The Anti-Manichaeist

I recently followed a link to the Other Journal where I found that they had a series of interviews with many Christian thinkers on politics. The thinkers include:Tony Campolo, Amy Laura Hall, Pam Cochran, Dan Allender, Walter Wink, Stanley Grenz, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Stanley Hauerwas.

I’m going to colorfully summarize the main ideas of each of the authors.

Tony Campolo argues that in the US, Evangelical Christians are not counter-cultural enough. He decries the effects of ideological short-cuts we often use that keep us from being more critical of our political leaders, make us overly supportive of the Republican Party, and insulate us from the world, while letting us be overly consumeristic and hypocritical about gay marriages when the real problem is heterosexual divorces.

Amy Laura Hall deals with questions of the family and policy and reproductive technology. She contrasts how Jesus primarily associated family with the Church, rather than one’s direct blood-relations, pointing out that our foundational relations should rest on eucharistic, not genetic, blood-ties. She is critical of the BushAdmin for failing to support basic social structures that bolster the Church and the Family and she is critical of liberal evangelicals for accepting the inevitability of the Culture of Death and not protesting against later-term abortions. Finally she critiques how our consumeristic mentality has led to the development of reproductive technologies where we calibrate our children to fit into our hopes and dreams, rather than recalibrating our lives around our children.

Pam Cochran argues that USEvangelicals confuse the traditional USAmerican notion of family with the biblical notion of family, which is implied as being more inclusive. She argues that maintaining the traditional family is not the only way to strengthen civil society and that we need to reconsider our current strategies of expending an incredible amount of energy trying to pass legislation with little success and to give more attention to other pressing issues.

Dan Allender describes the political election process as the political equivalent of rape with character assassination being a common tool of voter manipulation. We are in denial about our problem, the failings, of our own system and disassociate ourselves from these problems. But rape is a very significant problem in our world today and, while no obvious solutions present themselves, we must face its ugly reality and grieve over it and face our own responsibility for acts of omission to the graphic violence and dehumanization in our world.

Walter Wink argues that the real issue in the debate over homosexuality is how we interpret the Bible and how the Bible informs our lives today. He then proceeds to hermeneutically size up the biblical passages commonly presumed to deal with homosexuality and centers on Rom. 1:26-27 as the centerpiece of any discussion. He then argues that Paul didn’t understand the notion of one having a homosexual orientation and how homosexual behavior is natural. He empties a sack of Hebraic sexual mores that show how what the Bible teaches is not considered authoritative today, demonstrating his premise that what is considered natural is more important than what is biblical. His exegesis of the Bible is quite poor at times, implying that because we reject OT law in light of NT teaching that we can reject NT teaching in light of our modern-day understandings, and he also does a poor job of characterizing the facts of homosexuality. He ends with a plea for a broad tolerance.

Stanley Grenz starts by describing how emotionally charged and potentially divisive the issue of homosexuality has become. His response to the situation is to set up a Christian Theology of human sexuality apply it to distinguish friendship and marriage and then point out why same-sex intercourse is a deficient act occurring in the wrong context. Grenz’s theology emphasizes God’s creation of us as sexually male and female, or incomplete and with an innate drive to bond with others. By this understanding, all of our relations with others can be seen as in a way sexual, though the types of sexual acts of bonding should differ widely with the type of relationship. Grenz distinguishes between the inclusiveness of friendship and the exclusivenss of the marital relation. He points out how Jesus himself emphasized the company of disciples as more important than family relations derived from past and present sexual acts, which isn’t to say that the sexual relation proper does not have important meaning, but rather that its meaning depends on its context. The intended context by God for this sexual act is in heterosexual marriage, where it is the symbol of the exclusive bond between the partners. What makes it such a symbol is that it is the union of two who are sexually “other” into a sexual bond that is inherently bilateral. Grenz points out how this is not the case with same-sex intercourse and concludes that the marriage of male and female is the only appropriate expression of that exclusive sexual bond. I emphasize appropriate, because, at this point, I would prefer to substitute ideal and argue it is wrong to emphasize our ideals without a full consideration of the context. We Christians do accept other non-ideal relationships as a means of making the best of a fallen situation. Grenz, reacting to his liberal Canadian political situation, rules same-sex, sexual bonding out of court, even when it involves a mutual, life-long commitment and spends the rest of the essay interacting with a variety of arguments from this basic perspective that affirms that for people with homosexual orientations to be moral, they should be abstinent and seek to be changed.

I anticipate critiquing Wink and Grenz’s papers, later.

Jean Bethke Elshtain weds a neo-conservative viewpoint with a Christian concern for adapting the concept of Just-War to the 21st Ctry. She argues against the prevalent academic bias, as well as many Christian “neo-pacifists”, against going to war as a product of group-think rather than a consideration of the facts. She argues that the just-war tradition needs to be revamped to set out what ethical-post-regime-change commitment ought to be. I.e., what exactly does it mean when we own a country because we broke it. She glosses over the inherent ambiguity over what are the facts used to justify military action abroad and discounts the role economics/power plays in geo-politics. Her most interesting points look at the political-economic and social factors that have contributed to radical middle-east terrorism. Overall, she comes across as a BushAdmin partisan, in part by how she selectively frames issues. For example, with regard to Iraq, she frames the issue as to regime-change or not to regime-change, not: do we continue sanctions, improve our intelligence, trust that our commitment to retaliate against a 9-11 terrorist attack against the US with regime-change, as demonstrated with Afghanistan, will deter Hussein from supporting terrorist groups, do we counter Hussein’s pursuit of WMD-related capabilities by shining extra scrutiny on potential illegal ways they are violating existing economic sanctions? Bethke takes the priestly role upon herself of pointing to what is good, rather than simply outlining the alternatives and their likely consequences based on the “facts”. It would be interesting to hear how Bethke would respond to the recent criticisms of Neo-Conservativism made by Fukuyama.

Stanley Hauerwas argues that the Church too readily copies the forms of politics that surrounds it. This seemingly underlies his past critique of how Bethke has adjoined Just War-speak with a neo-conservative political perspective. Hauerwas sets forth a form of libertarian pacificistic political philosophy that is critical of both secular and religious powers that be, argues we should try to be more creative in coming up with alternatives to the use of state-based violence to solve today’s problems, and is very critical of the way religious language is used by politicians. Although, he wants the freedom to keep his own Christian speech when involved in policy-debates. His interview exemplifies his own attempt to be political in a different, Christian way.

dlw