This is from the January 26 issue of The Tablet [London]. Just as the Church was once wrong about the the nature of the solar system, it is now wrong about the nature of homosexuality. I wonder what some future historian will make of the parallels? By the way, the esteemed Ernan McMullin, editor of the book under review, is an Irish priest and longtime member of Notre Dame's Department of Philosophy.
Lead Book Review
Sins of the Commission
The Church and Galileo Ed. Ernan McMullin
University of Notre Dame Press, £23..50 Tablet bookshop price £21.60.
In 1633, the Holy Office found
Galileo to be “vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of
having held and believed that the Sun is the centre of the world and
immoveable”, and this despite a formal warning in 1616 that he must do
no such thing. On his knees before the cardinals, Galileo swore an oath
in which he abjured this and other errors and heresies; he promised to
do nothing in future to give rise to such a suspicion. The penalty for
breaking this oath would be death by burning.
The wound the Church thereby
inflicted on herself has done incalculable harm. No matter the glorious
history of Jesuit astronomers down the centuries; no matter that the
papal residence in Castel Gandolfo has two telescopic domes on the
roof; no matter that the Vatican Observatory now boasts a major
telescope in Arizona: the treatment of Galileo is cited day by day as
proof that the Church fears science.
The Galileo Affair, as it has
come to be known, took place at a pivotal moment in the histories of
both astronomy and of the Church. The task of mathematical astronomers
since antiquity had been to save the appearances, to devise geometrical
models for the planetary motions that would allow the calculation of
accurate tables. That a model – Ptolemy’s or Copernicus’ – worked well
for this purpose was no reason for supposing that it corresponded to
the underlying reality. But Kepler in 1609 set astronomy on a new path,
from the how to the why, from saving the appearances to discerning the
physical truth about the heavens. This led in 1687 to Newton’s Principia, after which it would be foolish to maintain that the massive Sun orbited the tiny Earth.
Galileo wished his Church to be
in the forefront of the new movement, but his judges understood nothing
of this. What they did understand was that when Christ was quoted as
saying, “This is my Body”, Protestant reformers had chosen not to take
his words at face value. This was no time for invoking the Augustinian
doctrine of “accommodation”, that the sacred author was using words
accommodated to the understanding of his readers; and yet this was
exactly what Galileo was doing when he argued that, despite Joshua’s
report that God made the Sun stand still for a very special purpose, in
fact it never did anything else but stand still.
The episode is hugely complex,
and never a year passes without yet more books on the subject. It was
therefore greatly to the credit of John Paul II in 1979 that he asked
for a commission to explore the affair in depth, in order to lay the
matter to rest by arriving at “a loyal recognition of wrongs from
whatever side they come”.
The project was ill-fated from
the start. It seems that the members of the resulting Galileo
Commission were chosen for the positions they held, not for their
knowledge of Galileo (the only member with some expertise in the
history of astronomy being Fr George Coyne SJ, director of the Vatican
Observatory). One member was soon appointed to a major see and so
attended only the first meeting. Others suffered ill-health, among them
the president, and it is probably because of his indisposition that
after 1983 the commission never once met. A number of historical
studies were published under the auspices of an editorial board that
included this reviewer, but otherwise the work languished.
Eventually the authorities
thought it time to bring the project to some sort of conclusion.
Confronted by a subject of such immense complexity, even a
well-informed and hard-working commission might have struggled to reach
an agreed verdict. It was Cardinal Paul Poupard who drew the short
straw. On 31 October 1992, he read out at a Vatican ceremony what
purported to be the commission’s findings. They were in fact no such
thing: Fr Coyne, for one, had not been consulted and knew nothing of
what Poupard was to say.
The “findings” laid the blame not
on any of the Church authorities involved but on (unnamed) theologians.
According to Poupard, when the motion of the Earth was scientifically
proved, which he bizarrely dates to 1741, the Church quickly responded
by authorising an edition of Galileo’s opera omnia, and by removing from the Index works advocating the heliocentric theory. In fact, the 1744 edition of the opera
had to omit Galileo’s brilliant work on the interpretation of
Scripture, now recognised as a classic statement of the Church’s
position; and his Dialogo, the book for which he was condemned,
could be included only if it was prefaced with both the Holy Office
decree and Galileo’s oath of recantation, and further doctored to make
the work appear hypothetical. And when the 1757 edition of the Index
appeared, Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, Kepler’s Epitome
and Galileo’s Dialogo were there, just as before. So much for the
Vatican’s eighteenth-century response to the advance of science, and so
much for the disinterested scholarship of the twentieth-century
“findings”.
Historians worldwide were
dismayed by Cardinal Poupard’s address, and by the speech written for
the Pope to read in response. Eventually, a conference of Galileo
scholars was held at Notre Dame University in 2002. The resulting
volume, edited by Fr Ernan McMullin, a leading scholar in the field,
must serve in place of the findings of the Galileo Commission. It is a
splendid work. Many of the chapters are definitive of our present
understanding of these very complex issues, and Fr McMullin’s summary
of the affair is itself worth the cover price. All but one of the
contributions deal with times past, but Fr Coyne tells the depressing
story of the official Commission as far as he has been able to
determine it. He concludes: “The picture given in the discourses of
October 31, 1992, does not stand up to historical scrutiny … In fact it
was the Congregation of the Index, the Congregation of the Holy Office,
and Paul V who enacted a hasty decree in 1616, and the Congregation of
the Holy Office and Urban VIII who proclaimed a hasty condemnation of
Galileo in 1633.”
When
the Galileo Commission was constituted in 1981, Poupard was named head
of one section and Coyne head of another. They have come to very
different conclusions. I, and most historians, believe the evidence
supports Coyne. If so, the Vatican has lessons to learn from the
Galileo Affair concerning the proper exercise of authority in the
Church today.
In response to my post below, Statements of Faith: Are They Appropriate? (here), I received this interesting response:
I have experienced these statements of faith as a seminarian preparing for the priesthood. It strikes me they are useful from the perspective of establishing intent. They are, however, in my humble estimation, not appropriate or productive as a means for enforcing orthodoxy in instruction. The only thing that can perform that function adequately is oversight with authority.
As someone who entered the seminary after a career in systems engineering, it occurred to me that an approach similar to establishing a trademark on the use of the term Catholic (with a capital C) would be a more effective mechanism to ensure against the misuse of the term than any other mechanism that might be employed in the western world.
Naturally, this would be highly controversial. It would not be problematic for the Roman Catholic Church to establish priority of ownership, but it might very well be problematic to establish a case for exclusivity. Given a successful case for both by the Roman Catholic Church, groups such as "Catholics for Free Choice" and publications such as the "National Catholic Reporter" would be required to drop the name "Catholic." Universities that failed in the obvious requirements for fidelity to Catholic teaching and formation would be required to give up their pretense to Catholic affiliation.
Barring success in this approach, perhaps it would be easier to establish exclusivity for "Roman Catholic." It would be interesting to see how the various and sundry organizations responded.
Of course, there is no likelihood that this approach will be attempted by the Church, not because it could not work, but because the Church does not approach enforcement in this way. Thus, organizations that fall from grace do not always fall from general public credibility. It is very much that way with all product warranties of safety and authenticity today. Knockoffs, though illegal, are ubiquitous. Tainted products or products that make false claims of some benefit manage to evade regulatory authorities and mechanisms all of the time. Its a sign of the times that people are generally left to their own devices for protecting themselves from shysters of every stripe.
This early reaction to Deus Caritas Est is sound, I think. From the January 28 issue of The Tablet [London]:
Editorial The true face of Catholicism
Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical confirms him as a man of humour, warmth, humility and compassion, eager to share the love that God “lavishes” on humanity and display it as the answer to the world’s deepest needs. On his election last spring, the former Cardinal Ratzinger was widely assumed to have as his papal agenda the hammering of heretics and a war on secularist relativism, subjects with which he was associated as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Instead he has produced a profound, lucid, poignant and at times witty discussion of the relationship between sexual love and the love of God, the fruit no doubt of a lifetime’s meditation. This is a document that presents the most attractive face of the Catholic faith and could be put without hesitation into the hands of any inquirer.
Unlike his predecessor, Benedict is not instantly comfortable as the focus of a huge crowd. But John Paul II, so charismatic in the flesh, was often hard to follow when he turned to the word. His encyclicals were wonderful intellectual journeys that repaid the great effort needed to understand them. Benedict’s Deus Caritas Est is by comparison an easy read, full of well-turned arresting sentences. “The epicure Gassendi used to offer Descartes the humorous greeting: ‘O, Soul!’ And Descartes would reply: ‘O, Flesh!’,” the Pope remarks. “Yet it is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only when both dimensions are truly united, does man attain his full stature.”
About the only flaw in the English text, indeed, is its non-use of inclusive language: for “man” read “man and woman”. But he makes no other sexist point; there is no attempt to distinguish female sexual love from the male version, no flirting with the madonna-whore dichotomy, no judgemental talk of what sexual love is ordained for, nor even of exploitation and sexual sin. Men and women who leave eros in the domain of their animal natures, without regard to the spiritual, are simply told that they are missing the true greatness that God intended for them; a lost opportunity rather than the road to perdition.
The second part of the encyclical, which is said to owe something to an unfinished project of the previous Pope, ties up a loose end in Catholic social teaching by addressing the question how, in a world seeking social justice, there is still room for charity. The answer is a compelling one. But this is still Ratzinger rather than Wojtyla, with his warning that it is not for the Church to take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. “She cannot and must not replace the State,” he insists. Yet at the same time she must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice. Thus is a careful line drawn with regard to efforts by Catholic prelates, most notably in the United States in the last presidential election, to tell politicians which laws they may or may not pass.
This is a remarkable, enjoyable and even endearing product of Pope Benedict’s first few months. If first encyclicals set the tone for a new papacy, then this one has begun quite brilliantly. _______________ mp
[From today's online Chronicle of Higher Education:]
A glance at the January-February issue of Academe: Statements of faith
Many private colleges today make professorships contingent upon making a statement of religious faith, but are such oaths appropriate?
Supporters of the practice defend it in part by calling colleges that embrace faith statements a healthy reflection of America's pluralism, explains Kenneth Wagner, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Radford University, a public institution in Virginia. Mr. Wagner calls them "restrictions on academic freedom," though, and says that theologically conservative associations "inhibit the building of social capital and the strengthening of civil society."
In a separate article, Peter J. Hill, a professor of economics at Wheaton College, a Christian liberal-arts institution in Illinois, writes that a faith statement is an acknowledgment of a worldview, and that secular colleges embrace worldviews just as faith-based universities do. Secular colleges, though, take as a premise that "there are no moral absolutes or organizing principles for life."
"Both positions are value-laden," says Mr. Hill, "and I think both should be options for organizing academic life."
Mr. Hill adds that faith statements do not necessarily affect scholarship, and that those who make them do so voluntarily. Mr. Wagner balks at the latter of those claims, though, saying that "you need have only a basic knowledge of the academic job market to know that many new Ph.D.'s take positions with institutions whose values they might not wholly endorse." He notes that violating such statements through pedagogy, research, or activism can be grounds for punitive action, even termination.
"What of the faculty member who comes to an institution fully subscribing to the statement of faith but who then finds a different view of the truth?" he asks. "Must this person either suppress these new ideas or resign?"
Mr. Wagner's article, "Faith Statements Do Restrict Academic Freedom," is available here.
Mr. Hill's article, "My Religious College, My Secular Profession," is available here.
I didn't attend Yale Law School (though I did teach there, in 1978-79). But that's about to change. After reading Eduardo's posting below, I've decided to cancel my classes for the rest of the semester, take up residence in New Haven, and audit Eduardo's CST seminar. Anyone want to join me? (Ah, if only my fantasies--some of them, anyhow--would come true!) _______________ mp
The following correspondence appeared in the January 27th issue of Commonweal:
Rick Garnett writes:
I appreciate Cathleen Kaveny's timely essay, Letter v. Spirit (December
16, 2005). Kaveny is right, of course, that good judges do far more than
apply the law and that the real question is how--not whether--a justice
will approach the task of constitutional interpretation. But President
Bus'hs mantra that Kaveny criticizes--that he wants judges who will not
legislate from the bench--is quite consistent with her observation. To
want a judge who will not legislate is not to demand, or to imagine, a
judge who refuses to interpret; it is to want a judge who will interpret
the Constitution appropriately--that is, in a way that is democratically
legitimate and that is consistent with the text, history, and structure of
that document and the government it constitutes.
Kaveny notes that we have to ask how we should make sense of the basic
law of our country today, which faces responsibilities and challenges the
Founding Fathers could never have imagined. The primary challenge we face,
though--one that the founders could and did imagine--remains the challenge of
exercising self-government responsibly under and through a written
Constitution. That many of the difficult moral and policy questions
presented today were not contemplated even by the most engaged minds of the
eighteenth century is not surprising. Still, the Constitution they drafted
and ratified is more about structuring government and allocating
decision-making and legislative authority than about providing--or
authorizing federal judges to provid--eanswers on the merits of difficult
new moral questions.
Yes, an approach rigidly focused on the explicit provisions of the text
and the intention of the framers is both theoretically and practically
inadequate, but rigidity usually is. The question is whether a different
approach--one that would authorize and encourage judicial invalidation of
democratically crafted policy choices on the basis of unelected judges'
understanding of political realities--is legitimate. To insist on the
importance of this question is not to define the right approach to
constitutional interpretation solely in terms of outcome or to raise
doubts about the justice of the holding in Brown v. Board of Education.
richard w. garnett Notre Dame, Ind.
Cathy Kaveny replies:
My colleague Richard Garnett thinks my complaint is misplaced because Bush's
mantra reasonably protests legislating from the bench. But he quotes only
half the mantra. Bush repeatedly calls for judges who will strictly apply
the Constitution and laws, not legislate from the bench. As I stated in my
first paragraph, I object to that mantra because it creates a false
dichotomy. Garnett thinks it obvious that the president didnt mean to rule
out the essential tertium quid of interpretation. Obvious to whom? Many
non-lawyers aren't familiar with the disciplined creativity that legal
interpretation regularly involves. I fear that Bushs mantra misleads
voters by implying that much legitimate interpretation is illegitimate
judicial legislation.
The rest of Garnett's letter raises issues I didn't address in my column;
they deserve brief comment. He suggests the Constitution is more concerned
with setting up government structures and establishing lines of authority
than with addressing moral issues and social realities. I don't agree. What
about the Bill of Rights? Or the Antislavery Amendments? And even
structural questions have controversial moral and social implications. We
can't ignore the torture memos, where Bush administration lawyers argued
that Congress has no constitutional authority to outlaw torture authorized
by the president in prosecuting the war on terror.
Garnett's main worry is judicial tyranny; he fears judges will usurp the
rightful place of democratically elected representatives in making policy
on controversial moral and social issues like abortion or gay marriage.
That is certainly a reasonable worry. But I don't think its best addressed
by adopting a truncated approach to constitutional interpretation, such as
Scalia's textualism or Garnett's own prioritization of governmental
structure over moral substance. Furthermore, untempered focus on the
dangers of an activist judiciary can make us less vigilant against other
sources of tyranny equally repugnant to the framers. Congress has
threatened to eliminate federal court jurisdiction over petitions for the
writ of habeas corpus filed by suspected terrorists. The president has
defended domestic spying without judicial authorization. With all due
respect, I don't think that tyranny of the judicial branch poses the most
immediate threat to our constitutional democracy.
Earlier today, I posted a link to Gary Wills on Jimmy Carter. Now, here is Martin Marty on Gary Wills on Jimmy Carter.
Sightings 1/23/06
Celebrating
Carter -- Martin E. Marty
In weekly Sightings and biweekly
"M.E.M.O" and Context, my regular outlets, readers may have noticed that
I very rarely "do" presidents, especially sitting ones. Today an
ex-president comes into periscope range, since it's exactly a quarter of a
century since Jimmy Carter left office. It would seem to be a safe time to
get distance on him. Still, this "best ex-president we ever had" stirs
slurs -- as in the weeks-ago Wall Street Journal's trashy trashing of his
new bestseller, Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis.
Carter the pol knows that politics is not a sport for the timid, and is used to
the give-and-take of criticism, some of which he gives in his new
book.
Having just finished co-directing a project at Emory University in
Atlanta, I had several chances for close-up views again on this fellow
retiree. On two occasions he made public appearances to advance our
project, so one might say I "have an interest." My main interest, however,
is to say that if I don't speak up once, in measured admiration and immeasurable
gratitude, I'd be an ingrate.
Let his detractors say what they wish; Mr. Carter
strikes me as someone who can be at ease with himself. Millions of voters
in scores of nations are better off for his (and his team's) monitoring of their
elections. Literally hundreds of thousands of the poor, especially in
Africa, are alive and healthy, thanks to Carter-inspired ventures (for example,
against river blindness and guinea worm infestation).
This is not the place to review Carter, but a review of
Carter's book by Gary Wills, which concentrates so much on religion (as it has
to if it wishes to "catch" the man), inspires some quoting and commenting.
Wills compares religion-in-politics in 1972, when he first tracked Governor
Carter in Georgia, with politics-in-religion today. One unavoidable theme,
for Carter and Wills, is the 180-degree turn by the Southern Baptist Convention
majority since Carter's younger years. Such Southern Baptists "have become
as authoritarian as their former antitype, the Roman Catholic hierarchy" --
something that grieves Carter, who grew up in the Convention back when Baptists
were Baptists. Now by their version of pushing religion into the public
square they are doing the most un-Baptistic thing conceivable: asking "the
state" to do much of "the church's" job. Wills
writes in theNew York Review of Books, my
citing of which will taint me, for "hanging out" with and quoting such
sorts. (His indictment, in the February 9 issue, merits
reading.)
Wills says better than I could who Carter is, so I will
quote from his conclusion: "Carter is a patriot. He lists all the things
that Americans have to be proud of. That is why he is so concerned that we
are squandering our treasures, moral even more than economic. He has come
to the defense of our national values, which he finds endangered. He
proves that a devout Christian does not need to be a fundamentalist or fanatic,
any more than a patriotic American has to be punitive, narrow, and
self-righteous. He defends the separation of church and state because he
sees with nuanced precision the interactions of faith, morality, politics, and
pragmatism."
Happy 25th, President Emeritus and tenured
post-retirement public servant.
[Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.] _______________ mp
For an interesting essay by Gary Wills (Catholic) on Jimmy Carter (Baptist), on religion in politics, and on the culture of death, click here. From the New York Review of Books, 12/9/06. _______________ mp
The following essay--by Luke Timothy Johnson, who is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament at Emory University, where I too now teach--is from the 1/27/06 issue of Commonweal. I hope the essay is widely read.
After the Big Chill
Intellectual Freedom & Catholic Theologians Luke Timothy Johnson
Suppose we indulge our fondest
hopes. Let us imagine that Pope Benedict XVI turns out to be quite
unlike what many expected, and that he embraces a spirit of theological
openness and generosity. No longer would a respected and respectful
editor of a Jesuit journal be removed for the sin of advocating
fairness; no more would a leading theological ethicist be removed from
a tenured position or a systematic theologian be quelled by the same
threat.
In this new atmosphere, local pastors would no longer
be summoned to account in Rome on the basis of parishioners’ calls to
the bishop (as priest friends of mine have been). Scholars (like me)
would not be disinvited to conferences on Aquinas because they
criticized John Paul’s theology of the body, or be asked to sign a
statement that they would not do anything to “embarrass the church”
when lecturing at a university, or, on the basis of other anonymous
calls, be warned by the vicar-general of an archbishop who is now a
cardinal against being “soft on the bodily Resurrection” of Christ when
teaching New Testament to adult Catholics. The “big chill” within
contemporary Catholicism includes all those mechanisms, overt and
covert, by which the Vatican has deliberately sought to suppress
theological intelligence and imagination in the name of doctrinal and
moral “Truth.”
Now suppose all these measures stopped because Benedict
XVI turned out to be someone who actually moderated his predecessor’s
repressive instincts. Would the church then be in a state beatific?
Would a healthy balance between magisterial authority and theological
inquiry be struck then?
I am not sanguine. For one thing, the chill has become
systemic. The episcopacy shaped by John Paul II will continue to
perpetuate its fearful distrust of theologians. Defenders of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) argue that its
investigations and sanctions of theologians are about “truth in
advertising”-Catholic theologians in Catholic colleges should teach the
way the Vatican says they should teach. Such a claim does little more
than reduce theological truth to catechesis.
Is there a better way to think about the relationship
between theologians and the church’s hierarchy? I think so. If we focus
our hope for the church on the personality or policy proclivities of
this or the last or the next pope, we simply perpetuate the Vatican’s
tendency to identify the church with the magisterium and the
magisterium with the pope. That, in turn, contributes to the
ill-conceived conviction that all theological wisdom must spring from a
single source. This fixation is problematic even-perhaps especially-if
we grant that John Paul II and Benedict XVI are genuine and even
important theologians. This fixation on the papacy results in the
steady theological impoverishment of the church as a whole, precisely
at a time when the task of articulating the church’s faith is urgent
and daunting. The effort by the Vatican and its allies to control
theological debate reflects little trust in the capacity of theologians
to criticize one another-something they have never been reluctant to
do-and even less trust in the best-educated laity in Catholic history
that is hungry for intellectual engagement with the faith that is not
condensed and condescending. Defenders of the CDF’s actions like to say
that theology is an ecclesial, not merely an academic, vocation. I
agree. It is precisely because theology is done by and for the church
that it requires the highest gifts of theological intelligence and
imagination. Some of the best theological talent available to the
church today is found outside the clergy. If these lay theologians
teach in Catholic colleges or seminaries, they are placed under strict
control; if they teach in Protestant or secular schools, they are
largely ignored. Many in the hierarchy seem indifferent to the academic
theological community, while others seem hostile to the climate of
intellectual freedom that theology needs.
[To print and/or read the whole essay, click here. Here is the concluding paragraph:]
The theological impoverishment of the church today is real and if
something is not changed, it will undoubtedly get worse. Perhaps it’s
too much to hope that the present model of the church as household can
open itself to a healthy conversation with the image of the church as
the living body of the resurrected Christ, particularly if the present
heads of household think that theirs is the only model that is true to
revelation. But they are wrong. The alternative (and, I insist,
complementary) image of the church is, if anything, truer to the good
news as found in Scripture. Those of us who long for a church in which
it is possible to be both smart and holy, both loyal and critical, live
in hope that something of this vision may gain recognition. Still,
suppose the big chill continues, through the papacy of Benedict XVI
(despite our fondest hopes) and the papacies to follow. What can
theologians do? They can continue to speak prophecy and to practice
discernment among God’s people. What is at stake is the integrity of
the church’s witness to the living God. _______________ mp
This op-ed should be of interest to many MOJ readers.
New York Times January 20, 2006
Wayward Christian Soldiers By Charles Marsh
IN the past several years, American evangelicals, and I am one of
them, have amassed greater political power than at any time in our
history. But at what cost to our witness and the integrity of our
message?
Recently, I took a few days to reread the war sermons delivered by
influential evangelical ministers during the lead up to the Iraq war.
That period, from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2003, is not
one I will remember fondly. Many of the most respected voices in
American evangelical circles blessed the president's war plans, even
when doing so required them to recast Christian doctrine.
Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta,
whose weekly sermons are seen by millions of television viewers, led
the charge with particular fervor. "We should offer to serve the war
effort in any way possible," said Mr. Stanley, a former president of
the Southern Baptist Convention. "God battles with people who oppose
him, who fight against him and his followers." In an article carried by
the convention's Baptist Press news service, a missionary wrote that
"American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity
for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."
As if working from a slate of evangelical talking points, both
Franklin Graham, the evangelist and son of Billy Graham, and Marvin
Olasky, the editor of the conservative World magazine and a former
advisor to President Bush on faith-based policy, echoed these
sentiments, claiming that the American invasion of Iraq would create
exciting new prospects for proselytizing Muslims. Tim LaHaye, the
co-author of the hugely popular "Left Behind" series, spoke of Iraq as
"a focal point of end-time events," whose special role in the earth's
final days will become clear after invasion, conquest and
reconstruction. For his part, Jerry Falwell boasted that "God is
pro-war" in the title of an essay he wrote in 2004.
The war sermons rallied the evangelical congregations behind the
invasion of Iraq. An astonishing 87 percent of all white evangelical
Christians in the United States supported the president's decision in
April 2003. Recent polls indicate that 68 percent of white evangelicals
continue to support the war. But what surprised me, looking at these
sermons nearly three years later, was how little attention they paid to
actual Christian moral doctrine. Some tried to square the American
invasion with Christian "just war" theory, but such efforts could never
quite reckon with the criterion that force must only be used as a last
resort. As a result, many ministers dismissed the theory as no longer
relevant.
Some preachers tried to link Saddam Hussein with wicked King
Nebuchadnezzar of Biblical fame, but these arguments depended on
esoteric interpretations of the Old Testament book of II Kings and
could not easily be reduced to the kinds of catchy phrases that are
projected onto video screens in vast evangelical churches. The single
common theme among the war sermons appeared to be this: our president
is a real brother in Christ, and because he has discerned that God's
will is for our nation to be at war against Iraq, we shall gloriously
comply.
Such sentiments are a far cry from those expressed in the Lausanne
Covenant of 1974. More than 2,300 evangelical leaders from 150
countries signed that statement, the most significant milestone in the
movement's history. Convened by Billy Graham and led by John Stott, the
revered Anglican evangelical priest and writer, the signatories
affirmed the global character of the church of Jesus Christ and the
belief that "the church is the community of God's people rather than an
institution, and must not be identified with any particular culture,
social or political system, or human ideology."
On this page, David Brooks correctly noted that if evangelicals
elected a pope, it would most likely be Mr. Stott, who is the author of
more than 40 books on evangelical theology and Christian devotion.
Unlike the Pope John Paul II, who said that invading Iraq would violate
Catholic moral teaching and threaten "the fate of humanity," or even
Pope Benedict XVI, who has said there were "not sufficient reasons to
unleash a war against Iraq," Mr. Stott did not speak publicly on the
war. But in a recent interview, he shared with me his abiding concerns.
"Privately, in the days preceding the invasion, I had hoped that no
action would be taken without United Nations authorization," he told
me. "I believed then and now that the American and British governments
erred in proceeding without United Nations approval." Reverend Stott
referred me to "War and Rumors of War, " a chapter from his 1999 book,
"New Issues Facing Christians Today," as the best account of his
position. In that essay he wrote that the Christian community's primary
mission must be "to hunger for righteousness, to pursue peace, to
forbear revenge, to love enemies, in other words, to be marked by the
cross."
What will it take for evangelicals in the United States to recognize
our mistaken loyalty? We have increasingly isolated ourselves from the
shared faith of the global Church, and there is no denying that our
Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of
our moral and evangelistic witness in the world. The Hebrew prophets
might call us to repentance, but repentance is a tough demand for a
people utterly convinced of their righteousness.
[Charles Marsh, a
professor of religion at the University of Virginia, is the author of
"The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil
Rights Movement to Today."]
