DET (Die Evangelischen Theologen) is the theological version of a digital news magazine. The DET authorial team provides insightful, thought-provoking content on a wide range of theological, religious, and even political subjects from current events and culture as well as from the Christian and other religious traditions.
Modern Christian ethics, like modern Christian life, is riddled with ambiguities. The Christian moral thinker, much like Kierkegaard's knight of faith, is torn between two competing visions of what is really real. On the one hand, her faith teaches her to trust the God of creation and redemption, whose secret providence governs the ultimate course of human history, directing it to its appointed consummation in the Kingdom of God. On the other hand, both her mission of reconciliation and her solidarity with the rest of humanity in joy and suffering plunge her into the conflicted, broken and often violent affairs of the world -- the real world of spirit and matter that God supposedly has created and still loves, though truth be told, it's often hard to find clear evidence of that. Theology and ethics fall into error when they sidestep the tension in that dialectic by choosing one term over the other.
Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr understood that dialectic. They wrote about it and lived it through two World Wars, the Korean War, the Cold War and, in the case of Reinhold, the Civil Rights Movement and the war in Southeast Asia. As I wrote in the first post in this series, Scott R. Paeth's survey -- The Niebuhr Brothers for Armchair Theologians (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2014) -- does a fine job of tracing both the commonalities and the divergences between two leading Protestant thinkers. Nowadays, the two brothers are often lumped together -- often, I suspect, by commentators who haven't read too much of either of them. That's a pity, because they did have significant disagreements that augured debates in theology and ethics that continue to this day.
Japanese Soldiers in Manchuria
In the spring of 1932 the Niebuhr brothers carried out one such debate in the pages of The Christian Century (The exchange can be accessed here). During the previous fall, Japan had invaded Manchuria, thereby sparking a crisis of conscience among liberal pacifists about how the United States should respond. In those days, pacifist leaders were opposed not only to military action abroad but to any coercive intervention whatsoever, including economic sanctions. The Century, whose notoriety had been boosted exponentially by Reinhold's unsigned editorials and by-lined articles, was a leading sounding board for such pacifist views (For a deeper appreciation of these contexts, see Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Cornell University Press, 1996.) (All my Niebuhr quotes are from the UCC website, and I have edited them to fix what seem to be typographical errors.)
Richard fires the opening volley of the debate with a theological essay extolling "The grace of doing nothing" (March 23, 1932). How does the social ethicist respond when there are no good options for addressing a tragic situation in public affairs? Not all forms of inaction are equal, apparently. Richard gives short shrift to the inactive stances of the ideological pessimist, who smugly views her worldview as vindicated in the rapid dissolution of the social order or of the conservative advocate for the status quo, who believes all nation-states act out of a totalizing self-interest in the tussle of the will to power. Richard also criticizes the moral indignation of the idealistic pacifists, who find in their inactivity an occasion for self justification. Closer to a proper Christian view, he claims, is the inactivity of the Communist -- the orthodox Marxist who has a broader confidence that history moves inexorably to a resolution of inequalities and injustices. The Marxist's belief in secular progress is analogous to, or perhaps parasitic upon, the traditional Christian belief in providence. (I'm not sure if most Marxists would accept as accurate this characterization of their views on human agency in history.) In the end, Richard endorses the inactivity of the theist who puts all her hope in the invisible hand of providence. He writes:
Those who follow this way share with communism the belief that the fact that men can do nothing constructive is no indication of the fact that nothing constructive is being done. Like the Communists they are assured that the actual processes of history will inevitably and really bring a different kind of world with lasting peace.
In short, God is working out both judgment an redemption in and through the conflicts of history, even if we can't discern how the final chapter of the human story will be written. Richard admits: "[I]f there is no God, or if God is up in heaven and not in time itself, it is a very foolish inactivity." In an interesting argument that prefigures postliberal communitarianism, Richard advocates for cell groups of "radical" believers who gather in prayerful hope in this God of ultimate redemption.
Reinhold believes in this God too, of course, but he is not satisfied with his younger brother's quietism in the face of naked imperialist oppression. He counters with the question "Must we do nothing?" (March 30, 1932). Reinhold shares Richard's critique of an idealistic pacifism that would deign to rise above the brutal conflicts of history, and he affirms his younger brother's ultimate eschatological hope as a rightful antidote to a paralyzing pessimism. He dissents, however, from Richard's counsel to simply wait out conflicts like the one in Manchuria, confident that God is acting providentially in and through the brutalities of imperial self-interest. He writes:
I do not see how a revolution in which the disinterested express their anger and resentment, and assert their interests, can be an instrument of God, and yet at the same time an instrument which religious scruples forbid a man to use. I should think that it would be better to come to ethical terms with the forces of nature in history, and try to use ethically directed coercion in order that violence may be avoided.
Consequently, Reinhold advocates economic measures to pressure the Japanese to relent; no military intervention is envisioned here. For Reinhold, authentic ethical action emerges from the dialectic between the ideal of agapic love, whose purity can never be instantiated in human history, and the imperative to strive for relative social justice within the compromises and limitations of social processes marred by sinful self-interest, especially on the part of collective entities such as nation-states. History, in Reinhold's view, is inevitably tragic, but even amid this tragedy we can still work for a more just social order. Doing so, however, may we temper our ethical idealism and sin boldly in the cause of justice.
Paeth writes:
What is striking about this exchange between the two brothers is not simply that they offered very different prescriptions for Christian moral action in the world, but that those prescriptions grew out of the same ground -- a disillusionment with the love, idealism, and naivety that had become central to the social gospel movement by the early 1930s. Both brothers perceived clearly that whatever the way forward for Christian ethics might be, the remedies proposed by the liberal Christianity that had been so influential for both of them were no longer effective for dealing with the pressing issues of their time, if indeed they ever had been (pp. 57-58).
The debate between the Niebuhr brothers remains relevant because this tension between idealism and realism is as intrinsic to Christian ethics as it is to life in the world per se. This dialectic also riddles the project of liberal democracy that has shaped all of us, from the peace activist who splatters blood on nuclear warheads to the drone-dispatching Christian realist (if that's what he really is) who inhabits the White House. Still, this doesn't necessarily mean that all cats are gray.
"I fear that Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth also stand with only one leg in heaven." "The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from everyday Christian life in community…may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; for in the poor sister or brother, Christ is knocking at the door." "Since ethical thinking in terms of realms is overcome by faith in the revelation of the ultimate reality in Jesus Christ . . . there is no real Christian existence outside the reality of the world." "People who reject their bodies reject their existence before God the Creator." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer Prelude Andreas Steinhoff [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons I envisioned having a lot of time for blogging this summer, but that simply has not been the case - the last month has been a crazy one, to say the least. For two weeks, I was working at a theology summer camp of sorts, the Duke Youth Academy, and s...
Every now and then I am asked for advice about studying Karl Barth. So, I thought that I would share some of my standard advice here. But, before I do that, let me just say that I am by no means a Barth expert as compared to the people whose books I will mention below. I would be thrilled to find myself in their league one day, but as of yet that remains a distant dream. Still, I have been reading Barth for long enough, and under the supervision of a number of the scholars that I will mention below, that I think I can provide a decent orientation. I have never read Karl Barth before. Which of his books should I read first? Barth’s most famous work is the monumental 13-volume Church Dogmatics . Reading the CD with understanding is not an easy thing, so you definitely do NOT want to start here. Luckily, there are two smaller works by Barth that serve as helpful introductions to his work. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction - Based on the lectures that Barth delivered duri...
You know, all the most interesting topics. Although Barth often confessed that he didn’t find these questions particularly interesting. At best they might draw sideways glances, as it were, as one travels the theological road. But I found a number of places in the records of Barth’s later conversations that I thought folks might find interesting, so I’ve collected them here. And if you aren’t familiar with the term “florilegium,” here you go ! All these texts are from the first volume of Barth in Conversation , with pages numbers given in parentheses along the way. As usual, italics are in the text and bold is mine. Hell “Now we come to hell. You shouldn’t laugh! There is nothing to laugh at! What does hell mean? I think hell means to be in the place where you are once fore all damned and lost without ceasing to exist, without losing the image of God, being what you are but being damned and lost, separated from God, whose creature you are, separated also from your neighbor, from...
I’ve been reading George Hunsinger’s (my doktorvater , for anyone who might be new around here) entry in the Brazos Theoloical Commentary on the Bible series on Philippians. Anyone who has studied with George will find this book to be a compendium and application of many of his most characteristic and beloved analytical tools and patterns, and I’ve been enjoying it immensely. But one of the things that really stood out to me was how he glossed the so-called “Christ hymn” of Philippians 2. George Hunsinger, Philippians , Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: BrazosPress, 2020). The gloss that Hunsinger provides is not a historical-critical interpretation. Rather, it is an ecclesial, ecumenical, and theological interpretation that attempts to fill in the blanks for how to understand this proto-liturgical formulation in light of the later formulations of the ecumenical creeds. In order to achieve this gloss, Hunsinger engages in “ecclesial hermeneutics” and makes “...
On the Monstrosity of Christ : Karl Barth in Conversation with Slavoj Žižek & John Milbank By Paul Dafydd Jones For a while, I hoped to frame this conversation in terms of a dramatic interchange – something along the lines of “A Slovenian philosopher, a British theologian, and a Swiss dogmatician walk into a bar…” Alongside an eye-wateringly hip assemblage of cinematic references, literary allusions, and comedic scenes – my early favorites being when Barth imagines a young adult novel, entitled Are you there God? It’s me, Žižek , and when Milbank waxes poetic about the Twilight movies – I wanted to engage some topics that would likely receive attention, were the authors to meet for drinks. Primarily, I envisioned an intense discussion of the logos asarkos and the logos ensarkos , with Milbank talking up the former category, Barth emphasizing the latter, and Žižek asking whether recent debates are but symptoms of secret puzzle, embedded in the Church Dogmatics – a puzzle that...
Comments