of the 'original' bible was very short indeed.

So what is my point?

That the story if Dinah is about justice that is raped. That the conduct of the sons of Jacob is depicted as despicable, because Israel - the later name of Jacob - is supposed to act differently from other nations. Because only from the whole context of the Bible and the motives and context of its insertion into the national culture, can it be read properly. If you decide to forget all of that, you wind up indeed with a messy text - the text of a book that never functioned in the ay we are reading it. Fragments of a culture that may have given rise to the text, but did not give rise to the book. Messy text indeed, but that is not valid for the book and its original community of readers. In fact, it is an invitation for a social self-reflecting community, that cannot simply set its traditions aside, but is empowered through commentary to make the changes in the law that really count for daily life.

Posted via email from Biblical Hebrew

Genesis 12:1 in Hebrew - Translation and Grammar - Advanced Biblical Hebrew

2010-06-28T04:47:00.001-07:00

Download now or watch on posterous

Gen 12 vs 1.wmv (3770 KB)

This is the first (experimental) post on Biblical Hebrew. My intention is to put a complete source on this site. For the time being just an explanation andtranslation of Genesis 12:1.

Posted via email from Biblical Hebrew

From the History of Political Systems: Constitutional Democracy

2010-05-25T09:13:00.000-07:00

In the previous post I have argued that to Hegel a state cannot be a formal democracy because it then ceases to be modern i.e. rational. That is why for Hegel not democracy, but constitutional monarchy is the exemplary form of the modern state.
This of course implies first, that the modern state is the result of a historical process of emancipation from an absolutist or authoritarian tradition. It seems probable that a republic is equal to a constitutional monarchy because in both cases sovereignty as such is represented by a head of state.
A more difficult issue is the implication of the system in the United States in which the president is at the same time the head of state and the head of government.
For Hegel however, the separation of sovereignty and government is essential to the modern state. The constitutional monarchy expresses a relationship between the visible representation of sovereign power and the reality of the individual citizen. It demonstrates that the execution of power should be consistent with the individual consciousness of the citizen from which it receives its ultimate legitimacy. The king in this system is no longer the head of government as it was in the classical and early modern era of political philosophy. Government is no longer the exercise of a particular prerogative. The political execution of power does not coincide with the principle of sovereignty that is expressed in an individual. To Hegel all of this is far more important than the formality of democratic procedure.
In a constitutional monarchy, three different powers should be politically separate, albeit in such a manner that each of them has an organic connection with the others. In paragraph 273 Hegel distinguishes between the legislative power that creates justice of the governmental power, that applies the law all, and the royal power that symbolizes the principle of sovereignty.
For our purpose, it is important to see how Hegel ascribes to the monarch the function to represent the principle of subjectivity. Freedom remains abstract if it can only be understood as a principle of the sovereignty of the state. The truth of subjectivity is shown concretely in a specific person. That idea would be lost if one would say that the freedom of the modern state is a formal principle, i.e. the abstract principle of individuality. We could say that the equality before, the basic rights of individuals are the expression of the modern ideal of civil autonomy. To Hegel that would only be formal, because this individuality would know where become concrete, whereas concrete existence belongs to the determinacy of individuals. In a paradoxical manner, an abstract principle of individuality, meaning that each of us should be treated as an individual, cannot express real individuality. We should remember that in Hegel's view the state should give an expression to concrete autonomous subjectivity, i.e. at least reflect it.
The modern King is the concrete subject in which sovereignty, i.e. the autonomy of freedom, appears concretely in a self-conscious person. In this single subject it becomes visible that our individuality might have become part of a social order but remains autonomous. The king has no real power that would set him apart as a particular person over against the people. His power is the possibility to be the symbol of an autonomous freedom of all, because that freedom is the property of every one; and not in an immediate sense, but within the mediation of the social order. The signature under a law represents the necessity of a subject giving his consent and affirming the objective contents of the law. Because the King in his individuality does not represent himself, but symbolizes our common individuality, his specific character is not immediately relevant.
In this transcendence of the king's individual will toward a political will that focuses on the common good as such, the king has become a symbol. Sovereignty in the modern state is not an external force outside individual citizens, but the symbolic expression of the coherence of a social and political order, in which individuals can maintain their own autonomy. Such a symbol is necessary in the modern state to make the difference between arbitrary sovereignty and government.
So what are the consequences of this for Peace Theology?

From the History of Political Systems: Modern Democracy

2010-05-21T09:10:00.000-07:00

In modern characterizations of democracy this assumption of an immediate harmony between particular and universal interests, is lacking. To a modern consciousness, there can be no such thing as an objective social morality. What we mean by democracy is precisely the subjective procedure of debate among citizens about their common interests - in order to find out what they are - and their different interests and goals - in order to find resolution of conflict in a compromise.

Everybody should be heard concerning the issues that affect his own interests, both immediately and with regard to the intermediate social order.
Hegel however makes it clear, that this notion of democracy remains abstract, as far as the particular will is not focused on the general and objective interest of the social order. It is possible for a private citizen to represent nothing else but his own interests, i.e. political patriotism might be a rare commodity. This notion of a private morality, the possibility that personal convictions and evaluations constitute an inner and subjective freedom that ignores the social order even though it depends on it, makes it impossible to rely on an objective social morality. It is no longer the existing social morals, nor the positively given Law that is the highest principle, but in this modern age of liberty, it is the individual positions, appreciations, convictions that represent the highest principle.
Greek democracy, as a way of unifying the universal and the particular in one single "social nature" can only be effective in small cities and is completely dependent on slavery. Only an economy that gives its citizens the possibility to devote a large portion of their time to political activities can hope to achieve such a high standard of democratic decision making.
Hegel does not understand the modern state primarily as a system of democratic government. It is not democracy that makes the state modern. The modernity of the state is the balance between private will and social order based on political consciousness, i.e. the inner coherence of state-power and individual liberty. The true state will in some manner reflect the self-consciousness of individuals. It all depends to a high degree on the way in which the institutions of the state have been organized. Only if state institutions are the visible reflections of the particular will and only if they include private interest, can the social order claim to be recognized as such. Then and only then it is the highest duty of every citizen to be a faithful member of the state: political patriotism.
It follows that according to Hegel the problem of the modern state is not becoming undemocratic, but the danger that the state, even if the execution of sovereign power is organized as a democracy, does in fact cut off the intrinsic connection between the exercise of power and the liberty of the citizen. It is obvious to Hegel that there can be something like a Democratic positivism that defends the social order as it happens to be with the ideology of democratic decision making. If it becomes impossible to criticize the rationality of social structures, then it becomes obvious that even in a democracy power is a identified with justice.
In general, Hegel indicates that all states have come into being by an exercise of violence. We might call this a right of power, to constitute a social order by force. As soon as the state is there, it can only protect its social order by instituting an exclusive power of justice. The right of power, though it can appear within the actual exercise of sovereignty in the state, cannot be its constitutive principle. The legitimacy of the state is grounded by the power of justice.
What does this power of justice actually mean? If justice is defined as the system of Law as it is given, that can be no difference between the right of power and the power of justice. According to Hegel that evil state belongs exclusively to the realm of existence. It is there, but it does not express the rational nature of the state. In a democratic positivism, the irrationality of the state is being camouflaged by its appeal to the formal correctness of its procedures of decision-making.
Not the rationality but the legitimacy of such a decision is the issue. If a democracy, that wants to be more than the modern equivalent of the polis, would focus on the rationality of the political will, then it would be the content of decisions and not the formal procedure that shows it. The procedure of decision making then becomes accidental to rationality as a quality of decisions.
This means that a good democracy comes to decisions based on the quality of its institutions and not based on the formal correctness of its procedures. To demand that a state is democratic in a formal sense of the word implies the assumption that all of its individuals have such an inner and free devotion to the common interest, that procedural legitimacy can be a sufficient principle. That however is an ideological assumption that assumes that people are just citizens: rational beings. Whereas they are also simply human beings, being driven by basic needs as well as irrational impulses.

From the History of Political Systems: Greek Democracy

2010-05-18T09:06:00.000-07:00

Hegel was of the opinion that this reality of the modern state was reached in a historical development, in which the Reformation and the French Revolution were decisive moments. Political history according to Hegel began with the kind of theocracy that was characteristic of ancient China.

The state exercised its sovereignty both in the legal and in the moral sphere of life. Justice and morality are confused. The Monarch rules as a patriarch, in the sense that he and he alone acts for the common good. In Greek democracy the unity of individuality common well-being was a principle, nevertheless the individual was treated largely as something that belonged to the life of the community, the polis.

The Classical State: Greek Democracy

In Greek democracy, a free citizen did not have to deal with his own corny and particular interests, because he did not have to perform labor. A free citizen of a Greek democracy was also a carefree citizen. In the Roman Empire the opposition between the consciousness of a particular individual and the state being no more than the abstract universality of common interest, led to a real opposition between state sovereignty and individual existence. A typical modern antithesis appears here: individual interests are at odds with the power of sovereignty. In medieval feudalism an individual could exercise stately power. The Lord of the land was the absolute ruler of a peasant population. The universality of a people was subservient to the particularity of a nobleman.

Hegel's depiction of the history of political structures, in particular his understanding of Greek democracy, is important in understanding that the modern character of the modern state does not rest on the analogy between the Greek democracy to our contemporary Western form of government. The fact e.g. that Greece, or rather Athens, could be considered as a state of justice, because "its laws were understood to be valid because they were a given", or because the exercise of power was seen as something that had to be legitimized both legally and morally, or the fact that all men were seen to be equal before the Law (in the Athenian Constitution by Solon), or the idea that true democracy should have a foundation in political patriotism, all of this is not Constitution of the modern state, but of the classic polis.

In the classic polis, the individual is seen as a subject of positive rights, nevertheless the essential feature of Greek society is the common, public cause. The public cause is the "substance", i.e. the essence and the objective reality, that precedes all other elements of society. The citizens of the polis are not required to approve or affirm the public cause. Hegel speaks about the ethos, or "natural social morality" or of the objective will, to describe this relationship between individual and public cause. In the realm of social morality, the law is valid, simply because it is there. The validity of laws is analogous to what is necessary by nature.

In this concept of the relationship between individual and state, the reflective consciousness, that allows the individual to understand both his participation in the community and his being, separate and on its own against the community, is lacking. The tension between individual conscience and the universal community is not yet adequately expressed. The state can still be seen as an organism, that exercises its own interest through each of its constituent members. The democracy of Athens is precisely that Constitution in which we find the immediate connection between common and private interest, the abstract unity of political will.

Peace with my Fellow Man

2010-05-17T06:56:00.000-07:00

It is hard enough to keep the peace. It is still more difficult to bring peace where it is not. Blessed are therefore the peacemakers — who not only study peace, but diffuse it. But how is this done?

Mat 5:9 God blesses those people who make peace. They will be called his children!

But who are those that ‘make peace?” If you accept the reality and legitimacy of war and strife you might say that it is about people who are ‘doing their best to make peace.’

Those who strive to prevent contention, strife, and war; who use their influence to reconcile opposing parties, and to prevent lawsuits and hostilities in families and neighborhoods. (Barnes Commentary on Mat 5:9)

Sounds good? Prevention of conflict, to influence others to reconciliation. What could be wrong about that? Isn’t that our normal view of a peacekeeper?
Again, the ordinary view would be:

A peace-maker is a man who, being endowed with a generous public spirit, labors for the public good, and feels his own interest promoted in promoting that of others: therefore, instead of fanning the fire of strife, he uses his influence and wisdom to reconcile the contending parties, adjust their differences, and restore them to a state of unity.

Well, there is nothing wrong with that, but it becomes wrong when we think that that is the full meaning of peacemakers. It would then refer to an individual effort to diminish as much as one can the level of violence in this world, assuming that violence is here to stay. It’s about fighting symptoms rather than providing the cure.
When we speak of peace, we understand it in two ways. First, there is negative peace. Negative peace means the absence of violence, typically through coercion rather than cooperation. Our legal systems provide that, because a decision is reached about who was wrong and who was right. In that sense, negative freedom can be called ‘order’ because it merely prevents worse forms of violence than there were in in the initial conflict. A ‘peace-officer’ can be called a peacemaker in this sense, but he is otherwise known as a policeman.
The second way of understanding peace is as positive peace. Positive peace implies reconciliation and restoration through creative transformation of conflict. Now the conflict is not merely resolved by one being right and the other being wrong, but by the establishment of a new relationship.
Curiously enough, St. Augustine had something to say about that:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

He does not say, “But I say unto you,” that you are not to return evil for evil; although even this would be a great precept: but He says, “that ye resist not evil;” so that not only are you not to pay back what may have been inflicted on you, but you are not even to resist other inflictions.

This is peacemaking: not to resist evil! It is the change that occurs in the attitude of the one who threatens or attacks you, when you turn the other cheek. It is the offering of your own vulnerability, reminding your enemy who he is as well: a human being like yourself. It is the provocation of violence: “Do you really mean what you’re doing? Is there really a reason for your violence against me?”
So peacemaking is the practice of non-resistance. But what is that as a practice?

Political Patriotism

2010-05-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

The political attitude, basic to all political points of view and in coherence with this basic solidarity amongst the citizens of the state, is called political patriotism.

The qualification "political" implies the exclusion of nationalism. Hegel does not identify this political patriotism with the willingness to defend one’s own state by force and to sacrifice one self in that endeavor. There is no duty towards the nation or to one’s own people.

Political patriotism is based on the insight that the state even when it acts in conflict to my own immediate self interests, remains the expression of a positive relationship between myself and others: guaranteeing the social order is ultimately in my own best interest.

In other words, ultimately my private interests coincide with others in the area of the general conditions that allow me to pursue my own. A pure individualistic self-interest is not possible in the modern state, despite the fact that subjective freedom is its founding principle. Unrestrained freedom ignores the necessary interconnection that binds my life with those of others. The principle of liberty, if understood concretely, makes it a visible that my liberty is not just restricted by the liberty of others, but it is dependent on the exercise of liberty by others. This connection is the reality of the state.

Although the modern state is ultimately dependent on the principle of subjective freedom, there is a conflict between the exercise of force or violence by the state and the exercise of private interests by individuals.

In modern theories of the state since the 16th century, it is assumed that state violence is grounded on the freedom of the sovereign, or any other institution that exercises ultimate sovereignty within the state. The justifications of the exercise of violence are based on a particular freedom against all. Only in this manner the eternal conflict of interest of all against all can be avoided.

The modern state is not about restraining this conflict of interest by force, but about creating a real coherence of individuals in a common social order, excluding the eternal struggle of private interests.

But, as such she remained an ideal.

Is the State Divine According to Hegel?

2010-05-14T09:02:00.000-07:00

Let us turn our attention now to the contents of Hegel's doctrine of the state. One thing needs to be dealt with first. Did Hegel – and does modern social theory – in a way make the State divine? Isn’t that Hegel’s major sin, to think that the Prussian State was the realization of the Kingdom of God?

Let’s examine that thesis.
The concept of the State is the final piece of his analysis of the so-called objective spirit. It is

The sphere in which the human mind aspires to the realization of its freedom by means of the legitimate social structures in which the human personality as a subject, i.e. as a center of understanding, action and meaning, can come to its own.

(Cf. L. Fleischhacker, "Hegels theorie van de oorlog in het licht van de kernbewapening." p. 269.) The State is the highest form of those social structures because it expresses the autonomous self-determination of the subject, including the social order and the life of the people as such.
Based on these introductory remarks on the nature of Hegel's social philosophy, I will now try to clarify directly his understanding of the State as modern state. In every discussion of Hegel's concept of the State, it is necessary to remove an obstacle that seems to block any kind of understanding. In the additional remark to paragraph 258 of his philosophy of Right, Hegel writes:

This essential being realizes it self as an independent power, in which particular individuals are but moments: the State is the movement of God in the world (es ist der Gang Gottes in der Welt, dass der Staat ist): its foundation is the power of reason that realizes it self as will.

The same thought seems to be present when Hegel writes in paragraph 270:

The State is the divine will as the present Spirit, that unfolds itself to become the real shape and organization of a world.

(Der Staat ist göttlicher Wille als gegenwärtiger, sich zur wirklichen Gestalt und Organisation einer Welt entfaltender Geist.)
Critics of Hegel usually understand these texts to be a glorification of the modern State. If we translate the sentence that begins with "Es ist der Gang..." with "...the State is the movement of God in the world " we identify the State with God. That hardly seems to be Hegel's intent. A more accurate version would be: " it is God's way in the world that that there is a state. "
In the second quotation it seems as if the State is a identified with the divine will without further qualification. On second thought Hegel tries to express the nature of the State with an accuracy that allows for a limitation. The State can be called the divine will (or rather willed by God) insofar as the State can be conceived as the Spirit that gives itself a real shape and is present as an organized world. The identification of the State and the divine will is placed under a limit. Not everything that happens in the State is as such willed by God. Hegel writes that the State is not a work of art; it stands in the world ,which means that it needs to exist in the sphere of arbitrariness, of coincidences and mistakes, and it is possible that it becomes disfigured by evil conduct on many sides. Hegel remarks in this context, that even a criminal remains a living being. In the same manner a State should still be recognized as State despite its flaws.

NOTE It also important to keep in mind that not everything that happens in a spiritual sense is primarily a reality of the State. According to Rosenzweig the limit is here expressed by the phrase "in the world." Above the world of social morality, above the visible organization of the social order, there is a final kingdom that is no longer an organization; there is an ultimate being-with-it-self of the soul, in which she is lonely like she was before she developed herself to a world of objective Spirit. Above the State are the spheres of art, religion and science (philosophy) that together constitute a kingdom of loneliness. We can certainly derive from this that to Hegel the State is only the highest principle in the sphere of objective spirit and history.

The existence of the state, however, is a part of God's dealing with the world. The remark must be made that all of this does not define any given State in an empirical sense. Hegel speaks about the real, i.e. rational state. It is not about the State as it appears to be in history, but about its rational foundations on the basis of which we recognize the State despite what she is in actual fact. In certain instances, Hegel speaks about the idea of the State to express this.
A Different Understanding: Why is the State Divine?
The relationship between the State and the absolute or divine can also be understood differently. The spiritual or rational nature of man, becomes a visible only in the state, but according to Hegel its appearance is still fragmentary, provision and limited. Only in the State does man live in an organized world, in a social order that allows him to expresses his spiritual nature.
This intrinsic connection between man and the state seems to be the most important insight that Hegel wanted to discuss. Even if the state in practice seems to be nothing but a system of force and violence, even then the state must in principle be coherent with the subjective will of the individual. The most striking feature of the modern state according to Hegel is, that the exercise of state power cannot be understood ultimately as mere violence or as a foreign intrusion. That is why Hegel can define the state as "the reality of concrete liberty. " (Paragraph 260)
More accurately the state appears in this respect in a twofold manner. Over against the ways of existence of family and civil society it appears as as an extrinsic coercion, external and foreign to particular interests.
At the same time, the state is the inner goal of the exercise of particular liberties. Because of the state the concern with private interests becomes possible. Within the social or other one can only prosper by advancing one's own interest, in so far as this order is recognized as such. The social order is a product of the state that requires the exercise of force, but needs no violence. The state organizes the social order most often by nonviolent coercion. What holds a society together is a fundamental feeling of a shared social order.

Violence therefore does not define the essential function of the state.

Violence is only the ultimate means at the disposal of the state, with which she can defend itself, i.e. the social order as such, that is a prerequisite of the exercise of private interests. The state is defined more by this shared feeling of the necessity of a common social order, then by the external violence that the state sometimes needs to apply in order to defend that social order.
In Hegel’s view therefore, the State is necessarily violent, because it protects the social order that people depend upon. But violence and the use of force should be distinguished. The essence of the State is not violence, even if she has to exercise itself in the form of non-violent coercion.
This is the ideal reality or the real ideal of the State according to Hegel. But is it also the reality of the State according to its empirical appearance?

The Definition of the State: Moving Toward Hegel

2010-05-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

Theology does not work in a vacuum. It is sometimes easy to see what kind of assumptions are used when constructing a theological proposition. We talked about Brunner’s use of a theory of the State in the first post in this series. We said:

On the one hand, he accepts the State as a social order of justice; on the other hand, he defines the State as the power that tries to execute justice by force and coercion. Only when this power becomes excessive, can the State be denied.

It seems obvious that the first part of this definition of the state is modern. The State as an expression of the social order is an early 19th century concept.
The second part of this definition however, is pre-modern because it simply identifies the use of force with the sovereignty of the State. The identity of the state and the sovereign power brings it closer to biblical notions of the State as a rebellious power.
The problem however, might be that the modern state is not adequately understood by this juxtaposition of two totally different principles. It is not clear why the state would execute violence if it were the expression of the social order of a people, unless the social order as such is worth defending. The welfare of a people does seem to be intrinsically connected to the social order – whoever threatens that order, threatens the very survival of the people. That seems to be a modern situation, or is it?
For now, it seems important to achieve a better understanding of the nature of the modern State.
Why would we need to move on to Georg Hegel for that adequate understanding of the modern state?
There are many reasons to consider Hegel's Philosophy of Right - lectures given in 1821 - to be one of the most important texts of modern philosophy. Hegel's political philosophy had a profound influence on Western political thought. No other work has been so focused on the inner coherence of the social order. Without exaggeration, it can be said that the Spirit of modern society is expressed in Hegel's Philosophy of Right in an exemplary way. His systematic description of the inner structure of the social order gave us the basic categories of subsequent forms of social philosophy, and through Marxism and neo-Marxism, it has deeply influenced the 20th century debate.
We need to iterate what we said before, the reason why we are on this arduous path toward Social Theory. this is the intuition we work with.

A theology of peace is in need of a theory of the modern state.

It seems self evident that Hegel has a key role to play or least that he is one of the most important partners in dialogue.
Yet it is altogether not clear how we can move beyond a recognition of the differences between a philosophical concept of the State and Biblical notion of government, power and the city that we want to use as guidelines in Christian social ethics.
This uncertainty arises as soon as we realize that Hegel's philosophy of Right is a systematic reflection on the self realization of liberty. It seems obvious that only a Liberal concept of the State would allow the notion of liberty to have such a prominent place.
This uncertainty increases as soon as we become aware that Hegel's concept of liberty has no direct analogies with the modern Western democracies. We might suspect that Hegel's thought is too much connected with an outdated image of authoritarian government. It seems as if one needs to hold certain political views in order to take Hegel's political philosophy seriously.
Yet there is a way of reading that turns out to be fruitful for a theology of peace.
The reading of Hegel that I want to present here will emphasize phenomena that Hegel considers typically modern, i.e. those elements of the social order that can be understood in conformity with the idea of self-realizing liberty.
Secondarily we will deal with the question to what extent the theological ethics of Karl Barth and John Howard Yoder has understood this modern character of the State sufficiently.

Pacifism and the State: Why We Need Theory.

2010-05-12T08:11:00.001-07:00

One of the reasons that a pacifist theology should deal with the notion of the modern state is the connection between sovereignty and the right to use force. But it seems necessary to develop a theory of the State or at least to find one that is suitable for our theological concerns, that deals with the modern state. In contemporary peace theology this task is hardly ever understood as vital to its relevancy.

Historically, theories of the state have influenced theological decisions. According to Emil Brunner e.g. any acceptance of the state necessarily implies the acceptance of the violence that the state requires in order to protect its own existence. That presupposes that the State is an entity that, analogous to human beings, has a right to self-defense, is entitled to survive as such. But what if the notion of the State is purely abstract? Or just an element of an ideology? What if the notion of the State – as Gerard Burdeau would have it – is an ideological pretense of the political power behind it? At this stage these are just questions, but they do indicate that a more detailed understanding of the nature of the State is in order when constructing a peace theology position.
In theology, this appeal to a right of self-defense has a long history. One might be tempted to argue in an abstract ethical manner against the necessity of self-defense as such. In a sweeping statement both the individual’s pretended right and that of the State are swept away. But that leave us vulnerable to the argument that precisely because the State has not given up this right to self-defense an individual can be entitled to give it up. Since Jon Locke’s Leviathan this seems to be the logical argument: the State steps in to do, what we as individuals cannot do on moral grounds: defend ourselves by force. For that exactly we need the State.
But isn’t it even more relevant to understand why Brunner would posit this right to survival for the State? And what then is the State? Why is it possible to apply the notion of self-defense to the State? In the theology of Emil Brunner the concept of the State remains ambiguous. On the one hand, he accepts the State as a social order of justice; on the other hand, he defines the State as the power that tries to execute justice by force and coercion. Only when this power becomes excessive, can the State be criticized.
In the next blog we will take a look at Brunner's definition of the State and why it is pertinent to the question of a Peace Theology.

New Forum

2010-05-11T05:07:00.001-07:00

Hi all,

Because the Ning network will be closing down per July 1st of this year, I thought we would start all over again. This time in English, and this time just as part of a blog.
The aim is to create a blogging network that will help us stay in touch and have a consistent conversation about the Peace Witness of the Church and all theological issues related to that.
Everyone is cordially invited to join in.

Just press the FORUM page tab on top of this page and check it ouit.

Shalom!

Biblical Hebrew on my my blog "Mennonite Peace Theology"?

2010-05-04T11:40:00.000-07:00

Hi there,

I made a page on my blog www.robbertveen.blogspot.com where I put some video's with my reading of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 22: 1 - 11 for now. I made them in Dutch for a friend of mine, but of course, they can be in English as well.

I'm curious to know if anyone would be interested in that, so I am starting a series on Genesis soon in Hebrew and English to find out.

If you find the idea interesting check out the format in Dutch. Even if you don't understand it - well the Dutch might be more difficult than the Hebrew for some of you - tell me if you like it.

I presuppose:

a basic knowledge of Hebrew grammar
an intense interest in understanding the biblical text in its original language.

If you don't have the first: would you be interested in a basic course in Hebrew?

If you don't have the second, I will also prepare lectures on the same passages just in English, with a bit more emphasis on the interpretation of the standard translations.

If you have an opinion on this and want to be involved in this new summer project, please write to me at:

raveen1956@hotmail.com

lehitraoot - bye bye

The Zeist conference in 1951: answers to the World Council position

2010-04-29T19:00:00.000-07:00

In 1951 in the Dutch town of Zeist a conference was held by the historic peace churches (Quakers, Hutterites, Mennonites) and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation.

It intended to formulate a response to the position of the World Council of churches in 1948. The text opens with two paragraphs that emphasize not only God's providence, but also the revelation in Christ. First we hear:

"... God is seeking to express his will in relation to international affairs... "

"The will God was made known in the life of Christ..."

From this dual perspective a stronger theological declaration becomes possible:

"We are convinced that Christian pacifism and nonresistance is the true interpretation of the teaching and example of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament... we believe that this is the only principle consistent with the gospel and we desire to lay it upon the consciousness of all."

This joint declaration was appended by the representatives of the Mennonite Church with a statement that expressed other theological foundations. What is so remarkable in that appendix, are the so-called added grounds. Apart from arguments from biblical theology, it seems that the Mennonite theologians in Zeist wanted to present support from experience.
Among the things mentioned are the impossibility to control or limit violence on the scale of war " as demonstrated in human experience" (p. 51); the destructive force of hatred; the illusion and deception of victory that turns the victor into an oppressor. Some of these elements have an obvious similarity to conditions of be justified war. The necessity of limited violence, and the imperative to conclude war with a lasting peace, i.e. a genuine reconciliation.
But even the arguments taken from experience do not constitute an analogy with secular pacifism. The concluding point of the appendix is the rejection of humanitarianism as a valid expression of this particular Christocentric pacifism.
So the conclusion can be drawn: Christian pacifism is not based on faith in

"the simple power of man's good will and humane action to transform human nature and thus to make the use of force unnecessary in society."

Three Arguments to Unconfuse State and Church

2010-04-27T19:09:00.000-07:00

In all of the declarations that have been made over the years by Mennonites, Brethren and Quakers, albeit in an unreflective manner.
It is more and more necessary to give a precise meaning to the terminology and positions that were developed to express peace witness.

The first World Council of Churches had already in 1948 made an appeal to the theologians:

"...we believe that there is a special call for theologians to consider the theological problems involved."

So let’s examine the concepts and strategies that the Historic peace Churches put forward in 1951 and beyond.

Supranational Church

In the witness of the Historic Peace Churches the idea of a supranational unity of the Church, without any room for national and racial opposition, was used frequently. The people of God testify to peace in the context of a society that is beyond its control. The notion of a free Church becomes important here. What exactly is the relationship between the Church of Christ and the national State?
In some of the positions that were represented in the World Council of churches, a positive relationship between Christians and the state was implied. For many it was a Christian duty to defend the state at any cost. The notion of the Free Church, defined as "any Church without an organic relationship with a government" suggested that the historic peace churches just happened to find themselves in a situation without a positive and affirmative relation to politics. The word "free" in this context would mean "without connection by accident."

Church and State

In 1965 John Howard Yoder used the word in a deeper sense in an article with the title "Church and State according to a Free Church tradition." Now the word ‘free’ refers here to an adequate vision of the freedom of the entire Church of Jesus Christ. In essence, the liberty of the Church is expressed in the fact that its relationship to government is not defined by the state, so that the historical changes of the state do not determine correlative changes in the attitude of the Church.

Ever since the age of Constantine there is a common assumption among Christians that the duties of a Christian as a member of the political community are identical to his duties to a government. That would imply that the vision of the state also defines the standards for Christian behavior. From Constantine on, Christians see themselves as responsible agents of State decision and action.

ARGUMENT 1
Starting from a biblical position, Yoder argues that Jesus affirms and accepts the fact that the State exists. They should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. But in the same context his disciples are admonished that they are to be different. Instead of trying to rule and govern they’re bound by the example of Christ's servanthood. Based on Christ’s Lordship, Christians should accept people in office and submit to imperial power.
ARGUMENT 2
The second argument is derived from the peculiar nature of the Church. If the building of the Church is the primary political fact of history, then the Church or rather Christ as the head of the Church is the only source for ethics. If the Church is the nearest thing to a true polis or state, if the Church is the visible manifestation of a viable society, then the Church sets the standard for the state and not the other way around.
ARGUMENT 3
Finally, within the New Testament, in the Book of revelation in particular, the state is seen in its demonical nature. There is no empirical difference between the State that is presupposed in Romans 13 and the State in revelations 13. All of which means, of that what ever the New Testament is teaching on the issue of the state, it is not teaching that the conduct of Christians can be defined by their citizenship of a community or by the symbiosis between the church and state.

The World Council makes a statement on war

2010-04-27T18:56:00.000-07:00

The difference of opinion among Christians is an indication of a shared responsibility for the continuance of violence and war.

A simple and absolute moralism cannot play a role of great significance here. At least we should accept that Christians that have reached other conclusions with regard to peace issues, remain brothers and sisters in Christ.
Yet ir remains a proper task in our theological conversation to note the differences.
The World Council of Churches adopted the notion of peace witness as part of its agenda in 1948. It argued that war is a consequence of sin and not inevitable; God's providential power makes it possible to further the cause of peace with success.
The difference of opinion among Christians is reflected in the two positions that are mentioned in the 1948 council documents:

modern warfare cannot be an act of justice because of the massive destruction that goes along with it, and
military involvement is the ultimate sanction employed by the power of justice and it is necessary to defend the social order, even by violence.

It is somewhat remarkable that we find a plea for the position of Immanuel Kant that only an international order of justice can guarantee peace among nations. In order to achieve that, the state must give up part of its national sovereignty. Institutions should be created in which conflicts between states are resolved by arbitration and by which the causes of armed conflict are dealt with as a basis for such an international order of justice the World Council appeals to the notion of human rights and fundamental rights of liberty.

Historic Peace Churches

2010-04-26T18:51:00.001-07:00

The expression "Historic Peace Churches" is used since 1935 to refer to the collective pacifist persuasions of the Quakers, the Church of the Brethren and the Mennonites. Within the World Council of churches they have spoken on behalf of a Christian Peace witness.

In 1935 a conference was held in Newton, Kan., in which the position of the peace churches was defined for the first time. The nucleus of this position is no doubt the sixth proposition that opens with the statement that war is sin. There is a simple moral consequence:

"Therefore, we cannot support or engage in any war or conflict between nations, classes or groups."

"1. Our peace principles are rooted in Christ and his word."

Secondarily, there is a role for the tradition, in line with the idea that we are dealing with historic Peace Churches, that have an analogous or shared history. It says:

"... remembering in gratitude to God ,the historic or testimony of our churches... in absolute renunciation of war..."

"... we are determined to follow Christ in all things. In this determination we believe we are serving the interests of our country, and are truly loyal to our nation."

In a positive sense pacifism or Christian Peace is present as a "spirit of sacrificial service, love and goodwill," and only thus can the common good of the nation be served.
In the series of conferences that followed this first meeting a number of principles were presented that have subsequently determined the discourse of Christian pacifism. In 1937, in Oxford, we find the ecclesiological notion of the Church as

"a universal brotherhood, a society with a unity so deep as to be indestructible by earthly divisions of race or nation or class."

The main principle that is connected to the peace witness by these representatives of the Historic Peace Churches, is the authority and the example of Christ. Only Christ is Lord and only his life is normative for human conduct. His commandment to love the neighbor but also the enemy, is absolute because of his authority.
It seems self evident that Christians in other traditions will also obey the ultimate commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself. It also seems clear that they would take this commandment to be absolute in all situations and circumstances. It is not clear whether such a consensus exists with regard to the commandment to love the enemy and the exhortation

"if possible, as far as depends on you, live in peace with all men and do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to wrath; for it is written, Vengeance belongs to me, I will recompense, saith the Lord." (Rom. 12:18, 19)

With regard to the problem of war a major disunity among Christians comes to light, that weakens their common witness. Roughly we can discern three different positions:

Some will take the reality of sin or moral weakness in this world as their starting point.

They do expect Christians to contribute to the reduction of violence in the world, without that leading to a position of strict pacifism. The State is an institution ordained by God, that is called to guarantee a just social order. If the state is threatened, it is a Christian duty to defend it by force. The only exception to that rule might be when a state starts a war of aggression.

Some would like to limit the involvement of Christians in war to the exceptional case of a justified war.

That would imply a specific doctrine of what constitutes acceptable occasion and means of war. This so-called theory of the justifiable war and goes back to Augustine, was modified by Luther and has continued to be used in a secular context. The decision of the United States to use force against Iraq in the Gulf Wars is acceptable if the state has the final word, but no longer acceptable if support from the United Nations was lacking. It is obvious that the five conditions for in the tradition of Augustine and Luther were not met in this case.

Some, however, will argue that war is a sin in every age and despite its goal.

It is seen to be in conflict with the intentions of the creator. Peace however, is ingrained in the universe and war is a perversion of our own nature.
The role of the Church in Society stands or falls with her peace witness. Instead of the costly preparation for war, society would be best served with the intensive labor of peace.

The existential or ethical appropriation of the Creeds

2010-04-26T17:22:00.000-07:00

Beyond a historical approach one might value one text over another because we value its meaning above others.

We may take Homer’s Illiad as source material for heroic and consistent behavior. We might read the gospels as a collection of valuable insights for our own moral discernment. We may even attach normativity to a subject in one of these texts when we read the text as sacred or inspired.

For the historian, such a manner of reading a text would lie outside his scope, because the meaning and importance we attach to a document is in itself a new historical and particular event. The reception of a text and the manner it is dealt with in the present is not contained in the document itself, which belongs to the past, it is added or superimposed onto it in the present. To the historian, the meaning of a text and the normativity that is attributed to it or its subject are different and separate historical events. In that manner Rudolf Bultmann e.g. could make a distinction between the historical nature of a text in its explanation and its existential appropriation in faith.

Existential appropriation

From this existential or subjective point of view, faith is an attitude of a person with regard to his ultimate concern (Tillich) which brings forth a personal truth or authenticity of being (Bultmann). One might argue, as in essence was the argument of the modernist and liberal theologies of the 19th century known as “ethical theology”, that any statement of faith derives its contemporary meaning from the life of the recipient. What we do with it, becomes far more important than what it means. Now, the doctrine of the Trinity in particular does not seem to add to that ethical perspective on faith. Immanuel Kant already wrote in 1798:

“Out of the doctrine of the Trinity, taken literally, nothing practical can be deduced, even if one assumes the doctrine to be intelligible.”

All theological propositions, Kant argued, can be tested for their truth by the attempt to “insert’ a practical meaning or moral sense into them. When we try to deduce any sort of rule of practical behavior from them, and modify them according to that derived moral sense, then we get intelligible faith propositions that have moral relevance.

If we speak about the doctrine of the incarnation e.g. as the union of God with a particular human being, then we simply are saying that at one time the divine nature coexisted with an historical human being, which is morally of no concern to us at all. If we try to deduce a moral obligation from it, if we take this Christ normatively, we are upholding for ourselves a divine standard of behavior that is impossible to achieve.

If however we construct it as an intelligible basis for moral deductions, we should understand the doctrine to mean that all human beings share a common humanity that is as such the standard of morality, and hence can be presented as unified with the divine nature. The incarnation is then about humanity as such and not about Jesus of Nazareth. The divinity then becomes an added quality by which we express the normative nature of the original concept.

No such moral reinterpretation is however available for the trinity, so that, bereft of any moral sense, it is merely part of the historical faith of the Church and should be discarded as an obsolete speculation on the divine nature. (It is interesting to note that the two main tenets of liberal Christianity are already mentioned in here, to wit, the primary role of history - Church faith which presents temporary solutions to specific problems - and the essential continuity between God and man – the notion of divinity being a predicate of true humanity.)

Is there an alternative to this speaking historically about the Creeds and the trinitarian dogma and the existentialist or ethicist reinterpretation of the dogma? I will first adress the historicist paradigm, and then I will try to present a different reading of the Nicene Creed.

Against historicism

I would argue, that there is at least one dimension of the meaning of a text – any text – that cannot be fully dealt with within the paradigm of historicity. The meaning of a text is not either historically what its creator intended to achieve, or existentially what any contemporary reader might want to do with it for his own purposes.

For example, when we would discuss the meaning of the Constitution of the United States, we would need to address the historian's questions about the intent of its authors and the context of their statements, and how their first readership would have understood and applied that text. Motive and purpose would be our main tools in explaining its contents. But we would also have to take into account how the document is read and understood by the community of the present that is bound by it. The meaning of that document depends on the motive and purpose of its authors, to have validity beyond their own time for the community of the future that was in continuity with them. For as long as there would be a nation of the US of America that would organize itself as a community under the rule of law, the Constitution would be of perpetual validity.

This would mean that the explanation of the document in historical terms or the contemporary existential response to the text as such would not suffice to present us with the meaning of that document. In the court rooms of the United States, the Constitution and its amendments would receive their meaning in the process of application and exegesis, and at the same time, this single identical meaning would have to be applied and therefore presupposed in the process. There would be no theoretical way of fully distinguishing the historical meaning and the contemporary meaning. They would be different, and yet would have a continuity. The historical argument would be part of that process, but it would not suffice on its own.

If we take the historian’s approach to the Nicene Creed two things will become apparent.

First, there is a certain ambiguity in the different theological layers of the NT text that provided a problem for the Church in the 2nd and 3d century.
Second, the Church had to deal with that problem in Hellenist terminology, because that was the cultural context in which she was called to be faithful. Theology in that pre-Constantinian era was intent on affirming the normativity of Jesus against judaism and paganism and the truth of monotheism against paganism.

The 4th century inherited a whole series of responses to this problem, ranging from a monarchianism that stressed monotheism to the point that Christ was no longer anything more than a prophet, up to the Latin Church Father Tertullian who identified Christ as the Son of God, i.e. as the primary selfdisclosure of God Himself. In the 4th century Arianism became a quite popular solution to all of these problems. Jesus had become the Son of God, but He was not so from eternity. Arianism is a kind of adoptianism, of which Yoder stated that a rough form of it had been the oldest solution to the problem in NT-times.

The first Council of Nicea was convened by emperor Constantine in 325 AD precisely because Arianism threatened the unity of the Church. Two issues in Christology were at stake in Nicea.

Arius had explained that the Son of God was begotten, and in that sense He derived His origin from God the Father, and therefore must have been created as a temporal and finite being. That is why ultimately the words “begotten, not made” were inserted into the creed. The response of the Nicene Council was, that though it can be said that the Son has an origin, this does not mean that he was created. “Begetting” in God refers to an eternal relationship, and not to an event in time.
The second issue was how the relationship between this eternal, preexisting Son of God and God the Father should be expressed. Here Arius adopted the word “homoiousios” which means “of like substance”, from homoios, like, and ousia, substance, independent and individual being. If you dropped the jota in greek, you get homoousios which means of the same substance, but then, substance might not mean “ independent and individual being” any more. The word “ousia” could then be taken to mean “essence”, without the notion of individuality.

The unity of Gods essence, Barth would later explain, consists in the triad of His persons, His "modes of being". In God there is no real distinction between his essential unity and his being in three “modes”. In this form of the Trinitarian dogma, the unity of God is saved by stressing the unity of the essence or substance of God. At the same time tritheism or polytheism is rejected, because Christ and the Spirit are not to be considered as Arius did as divinities in their own right, as separate “gods” of lesser statue. The secondary figure of Christ would then be conceived as a demi-god that receives worship, while He is still not God in the full sense of the word.

The NT of course did not speak like this. It put all of its emphasis on the activity of Gods saving presence in this world. It did not try to express directly who this God was, but for the explanation of the Name that this God had. In the NT testament this Name of God is being spelled with three “syllables”. There is a worship of the Father, through the Son in the Spirit. The one God if Israel and Jesus is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The trinitarian dogma is prepared for in the NT in the triadic formulas.

The historical reading of the Nicene Creed

2010-04-24T17:17:00.000-07:00

The importance of the Nicene creed and the kind of theological speculation that it has evoked, has been under attack – so it seems – by our most modern Church Father, John Howard Yoder. Yoder called for a reading of the Creeds that stressed their historical particularity.

They are merely historical and should be approached as contingent articulations of the gospel, which is in essence the proclamation of the relationship between the Lordship of Christ and our particular lives. They are dependent on a cultural context that is defined by a Greek and latin language and a philosophical terminology that is far removed both from us, and from the hebrew mindset that permeates the gospels. They are the result of what C. Norman Kraus might call a “relocation” of the gospel, that has to be reformulated in order to reach the contemporary world.

In other words, the Creeds present us with an expression of the gospel by using rhetorical devices that derive their meaning from the concerns they address, and the problems they tried to solve, not from the metaphysics they presupposed. There is therefore no perpetual validity of those concepts, and their method of doing theology is at best a temporary device, that should be replaced by other methods in order to achieve in our own time the theology that we need to be doing.

As Alain Epp Weaver pointed out, Yoder appeals to the Creeds only in so far we share their underlying problem: how to express the normativity of Christ, on the basis of scripture, in contemporary language, that can persuade, and precisely because we need to do that, we should deny their centrality as a catholic and normative confession of faith and their claim to eternal validity because they are historical, particular expressions of faith and contingent upon a different worldview and a different metaphysics.

In the words of Dutch reformed theologian Oepke Noordmans, the creeds are part of the assimilation of the gospel to a specific set of cultural Hellenist conditions. In opposition to that, the Bible should again be read hebraically, with an emphasis on history above ontology. In fact, some even argue, that the gospel is about practical obedience of the people of God whereas Patristic and Nicene theology is about redemption through dogmatic faith.

By reading the tradition dynamically, not as a deposit of truths, but as part of the ongoing struggle of the Church to remain faithful to Christ, the Creeds become a culturally bound proclamation instead of an eternal intellectual foundation for present day theology.

Let me first explain what a historicist and rhetorical reading of the creeds would mean. In any historical reading of a document of the past, the main question to ask would be about motive. For what reason and to what purpose was this document written? What intention did its author have in producing it? What interest was being served by its publication? And also: how did contemporaries respond to it? The creeds of the Church can be considered like any other document to have a motive behind them, and a purpose to them and an interest that was served by them. The rhetorical analysis would be about the literary means adopted by the author to achieve these purposes. To the historian, the meaning of the Creed is properly explained, when its purpose and motive have been established as the objective context of the text. This is e.g. what Yoder does when he argues in Preface to theology:

“It is understandable for the High Church tradition to have picked out the Nicene tradition, because the King was finally on that side.” (Preface, 205)

Yoder here establishes the motive of the Church fathers as their understanding of their interest: when the Emperor Constantine decided to be on the side of Athanasius in the council of Nicea, the Church adopted the Athanasian solution because it was better to have the State on their side than against them.

In biblical theology this approach is known as the historical-critical method. It starts from the same assumptions with regard to biblical texts as with any other text and asks about motive and purpose as part of the reality of the text. All documents have a particular origin in time and place, and all texts are produced by an agent who had motive and purpose. The gospels may differ from Homer’s Illiad and a shipping inventory from a 17th century merchant vessel, but they would all have in common that they equally reflect historical circumstances as part of their meaning.

However, isn’t there ample reason to defend the Creeds?

Adam Pastor: heretic or real Doopsgezinde?

2010-04-21T16:42:00.000-07:00

In his introduction to the works of Adam Pastor, Dutch historian and theologian Cramer expressed his deep admiration by saying:

He was not a mere Anabaptist, nay, he was a Doopsgezinde!

The cause for this praise was primarily the unitarian position that Adam Pastor took against Menno Simons, and secondly the mild manner of his polemics. Adam Pastor turned unitarian well before the Socinians began to influence the Dutch Mennonites, and in retrospect Adam Pastor was seen as the hero in his conflict with Menno. When Menno Simons wrote his “Confession of the Triune God” in 1550, four years of strife had seriously threatened the always perilous unity of the European Anabaptists. Menno wrote: “For during the last four years, alas, Christian love and peace have become pretty thin with some, on account of much pernicious arguing and bickering about the divinity of Christ and the Holy Ghost.” (CW, p. 489)

What had happened was this. Adam Pastor had preached that Christ was just a human figure and he had been banned by Obbe Philips when after several consultations he persisted in this teaching. In his own defense of his position, Adam Pastor repeated two arguments:

1) the trinity (or more to the point, the divinity of Christ) was not taught in the gospels and actually in contradiction with the gospel statements about Jesus praying to His father e.g.

2) if we accept the divinity of Christ, then we cannot but see Him as a secondary and lesser God, the “mortal god”, because god is immortal and Jesus obviously was not.

Menno on the other hand tenaciously clung to the Nicene model of trinitarian Christology and tried to add his own brand of Melchiorite Christology to it by stating that Christ did not receive his flesh from his mother Mary. He was in all respects the New Adam, making Mary into a receptacle of the full humanity of Christ.

Menno tried to emphasize that Christ had to share our fallen existence in order to save us, - so He had to be human - but that He could not save us if He had shared the fallenness of our existence – hence the doctrine of the heavenly flesh. If He had been the Son of Mary in the full sense of the word, He would have been unable to be our Savior as a Man. That would have made our redemption completely independent from our existence and would have led to a mere declarative state of forgiveness and justification. Redemption would have become a mere eschatological hope and not a present reality in the Church.

It is from there that Menno developed his notion of the Church without spot or wrinkle. Christ is truly God, and therefore his Humanity must be a true and perfect humanity, and therefore His disciples share His perfect humanity through rebirth, without becoming perfect human beings however. Our depravity must be greater than we think, if the means for our salvation can be nothing less than a new creation.

Adam Pastor’s rejection of the trinity leads actually to a moral perfectionism in trying to emulate this human being called Jesus that was able to be obedient to God, without receiving the means for such a discipleship in the act of redemption. At the same time Adam must lower the standard if he wants to be able to maintain that ethical perfection is the following of a human Christ. On the other hand, Menno Simons’ emphasis on the heavenly origin of Jesus’ earthly being, both raises the standard to the full measure of human perfection while at the same time it emphasizes the transformative grace that we receive in Christ. Perfectionism in Menno Simons is therefore greater because His Christology enhances both the human and the divine element of Christ.

Now, it is not necessary for my purposes today to go into the details of the historical circumstances of Adam Pastor and the Adamites that were his followers. Suffice it to say, that his position was rejected by Menno Simons and Obbe Philips and that Adam Pastor was banned from the Anabaptist community for this doctrinal heresy.

Should we care?

It is hard to find a copy of Adam Pastor’s account of the debate he had with Menno and Obbe, - Cramer deplored that situation - but interestingly, though Menno’s own strong defense of trinitarian Christology is now part of his collected works, translated into many languages – it seems that nobody over here reads that either.

What this seems to spell out, is the simple fact that Doopsgezinden, Dutch Mennonites nowadays have all become Adamites at least on this issue of the divinity of Christ. Maybe that is the reason we do not call ourselves Mennonites anymore, but Doopsgezinden. But I also doubt whether the Dutch division of the Mennonite movement would accept Adam’s high view of scriptural authority and his rejection of worldly culture and philosophy as a means of discerning truth. Most of the references to his name that you may find in Dutch books on Mennonite history deals with the perceived animosity with which he was dealt with. It is a scandal to some, that Adam was treated like a heretic by Anabaptists, heretics themselves, who should have known better.

But what about the issue itself? What about the claims of catholic Christianity that Christ is the divine Son, the second person in the trinity, God the Son who existed from eternity? Is He what the Nicene Creed says He is, one of substance with the Father? Is he equally God? And why should we care about that kind of obstruse dogmatic argument in our time, when we are facing challenges in theology and ethics on a more practical level: the issues of mediation and peacemaking, the integration of foreigners in our society, dealing with social violence and injustice? Is it not a grand detour to say the least, to discuss such abstract topics as the relationship of the three persons in the divine substance?

Let’s talk about that – in another post.

Why it should not have been

2010-04-20T16:32:00.001-07:00

Notes on the Jewish Christian schism
based on John Howard Yoder's
"It Did not Have to Be" In: The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited

The common historical reading is wrong:
1. In the first century there was no single normative Judaism and no single normative Christianity that could be engaged in a single clear controversy.
Jews, messianic Jews and messianic non-Jews could not be distinguished along clear-cut lines, of the sort that appeared in hindsight in the reconstruction of the conflict.
2. The teachings of Jesus but also those of Paul are completely harmonious with the larger context of Jewish faith, including the acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah.
And that holds true also for the conflicts between Jesus and his disciples on the one hand and representatives of other schools of thought within Judaism: those are family rows on common soil.
3. The teachings of which it is said that they must have produced a sharp division between Judaism and Christianity were not experienced as controversial in the first century and then they were certainly not present in the shape that they received after the Council of Nicea in the fourth century.
There was no well-defined doctrine of the Trinity and the recognition of Jesus' particular status was not yet considered to be non-Jewish.
4. The apostle Paul never ventured beyond the limits of Judaism. We get that impression only after his letters had been reinterpreted in the context of 'normative' Catholicism and the early Protestant rejection of it. The Torah and Judaism in his letters were understood as expressions of that Catholicism. The external and meritorious works of the church - means to acquire atonement - were identified with the "works of the law" in Paul. Nobody was able to understand what mizvot meant within Judaism.
5. Christianity is not simply defined by the twofold No! that it heard from the synagogue. The first No attacked Jesus status as the Messiah, and the second No attacked the shape of the Church as a community of Jews and non-Jews. Despite that important difference Christianity as a whole can still be defined as a Judaism. The kingdom of heaven, the expectation of the Messiah, the image of God as creator and moral lawgiver, the moral teaching itself, the concept of the people of God, the role of the Holy Spirit - all of these are notions from the rich treasury of Second Temple Judaism.
6. The schism between the church and synagogue can be defined with greater accuracy by pointing to two stages.
A. in the era of the Apologists of the second century the Church was focusing more and more on a pagan population and used Greek philosophy to express her message.
B. in the fourth century the Constantine merger of church and state removed any reason for a dialog with Judaism. After the Council of Constantinople in 381 Christianity becomes the single religion in Europe.

Justin Martyr (135 AD)
He was born at Flavia Neapolis. According to church tradition Justin suffered martyrdom at Rome under the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (between 162 and 168). Justin called himself a Samaritan, but his father and grandfather were probably Greek or Roman, and he was brought up a pagan. It seems that St Justin had property, studied philosophy, converted to Christianity, and devoted the rest of his life to teaching what he considered the true philosophy, still wearing his philosopher's gown to indicate that he had attained the truth. He probably traveled widely and ultimately settled in Rome as a Christian teacher.
He wrote:

It is evident, therefore, that they did not relinquish the truth, but with all boldness preached to the Jews and Greeks. To the Jews, indeed, [they proclaimed] that the Jesus who was crucified by them was the Son of God, the Judge of quick and dead, and that He has received from His Father an eternal kingdom in Israel, as I have pointed out; but to the Greeks they preached one God, who made all things, and Jesus Christ His Son. (Discourse to the Greeks p. 868)
Therefore have the Jews departed from God, in not receiving His Word, but imagining that they could know the Father [apart] by Himself, without the Word, that is, without the Son; they being ignorant of God who spoke in human shape to Abraham, and again to Moses, saying, “I have surely seen the affliction of My people in Egypt, and I have come down to deliver them.”

So here for the first time we find the schism expressed. Half a century beyond the era of the apostles.

The effects of the schism
1. Both communities suffered from their separateness in the second and fourth century. The Jewish community in exile became vulnerable, and the Christian community got paganised.
2. Because of the schism a theological climate could persist in the church that contri-buted to the Holocaust.
3. Without the schism, the synagogue could have fulfilled its original mission as the nucleus of an open Abrahamitic community.
4. Without the schism, the church could have avoided its triumphal seizure of power and then the imperial church of the Middle Ages would not have existed.

We can now reach the conclusion:
In the schism between Judaism and Christianity did not have to be, because:
1. They were not divided sociologically.
2. Their teachings were almost indistinguishable to an outsider.
3. The fourth century theological controversy didn't exist yet.
4. The 16th century controversy didn't exist yet
5. The mutual rejection wasn't sufficient for separation
6. The second and fourth century controversies were not widespread

The schism was harmful because:
Both communities were affected negatively by it. Without the Imperial Church the Holocaust might have been avoided.

Why it is important to be a Melchiorite…

2010-04-16T09:16:00.001-07:00

It’s an old controversy, but remarkably relevant for us today. Is Christ born out of a woman, or born to a woman like the rest of us?

Early Mennonites and Obbenites (followers of Obbe Philips) had a ‘strange view of Mary’s relation to Jesus before his birth.’ The Swiss Brethren did not share this notion and Mennonites soon dropped it. John Christian Wenger, who I just quoted, continues by referring to the Dutch Mennonite Confession of Faith of 1632, article IV:

But how or in what manner this worthy body was prepared, or how the Word became flesh, and He Himself man, we content ourselves with the declaration which the worthy evangelists have given.

What was this strange view on Mary’s relationship to Jesus?

Melchior Hofmann and later Menno Simons insisted that Jesus was already present in heaven as a human being, before He was born into this world. He became flesh inside Mary, but did not partake of her flesh. The Latin formula ‘natus ex virgine’ was understood to mean exactly that: born out of Mary, but not born of Mary. In other – rather specific - words, Mary conceived by having a fertilized egg implanted in her. God created in a sense both egg and sperm meaning that Jesus in His humanity was a fully new creation.

At least the Melchiorites tried to understand the incarnation whereas in 1632, tired of the controversy among themselves and with the Reformed Church, they decided to just take the evangelists’ word for it.

Strange as it seems and notwithstanding the apparent late medieval pseudo-biology that was used by both Hofmann and Simons to express this idea, it does present us with a couple of important emphases and notions.

For one thing, the so-called theological difference is maintained very strictly: Jesus’ humanity and His divinity are never mixed up. He is both and equally so. But His Divinity always outshone his Glory as Man. His humanity remained a vessel that the divine made use of for atonement purposes. In this doctrine the Humanity of Jesus as such becomes glorified, including his life and deeds. The ethic of discipleship is strengthened when the life of Jesus is more important too. The revelation of God also implies a revelation of true humanity in Jesus Christ. He is the New man, the New Adam and as such the origin and the ‘model’ of the New Creation. He did not just take on flesh in order to die as a substitutional sacrifice, but in order to show the New Humanity and ground it in His Church.

In all of this divinity and humanity are strictly separate, without the one being more important than the other. Furthermore, if Mary could be the source for Jesus' flesh, that would mean that there was something good in there. Something unblemished and untouched by sin. Could that be so? It would imply a natural theology which declared some elements in nature to be perfect. And finally, if Jesus was manifested in the ‘flesh of sin’, then obviously there was no need to strive for a sinless life. That is why Menno responded so sharply to the Lutheran doctrine which basically argued - well not by Luther of course, but by some of his proponents – that you could do whatever sin you liked, because salvation was guaranteed by the sacrifice of Christ anyway.

In sum: a Melchiorite Christology which stress equally Jesus’ Divinity and His humanity remains true to the difference between God and man and grounds a high ethics of responsible living in the power of the Spirit.

There is however another reason to stress the Melchiorite Christology. Especially in the 1970s there was strong emphasis in Dutch theology on the efficacy of the Holy Spirit. Gods “spiritual power” was stressed as an autonomous divine energy, that worked both in and outside the Church and did not necessarily take on the shape of Christ.

It is against such an eccentric pneumatology that tries to turn its back to the primacy of Christology, that some Dutch Mennonite theologians like Auke de Jong and Sjouke Voolstra tried to take a stand. And they could refer to Melchior Hofmann to achieve that. The Spirit can do nothing without Christ; the Spirit takes it from Jesus and manifests Christ in the world. Christ is the standard, the source of the work of the Spirit. The Spirit binds the faithful to Christ and renews them in the baptism of the Holy Spirit. To those who have read Barth’s Church Dogmatics, especially IV/4 on baptism, this most certainly sounds familiar.

In fact, Menno said as much when he emphasized, with the eastern tradition, that the Spirit came from the Father and the Son. (Filioque). Meaning that henceforth, the Spirit is bound by the revelation in Christ. God does not reveal Himself outside of Christ – and His humanity – His life, actions, sayings, death and resurrection – are the events of that revelation.

As if there could have been any doubt about that.

The Image of my Enemy

2010-03-19T10:18:00.000-07:00

Where can I find my enemy?

I know my friends and I know my family. But who is my enemy? In times of War it is the person with a different nationality. In religious strife, it’s the one with a different set of beliefs. It can be the personal enemy in your work place, or the other guy in your profession who gets the job you wanted to have.

The ordinary definition of enemy according to Wikipedia is:

An enemy is a person who hates or dislikes another person. The opposite of a friend.

What then is a friend? And is it really about emotions alone? Someone hates us, okay, but does that in itself make him my enemy? Negative feelings do not contribute to the answer so it seems. It is not a question about how someone feels.

Besides, who is my enemy? is not about identifying someone as my enemy.The question is about what it means to call someone the enemy. It’s a matter of “image”, the immediately perceived qualities of someone as soon as they are my enemy.

…united against a common (unknown) enemy…

The Image of the enemy

The image of the enemy has many layers and components.

It’s first of all a perception of a motive: the enemy is the one who threatens you.
It’s a sentiment of fear, associated with the presence of the enemy and his dark aspirations.
It’s a projection of my worst fears: the enemy is responsible for everything bad that happens to me.
All of these come together in a mixed notion of the “other” out there, who is after me, who hates me and can only rest when I am dead.

The function of the image

It provides me with an excuse. We/I are not to blame. Everything that went wrong is caused by the enemy. If you don’t have an enemy to blame when things go bad, it is obviously a good thing to invent one.
It gives us, the group, stability. We are united only against an enemy, because our distrust and dissent is overshadowed by the fact that we share a common enemy.
It makes life easy. because it polarizes the world into two factions: “us” and “them” it becomes clear now. Good guys against bad guys, West against East etc.
Finally, it helps us to act in stead of to think. We like acting and we don’t like thinking. We feel that if there is something wrong, something has to be done. But sometimes thinking is the better way to act.

Think about it for a moment. Who is the enemy?

Our economy is in ruins, who do we blame?
Who is our common enemy?
Imagine how easy it becomes to have a world neatly categorized in two different groups.
And how wonderful to be motivated to finally do something about it.

Who do YOU think the enemy is?

Tags van Technorati: peace,conflict,islam,economic crisis,image of the enemy

The Origins of Violence

2010-02-04T06:30:00.001-08:00

Cain and Abel

By Robbert Veen © 2010

WHAT WE LEARN FROM CHILDHOOD STORIES

We heard the stories read to us when we were children. If we've been brought up in a Christian environment, we have heard them read and explain to us. They were part of the stories and traditions that shaped us as adults. Movies and songs dealing with the same themes and ideas molded our subconscious.

So now there are lots of things we believe, without knowing we believe them.

E.g.

· We think that the best (only) way to respond to violence is to counter it with violence.
· We think that violence is necessary to maintain the order in society
· We think that violence on a large scale can be productive, e.g. in revolutions.
· We think that war is sad at a human level, but necessary in politics.
· Violence is necessary to defend ourselves from a ruthless and inhuman enemy
· In sum: we think that violence is a proper means of achieving one's goals

Why do we believe that? It's not because we thought about it or studied it. We just do.

POPEYE

Let's take Popeye. A whole generation was brought up with Popeye cartoons. One of its functions was to teach children that spinach (yuck!) was good for you. It made you stronger. You could be a hero like Popeye.
But the cartoons also made you think that:

· There is an easy (moral) division between good guys and bad guys.
· Bad guys always resort to violence
· Bad guys cannot be reasoned or bargained with
· Good guys have to use violence to stop the bad guys
· Good guys will always win in the end - Popeye will never run out of spinach.
· Bad guys will never stop to be bad guys
· The source of the conflict is something both sides want
· Good guys and bad guys do not learn from their experiences

(E.g. Brutus never learns how to use spinach, he will never understand that everything is stacked against him, and Popeye will never learn how to prevent the conflict erupting over and over again. The victim never learns anything either: Olive Oil keeps being seduced for a while by Brutus. The victim is not simply innocent actually in this case.)

Now take John Rambo: his violence is provoked by a provincial cop and he takes it to the limit.

Is he justified in doing that?

We think so! At least for as long as the movie is entertaining us.

And we walk out of the theatre thinking (mostly subconsciously) that violence can be all right after all.

IT IS ACTUALLY CALLED THE MYTH OF REDEEMING VIOLENCE

Now, is that really what we think?

I don't think so! Most humans find "real" violence, as opposed to portrayed violence abhorrent.

· When you or your loved ones have been a victim of violence
· When you happen to see violence on the street
· When you use your empathy to understand what a victim of violence must feel
· When you watch images of soldiers fighting in the street of Baghdad.

Nevertheless we are fascinated by such acts of violence at the same time.

This fascination is the basis for our acceptance of violence when

· It is used by the good guys
· Helps save a victim (even if others get killed in the process)
· Is only used as a means to a goal
· Is practiced reluctantly.

…then it is OKAY

But…who is the good guy and who is the bad guy?

In the Myth of Redeeming Violence it is always very clear what is going on. Just as in the Popeye stories.

· We can easily identify good guys and bad guys, "us" and "them" e.g.
· We can always see that it is worthwhile to save the victim.
· We never - ever - do the moral math to see that the cost of violence is most often higher than the gains.

CAIN AND ABEL

So let's go to Cain and Abel. To see what this story tells us about violence. Maybe the story wants to tell us something that goes against the Myth of Redeeming Violence

Cain and Abel is a myth portraying humankind. There are two types of humanity:
Cain, ("blacksmith", forger) who is a tiller of the soil, a farmer who enjoys the fruit of his hard labor.
Abel ("lightness" or "vanity") is his brother. The story is about "man and his brother."

Here it is in a modern somewhat paraphrasing translation:

1 Adam and Eve had a son. Then Eve said, "I'll name him Cain because I got him with the help of the LORD."
2 Later she had another son and named him Abel. Abel became a sheep farmer, but Cain farmed the land.
3 One day, Cain gave part of his harvest to the LORD,
4 and Abel also gave an offering to the LORD. He killed the first-born lamb from one of his sheep and gave the LORD the best parts of it. The LORD was pleased with Abel and his offering,
5 but not with Cain and his offering. This made Cain so angry that he could not hide his feelings.
6 The LORD said to Cain: What's wrong with you? Why do you have such an angry look on your face?
7 If you had done the right thing, you would be smiling. But you did the wrong thing, and now sin is waiting to attack you like a lion. Sin wants to destroy you, but don't let it!
8 Cain said [this] to his brother Abel, "Let's go for a walk." [That's not in the original text!!!] And when they were out in a field, Cain killed him.
9 Afterwards the LORD asked Cain, "Where is Abel?" "How should I know?" he answered. "Am I supposed to look after my brother?"
10 Then the LORD said: Why have you done this terrible thing? You killed your own brother, and his blood flowed onto the ground. Now his blood is calling out for me to punish you.
11 And so, I'll put you under a curse. Because you killed Abel and made his blood run out on the ground, you will never be able to farm the land again.
12 If you try to farm the land, it won't produce anything for you. From now on, you'll be without a home, and you'll spend the rest of your life wandering from place to place.
13 "This punishment is too hard!" Cain said.
14 "You're making me leave my home and live far from you. I will have to wander about without a home, and just anyone could kill me."
15 "No!" the LORD answered. "Anyone who kills you will be punished seven times worse than I am punishing you." So the LORD put a mark on Cain to warn everyone not to kill him.
16 But Cain had to go far from the LORD and live in the Land of Wandering, which is east of Eden.
17 Later, Cain and his wife had a son named Enoch. At the time Cain was building a town, and so he named it Enoch after his son.

Nice story. Eh? In this translation however, everything is lost that we need to understand what it wants to say. That happens frequently in modern translation that try to be understandable at the cost of being accurate. It's interesting though, because it tells us how prejudices work in translations. What does the story do in this version? Now we are left with the idea that:

· It is about giving the proper sacrifice
· God did not like Cain's offering for some unknown reason
· Cain became jealous and hated Abel for being accepted
· He was warned by God that jealousy could get him into trouble
· A power called "sin" could get control over him
· He didn't listen so he got angrier and angrier
· And out of this anger he killed his brother - by attacking him from behind (the coward)
· Then he lied about it
· And was sent away as a wanderer, a tramp
· But God did spare his life
· And he was quite successful in founding the first city

It's obvious that Abel is the simple good guy and Cain is the bad guy.

Now would you say that violence is here portrayed as something that is innate in human beings? When you are dealt with like this, you hold a grudge. You are not dealt with fairly. In a way Cain is right to feel jealousy. He can't help it, he can't stop it. And the result is murder. Not a nice thing to do, surely, but understandable in a way. Right?

That's how the translator feels about the story, because he (they) was (were) a product of the Myth of Redeeming Violence. And though the text does not condone murder, it still seems to help us understand it. And to that degree justify it. Okay, we should not kill each other, but if provoked by injustice and without the means to get justice, what can one expect? Should Cain have taken this insult without any response?

A DIFFERENT TRANSLATION

And the man knew Eve his wife; and she conceived and bore Cain, and said: 'I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD.'
2 And again she bore his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
3 And in process of time it happened, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD.
4 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect (looked at) unto Abel and to his offering;
5 but unto Cain and to his offering He had not respect (did not look at). And Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. (He looked at the ground)
6 And the LORD said unto Cain: 'Why are you angry? and why is your countenance fallen?
7 If you do well, shall it not be lifted up? and if you do not well, you lie at the door of sin. Unto you is his (Able's) desire, and you should rule (=take care of) over him (Able).'
8 And Cain spoke unto Abel his brother (telling him what God had said to him). And it came to pass, when they were in the field (talking about this) , that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.
9 And the LORD said unto Cain: 'Where is Abel your brother?' And he said: 'I know not; am I my brother's keeper?'
10 And He said: 'What have you done? the voice of thy brother's blood cries unto Me from the ground.
11 And now cursed you are from the ground, which has opened her mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand.
12 When you till the ground, it shall not henceforth give to you her strength; a fugitive and a wanderer shall you be in the earth.'
13 And Cain said to the LORD: 'My guilt is greater than I can bear.
14 Behold, You have driven me out this day from the face of the land; and from Your face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer in the earth; and it will come to pass, that whosoever finds me will slay me.'
15 And the LORD said to him: 'Therefore whoever slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.' And the LORD set a sign for Cain, so that no one finding him should kill him.
16 And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.
17 And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and called the name of the city after the name of his son Enoch.

NOW WE HAVE A TOTALLY DIFFERENT STORY

· The sacrifice is a meeting of the brothers with God
· God is drawing attention to Abel by looking toward him
· Cain does not like the fact that his achievement is not rewarded
· God reminds Cain that he has an obligation to take care of his brother - it's part of his calling and the selfevident principle of his profession

When they were presenting the sacrifice - the gift - , God looked at Abel. He was - that's the freedom of the author - standing there between them. He was drawing Cain's attention toward his brother Abel. There is no indication of a "looking" from above. God is portrayed as standing there on the earth, as He is in tchapter 2, strolling through the garden.
Now why would God look away from the stronger brother who could proudly present his achievement - look what I have done! - to the weaker brother who had nothing to give from his own achievements? He as just a shepherd, a fairly lazy profession as compared to Cain's. Especially when you consider that they would use milk and wool, but would not eat the meat. Much later humanity was allowed to eat the meat, after Noah, but not here.
Is it not because the story wants to tells us that God wants Cain - the stronger - to look after his brother?
Is this not strengthened by verse 17?

THE MAIN VERSE 17

If you take away the dust that gathered on top of it during the ages, it should read:

17 If you do well, shall it not be lifted up? and if you do not well, you lie at the door of sin. Unto you is his (Abel's) desire, and you should rule (=take care of) over him (Abel).'

It is saying this: if you act like you are supposed to act, like a brother, taking care of your brother, why look at the ground? Why be angry? (Looking at the ground would be an attempt to hide the disappointment that the sacrifice is not about achievement.) But if you do ntot act with compassion and care toward your brother, then you have taken a step close to sin, you have already made the first step in the directionof violence.
Don't forget what you are: your brother looks up to you and you are supposed to take care of him = rule him.
The basic idea of "desire" being: what I need I get from someone else. I am dependent upon somebody else. It's the same concept used for Eve: woman has a right to be treated with care so the text states: her desire will be toward man.
The basic idea of rule being: I have dominance over you in orer to give you security and help you survive. It's the origin of "hierarchy" based in care and mutual survival, and the origin of social bonds (desire).

· Cain refuses to accept his role as caretaker of his brother.
· Cain strives for autonomy based on his own ability to survive by his own merit.
· The strong desires to be on his own.

SO THERE'S THE ORIGIN OF VIOLENCE!

Violence comes from the refusal to be our brother's keeper.

Violence is not the great means of survival, but it is the result of ignoring one's calling as a human being to care for the brother, especially if he's weak.
Social bonds imply the - mutual - duty to take care of others. It is directly opposite the instinct for autonomous freedom.
People know that instinctively. That is why we need this identification of the bad guy, the enemy, the stranger, the demon, for people to break this bond and accept violence against someone else. If the cop in the Rambo movies had been a sympathetic guy, just following orders etc, we would not have sympathized with Rambo. He had to be shown to be obsessed with getting at Rambo, he acts like a moron, enjoins rules and regulations too much etc. He had to become an unsympathetic bad guy in order for us to be involved in the story.

Cain becomes a murderer because he does not want to be bound by this loyalty to his brother - i.e. fellow-man.
The "jealousy" that Cain feels is this denial of responsibility and solidarity with Able. It makes him an opponent of Able a competitor for the ultimate goal: the acknowledgment of his existence by God. (Which may be taken symbolically for "making it in life", to be truly human.)

Now many more things can be said about the story. We haven't dealt with the response to Cain's murder, the idea of 'wandering" in the land of Nod (the land of confusion and homelessness.) I had to make some choices.

The main thing at the end is this:

The life in the City is essentially the life of wandering individuals, striving for autonomy, in a context that will allow them to attain this only by letting go of two basic connections: first, the connection to the earth - implying an economic system that makes farmers "serve" the needs of the city. Social hierarchy and division of labor lead to a society where power and violence are necessary to maintain order.
And secondly the connection between brothers. In the City in principle one is alone.

Now all of this doesn't mean that we need to look at it exactly like the author sees things. One might argue that he has a bleak vision of city life, and that modern social institutions have improved beyond the cities of antiquity - Nineveh, Babylon and Rome being the bad examples the Bible refers to when something has gone awfully wrong. I'm not presenting the text as inspired truth but as literature - as an ancient text that matters.

We know the story as it was presented to us by many generations of teachers. It underlines the Myth of Redeeming Violence. In this presentation I wanted to show that the story is actually highly critical of that myth. It condemns violence. And it shows us where violence begins: when we do not acknowledge the responsibility to take care of others. All others in principle.

An ancient text can be reread in the light of our modern knowledge and experience. And the story can again be retold. But now to counteract the pervading Myth that says that Violence is the origin of many wonderful things, that it cannot be avoided as long as there are bad guys out there, and is just an instrument of politics.

2010 © Robbert A. Veen