A. G. Mojtabai. Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas

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A. G. Mojtabai. Blessed Assurance: At Home With the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas. Syracuse University Press, 1997 [1986].

Though this book was written over twenty years ago, it remains a fascinating portrayal of the link between futuristic eschatology and American militarism (the paperback edition, published in 1997, remains unchanged from the original).  Mojtabai, a secular Jew and humanist from New York, decided to pay an extended visit to Amarillo, Texas, in order to understand the people who make nuclear weapons. After she arrived in Texas she began to learn how intertwined the acceptance of the validity of such work was with Christian fundamentalism.

The book is well-written and for the most part lets the people of Amarillo tell their own stories. Mojtabai seems to be a good listener, able to evoke a sense of trust from the people she talked with. She does ask some pointed questions and lets her perspective enter the discussion at times. However, the book’s power stems most of all from her care in keeping her agenda below the surface.

What results, though, is indeed a powerful and frightening portrayal of American Christianity and the American scandal of pouring such an incredible amount of treasure (human and material) into the creation of an unspeakably evil arsenal of death-dealing weaponry. The shocking element of Mojtabai’s story arises from the overt complicity of theology in such a blasphemous undertaking.

Mojtabai finds herself wondering what’s wrong with the sensibility of these Christians who so blithely support the creation of such weapons of mass destruction. In doing so, she actually presents Jesus and his message over against the words of the Christians–an act of wonderful irony where the agnostic understands the gospel better than professing Christians.

“Going from church to church in Amarillo, the impression is unavoidable: some of the most ardent born and born-again Christians are writing Christianity off as something that did not, could not work—at least, not in the First Coming.  The conviction that mankind is bent on its own destruction, that goodness cannot succeed in a world so evil, the constant recourse to the Old Testament (to the most bellicose sections), the turning for betterment to the dire remedies offered by the book of Revelation, the only light left to the Second Coming—all this strangely negates the ‘good news’ of the Gospels and the First Coming.”

 

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Triumph of the Lamb: Revelation Four and Five

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The book of Revelation continues to gain a great deal of attention–for better and for worse. Back in the 1980s I paid sustained attention to this amazing piece of literature and wrote a short commentary.  Here is the commentary’s discussion of chapters four and five, from Triumph of the Lamb (Herald Press, 1987; reprinted by Wipf and Stock).

Garry Wills. What Paul Meant

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Garry Wills. What Paul Meant. Viking, 2006

Garry Wills is an American treasure–a great historian, especially of American presidents, a political and religious progressive, a powerful critic of many of the failings of hierarchical Catholicism, a perceptive commentator on current events, and a prolific writer of always useful books.  As a kind of sidelight late in life, he has written a series of books on the New Testament–one on Jesus, one on Paul, and one of the gospels.

The second of the series, What Paul Meant, provides a clear, concise, and informative look at the great Apostle. One strength of the book is its accessibility combined with its reliability. Wills is not a New Testament scholar, but he is attentive to some of the best of Pauline scholarship and does a fine job summarizing some of its key insights. Another strength of the book is Wills’ clear and forceful placing of Paul firmly in first century Jewish debates. He rightly, and importantly, asserts that Paul was not a “Christian” because such a thing did not exist until after Paul’s death. Paul was a Jew arguing with other Jews about the best understanding of their tradition–from within that tradition.

Somewhat of a weakness, in my opinion, is that Wills does write as a historian–even if one seeking (successfully) to speak to a general audience.  That is, he is more descriptive than prescriptive, focusing more on what Paul “meant” then, than on what Paul means for us now.  One somewhat distracting element of this historical focus is the energy Wills spends on debunking Luke’s Acts of the Apostles as a useful source of information about the historical Paul. In such a short book (again, its brevity is a strength for Wills’ intentions with this book), it seems too bad that he would focus on this negative tangent. I don’t necessarily disagree with his judgment of Acts as history (though I think he presents the evidence as more clear and certain than it probably is) so much as think that if one wants to focus on Paul’s own writings as the basis for reconstructing the central elements of his life and thought one should simply do so and not spend much time justifying the exclusion of Acts from consideration (it would be different should this book be aimed at a more scholarly audience).

Nonetheless, while I was disappointed that Wills did not reflect more on Paul’s meaning for today (which would have seemed natural for one who pays such perceptive attention to the American political scene), I would recommend this book as a great introduction to the historical Paul.  And, in the end, Wills gets it exactly right, in my opinion, when he links Paul with Jesus, summarizing the message of both: “Both were at odds with those who impose the burdens of ‘religion’ and punish those who try to escape them. They were radical egalitarians, though in ways that delved below and soared above conventional politics. They were on the side of the poor, and saw through the rich. They saw only two basic moral duties, love of God and love of neighbor. Both were liberators, not imprisoners–so they were imprisoned. So they were killed. Paul meant what Jesus meant, that love is the only law” (175).

 

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Is God Nonviolent?

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It is difficult to think of a more difficult and more important moral issue in our world today than the issue of violence. For Christians, one important foundation issue that directly impacts our understanding of our own use of violence in how we understand God. Is it meaningful to think of God as nonviolent? Here is an essay that examines this question and argues that we can (and, indeed, must, if we hope to overcome the scourge of violence in our world) imagine God as indeed being nonviolent.

Jacob Taubes. The Political Theology of Paul

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Jacob Taubes. The Political Theology of Paul. Stanford University Press, 2004.

This is an interesting book, though perhaps not for everybody. Taubes was a Jewish political philosopher in Germany and the United States who died in 1987. Shortly before his death he presented a set of lectures on the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans (kind of). These lectures were gathered, edited, and translated, finally being published in North America in 2004 in a Stanford University Press series on postmodernism that includes other books from European philosophers on Paul.

Mark Lilla’s New York Review of Books article, “A New, Political Saint Paul?” in the October 23, 2008 issue (unfortunately only available online through a paid subscription), very helpfully puts Taubes’ thought in context. Unlike thinkers such as Zizak and, especially, Badiou, Taubes presents us with a Paul who is thoroughly Jewish. This is a major issue, and we can be grateful for Taubes’ counter-witness to what seems surely to be the kind of attention to Paul that does little to advance Christian theology and ethics or the much needed rapprochements of Christianity and Judaism on the one hand and of post-Christian Western thought and the authentic gospel on the other.

Taubes also stands over against the great Jewish thinker, Martin Buber, in his understanding of Paul.  Buber’s great book, Two Kinds of Faith, displayed a remarkably sympathetic Jewish reading of Jesus–but unfortunately drives a deep wedge between Jesus and Paul. Taubes rejects this wedge (though he does not pay much attention to Jesus, per se) and makes the assertion that Paul remains thoroughly Jewish in the prophetic line. This assertion would have still been unusual in the 1980s, but happily is now much more central for scholarly readings of Paul. Taubes was a good friend of the pioneering Pauline scholar Krister Stendahl and his affinity with Stendahl on this issue of Paul and Judaism is apparent.

However, the “kind of” in my parenthesis above must be explained. If you are looking for a close reading of Romans you will need to look elsewhere.  Taubes rambled a lot in these lectures. What is reproduced in this book is mainly a series of reflections on an appreciative Jewish reading of Paul, on various currents of 20th-century European political philosophy, and on Taubes’ own very rich and fascinating life. This makes a fun read–but useful more for its suggestiveness than for any sustained argumentation.

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Biblical Bases for Restorative Justice

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Over the past 30 years, the United States has increased our prison population ten-fold, from in the neighborhood of 200,000 to over 2 million. This transformation from a bad situation to a terrible situation has been catastrophic for too many in our society and the catastrophe continues to spread. One small response that has been emerging is the restorative justice movement.  Here is a recent lecture I presented on, “Biblical Bases for Restorative Justice.”

This lecture was paired with a lecture from my friend and colleague, Howard Zehr on the historical dynamics that have created our problems.  I  highly recommend Howard’s books in these themes:Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice (Christian Peace Shelf) and The Little Book of Restorative Justice (The Little Books of Justice & Peacebuilding).

James Logan. Good Punishment?

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James Logan. Good Punishment?: Christian Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment. Eerdmans, 2008.

This is an important and timely book.  Logan, a Mennonite who teaches at a Quaker school (Earlham College in Indiana) has provided a clear and devastating critique of the American criminal (in)justice system.  In careful, even understated prose, he details layer upon layer of social devastation–to the convicts who are treated like pieces of trash, to the victims of crime who are shunted aside by the system, and to the broader society that finds more and more resources being poured into a more and more ineffective (even counter-productive) prison-industrial complex.  A strong sense of humanity, grounded in his Christian faith, underlies Logan’s analysis.

By far the strongest part of the book is the first half, where Logan lays out the problems. He is quite persuasive in helping us see the social consequences of our society’s linking the violence of retributive philosophies and practices that takes already damaged people (convicted criminals) and damages them even further through dehumanizing punitive practices together with a powerful trend toward privatizing prisons and making them serve corporations’ lust for profits.

Logan writes this book as a theologian. He seeks to develop a case for what he calls “good punishment” where violations are taken seriously but become an occasion for seeking to heal the damage done rather than an occasion to unleash the forces of vengeance and (now) capitalist extraction of profits from human misery. He draws especially on the work of the pacifist Methodist theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas in this constructive effort.

I greatly appreciate Logan’s attempt to respond to this terrible crisis theologically. Indeed, the churches and the larger society are in dire need of such responses. The Dutch law professor, Herman Bianchi, makes the evocative statement that since the western theological tradition has so much responsibility for the crises we find ourselves in, one important step in a positive direction would be to apply some “homeopathic” therapy where we draw on this same tradition for resources that might heal the damage it has done. Logan’s work is an important effort at such homeopathic therapy.

Nonetheless, I found myself somewhat disappointed with the constructive theological proposals Logan makes. One problem arises from his use of Hauerwas as his main interlocutor. Hauerwas has a disconcerting tendency to take concrete ethical issues and mush them up with opaque theological jargon and abstract and vague thought experiments. So, Logan inevitably moves in the same problematic direction by relying on Hauerwas. He makes some perceptive criticisms of Hauerwas’s tendencies in this direction, but they pale in relation to how he nonetheless lets Hauerwas frame a theological response.

Logan’s main constructive proposal is to develop the notion of what he calls a politics of “ontological intimacy”–an unfortunate term that does not really help very much in providing clear directives for a theological, ethical approach to transforming the retributive and corporatist system we suffering under today.

When I picked up this book, knowing that Logan is a Mennonite and with the title “Good Punishment?”, I expected more engagement with the work of John Howard Yoder.  Yoder wrote a set of essays under the rubric of “good punishment” that have never been published (they were written in 1995 and are available online here [this page has many of Yoder’s unpublished writings, scroll down a ways to find the set of lectures calls “The Case for Punishment”]). I thought Logan might be taking Yoder’s creative work as his jumping off point. He does refer briefly to Yoder; however, by letting Hauerwas set the agenda instead of Yoder, he misses an opportunity to make a more significant theological contribution to these important issues.

It is probably true, as Cornel West says in a blurb for the book, that “Logan’s book is the most sophisticated theological treatment of the prison-industrial complex we have.” And Logan deserves our strong appreciation for producing this “treatment.” In the end, though, I still find myself looking for more.

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Triumph of the Lamb: Revelation Two and Three

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The book of Revelation continues to gain a great deal of attention–for better and for worse. Back in the 1980s I paid sustained attention to this amazing piece of literature and wrote a short commentary.  Here is the commentary’s discussion of chapters two and three, from Triumph of the Lamb (Herald Press, 1987; reprinted by Wipf and Stock).

Nicholas Wolterstorff. Justice: Rights and Wrongs.

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Nicholas Wolterstorff.  Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Princeton University Press, 2008.

This is an important book, but also a bit of a frustrating book. Wolterstorff is a well-known Christian philosopher, long-time professor at Calvin College, more recently at Yale University, and currently in residence as an active retiree at the University of Virginia.

I really like his argument. He grounds justice in human rights and he grounds human rights in the inherent worth of each person.  He presents the case for seeing such an understanding in the Bible. I love that he brings the Bible to bear on this discussion, though his presentation is a bit disjointed.  He summarizes his interpretation of the biblical bases for a strong view of human rights, but then kind of leaves it behind as he turns to the philosophical tradition. It feels more like he is using the Bible as an illustration than as a fundamental source.

Probably because I am not a philosopher, Wolterstorff’s long and winding journey through philosophical argumentation did not hold my attention. I like where he ends up, but I did not find the process particularly enlightening.  One big surprise for me was his utter lack of attention to the political philosophers of recent years who have tackled the theory of justice (John Rawls gets a brief footnote early on, Ronald Dworkin gets a passing mention; Robert Nozick, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, William Galstone are all completely ignored). I found this lack to be surprising. By not engaging the political philosophers, Wolterstorff allows his discussion to remain on a highly abstract level once he leaves his biblical discussion.

It turns out that this book is part one of a two part work. In the midst of writing on justice, Wolterstorff realized that he needed a thorough treatment of love. He briefly addresses love here but promises a second volume that deal with it in much more detail. I look forward to this second book and believe that some of the problems I have with Justice: Rights and Wrongs (especially how abstract and philosophical it is) will be alleviated when the full work is complete.

One of the most attractive aspect of this work in my mind is Wolterstorff’s openness about his own commitments–he’s profoundly committed to social justice (having been active in anti-apartheid activism and supporting Palestinian rights in the Middle East) and he’s a deeply committed Christian who seeks to view everything through the eyes of his faith convictions.

His argument about justice, human rights, and human worth is profound and deserves careful attention. He provides bases for a Christian perspective on many of the pressing issues of our day that challenge injustice and oppression. Hopefully Wolterstorff himself and others will continue to push out implications of this understanding of justice and apply it to actual on the ground issues.

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Jesus and Herod: Two Kinds of King

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One of the central issues that Christian theology and ethics must face is the question of why Jesus, who by all accounts was an extraordinarily kind, generous, and merciful person, found himself is such conflict during his life–ending with his execution in the most torturous, humiliating way imaginable. To take this question seriously is to engage the issue of our own faith and the role it plays in our way of living in the world.

Here is an article I published about ten years ago that reflects on this issue.  Jesus came to be seen as the Christ, a title that literally meant “King.” In the story of Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s gospel, we encounter another king, known as Herod the Great. Comparing and contrasting these two kings, especially in relation to the categories of scarcity and abundance, provides important insights into Jesus’ way of life, his conflict with the powers that be, and the shape lives modeled after his might take.