Theology and Global Conflict: Beyond Just War
The prophet Jeremiah interpreted the three Babylonian invasions of Judah leading up to the destruction of the temple in 587 BCE as God's judgment. God's people had committed "two evils" (Jer. 2:13): they had forsaken their God and they had turned elsewhere for sustenance and security. Jeremiah's lament over the fate of his disobedient people is still ours today: "We look for peace, but find no good, for a time of healing, but there is terror instead" (8:15). Each of the contributions in this issue on Theology and Global Conflict: Beyond Just War offers a perspective on current situations of global conflict. What unites these pieces is their effort, in the tradition of Jeremiah, to challenge human thought, behavior, and structures in light of the word of God.
Daniel Bell, in his article "The Labor of Communion in a Capital Age," concentrates his critical analysis on the structure of capitalism. Bell argues that Christians must resist the global extension of capitalism (built on conflict and war) in favor of pursuing the kingdom of God (built on communion with God and neighbor). Mary-Jane Rubenstein focuses her critical lens on the American military. In "A Certain Disavowal: The Pathos and Politics of Wonder," Rubenstein provides a whirlwind philosophical history of the term "wonder," advocating the recovery of wonder as "a ceaseless attunement to and critique of the uncanniness of the everyday." Rubenstein connects this kind of wonder with the biblical notion of fear of the Lord, characterized in Job and Proverbs as the beginning of wisdom, and opposes it to the deifying of the human subject as the source and object of wonder that drives "Shock and Awe" tactics. Gordon Brubacher, professor of Old Testament at Messiah College, addresses the ethical perplexity of the Old Testament witness on war in his article "Just War and the New Community: The Witness of the Old Testament for Christians Today," suggesting, as indicated by the title of his article, how this witness may be instructive for Christians faced with contemporary global conflict.
W. Travis McMaken's interview with George Hunsinger explores how a theology rooted in the biblical witness may be brought to bear on situations of global conflict. In this interview Hunsinger discusses some of the theological underpinnings of his activism against the U.S. government's use of torture, and offers advice to the next generation of ministers as to how they might best equip themselves and their congregations to respond to issues of political and global conflict. Reflections by two ordained ministers, Hyun-Soo Kim and Mark Winward, further broaden the contexts in which the theme of theology and global conflict is addressed in this issue. Kim, an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church of Korea, analyzes the Korean-Japanese conflict over the Japanese colonial government's abuse of Korean "comfort women." Critically appropriating philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch's writing on forgiveness, Kim proposes a biblically grounded way forward in this international dilemma. United States Navy chaplain Mark Winward addresses an entirely different context in a reflection entitled "How Can a Pastor Serve in the Armed Forces?" Winward answers this question by explaining the theological convictions motivating him to minister to those involved in armed global conflicts. Finally, W. Travis McMaken examines the meaning of Jesus' statement "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matt. 10:23) in his reflection, "The Sword that Christ Came to Bring: An Instance of Canonically Theological Exegesis."
Jeremiah's lament in chapter eight, "We look for peace, but find no good, for a time of healing, but there is terror instead" (v. 15), could today be the lament spoken by victims of an unjust economic system, innocent civilians who become the casualties of war, prisoners tortured by American intelligence networks, battered Korean "comfort women" seeking justice, or even by soldiers in combat. Jeremiah's lament does not go unheard. In chapter thirty he receives another word: "Thus says the LORD: We have heard a cry of panic, of terror, and no peace" (v.5). God promises to respond: "For I will restore health to you, and your wounds I will heal, says the LORD" (v.17).
In this advent season we remember the birth of the child
born to be our Prince of Peace. May the readings that follow
help us take to heart his words of encouragement to us:
"Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not
give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be
troubled, and do not let them be afraid" (John 14:27).
The Labor of Communion In a Capital Age
When we think of global conflict today, it is hardly surprising that the global war on terror comes immediately to mind. Since 9/11, we have been fed a steady diet of war and told that such will be our fare for the foreseeable future. As significant as this global conflict is, however, it has not succeeded in squelching all other forms of conflict. Indeed, from time to time, flashes of another global conflict have poked through our television screens and pierced our iPod-secured solitude. Occasionally we glimpse a skirmish in the conflict over globalization. That, of course, is a misnomer, for what is at issue is not simply an interdependent world versus an imaginary isolation or nostalgic localization. Rather, what is contested is a particular regime of globalization, a particular way of ordering relations, both human and non-human, on a global scale. Specifically, what is at issue is the global extension of capitalism. What is resisted is what some have celebrated as "the end of history" and others have denounced as the imperial advent of a virulent nihilistic capitalism.(1)
In what follows, I will suggest why Christians cannot join in this celebration, why we cannot but work for the end of the empire of capital, and why we hope and pray that this capital time, this capital age, does not in fact mark the end of history.
I. Capitalism and Communion
The typical debate over the moral legitimacy of capitalism in Christian circles tends to revolve around questions of its efficacy or lack thereof in addressing and eliminating poverty. Does capitalism reduce poverty and elevate the standard of living of the poor or does it perpetuate and exacerbate the suffering of the destitute and impoverished? This standard of evaluation makes theological sense. It makes sense, not the least because the biblical witness consistently puts precisely this question to individuals and economic orders. Unlike many contemporary accounts of justice, which reduce economic justice to its commutative or contractual dimension or even deny that there is such a thing as social justice,(2) Christianity has consistently proclaimed that economies should be so ordered that they are especially geared toward succoring the poor. Indeed, it is for this reason that both capitalism's Christian advocates and critics agree that God opts for the poor and so should we. As Amy Sherman, a Christian advocate of capitalism, observes, "For Christians, opting for the poor is not optional; it is a clear command of Christ."(3)
Unfortunately, debates regarding the efficacy of capitalism in alleviating poverty are as endless as they are fruitless, which is not to say that they do not have answers, only that the answers and evidences proffered in such discussions rarely, if ever, prove persuasive. Of course, recent geo-political developments shed some light on at least one dimension of this discussion with which it is difficult to argue: Whatever the merits and faults of capitalism - and everyone, even the staunchest Christian proponent of capitalism, recognizes capitalism falls short of the kingdom - Marxist socialism is dead.(4) The framing of the theological debate between socialism and capitalism has been rendered moot.
What are People For?
The interminable character of the empirical debates combined with the utter failure of socialism prompt us to pursue the question of capital from another angle that begins with the seemingly innocuous question, "What are people for?" Why are we here? What is our end or purpose? Augustine captured the Christian tradition's answer as well as anyone when he said, our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Or as Aquinas said, our end is beatitude, blessedness, which is nothing less than friendship with God. We are created to glorify and enjoy God. We are created for friendship, for communion. Of course this friendship is not merely a matter of me and Jesus or me and God. Scripture reminds us we cannot be friends of God if we hate our neighbors (1 Jn 3:17; 1 Jn 4:20-1); hence, the commandments are summed up in "Love God and neighbor" (Mt 22:35-40).
What, then, is the problem? Why are our hearts so clearly not at rest? Why can't we all just get along? If we are created for friendship, why do we have to pray for our enemies? Why do we live in fear of our neighbors and constantly look over our shoulder at the stranger? The Christian tradition accounts for this in terms of the Fall, i.e., sin. We were created for friendship with God and one another, yet in sin we struggle, fight, compete (cf. Gen. 4-11). Now, sin is not merely a matter of disobedience or breaking commandments. Rather, as the early church taught, sin is a matter of division, of the breach or rupture of communion. As Origen declared ubi peccata, ibi multitudo and Maximus the Confessor observed, our postlapsarian condition is such that "now we rend each other like wild beasts."(5)
What has this to do with the so-called free market economy, with capitalism? Everything, for capitalism deforms and obstructs our friendship with God, with other humans, and with the rest of creation. In other words, the problem with capitalism is not simply that it may not facilitate the ordering of material goods to their universal destination - the succoring of the needs of all and especially the poor (cf. John Paul II, Centesimus Annus). The problem with capitalism is not simply that it may not work, but that even if it does increase aggregate wealth, it is still wrong and to be opposed on the grounds of what it does to humans and human relations. As Alasdair MacIntyre has noted, "although Christian indictments of capitalism have justly focused attention upon the wrongs done to the poor and the exploited, Christianity has to view any social and economic order that treats being or becoming rich as highly desirable as doing wrong to those who must not only accept its goals, but succeed in achieving them. . . . Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to. recognize." (6) This is to say, capitalism is problematic not simply because it fails to work but because of what it does when it succeeds. The problem with capitalism is that where it succeeds human relations are ordered agonistically; they become a matter of struggle, conflict and competition - all antithetical to the friendship or community to which we are called and for which we were created.
The Agony of Capitalism
The agony of capitalism can be exposed by considering the kind of subject capitalism forms. Capitalism's success hinges upon the formation of a particular kind of human subject, one that relates to its environment in a certain way. For example, as Michael Perelman has shown, capitalism's emergence was hindered by a largely agrarian and cottage industry peoples' refusal to permit their relations with others, with the land, and with themselves to be reordered in capitalist fashion.(7)
Its Christian defenders often laud capitalism for the kind of subject it fosters and describe that subject in terms of creativity, inventiveness, independence, the self-interested pursuit of personal happiness devoid of envy, cooperation, and so forth.(8) This rather rosy portrait is painted of what is widely acknowledged as the anthropological center of capitalism: homo economicus.(9) Where it succeeds, capitalism forms human subjects as individuals who are fundamentally self-interested, whose relations (to themselves, creation, others and God) are competitive, conflicted, and contractual.
Homo economicus is first and foremost an individual - independent, autonomous, and self-made. Consider the shibboleths of capitalist culture: No one can tell me what to do or think. Dependency is a bad thing. The highest value is freedom as license, as sheer naked choice. Examples of this abound, from commercial jingoes like "have it your way" and public policy debates that, for example, revolve around not the quality of health care but only whether or not I get to choose my doctor, to the notso- subtle hostility directed toward "greedy geezers" who prove incapable of adhering to the strictures of homo economicus.
One must be careful, however, not to misconstrue the individualistic nature of the capitalist subject. No one is finally autonomous; we are all intrinsically interdependent and social and capitalism's advocates know this. So they argue that capitalism is about cooperation and community, albeit cooperation and community of a peculiar sort - namely, the corporation.(10) Thus, when capitalism produces individuals it is not producing isolated or solipsistic monads but subjects who relate to other subjects in a particular way. To be an individual is to relate to others in a particular, problematic manner, something that will become clearer momentarily.
The capitalist subject is not only an individual, but is fundamentally self-interested. Indeed, homo economicus is an interest-maximizer.(11) Here we might recall the well-known line from Adam Smith that it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, brewer or baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest. There is no substantive common good or shared purpose (i.e., one more substantial than the utilitarian claim that the good of all is served by self-interested individuals pursuing their discordant private goods) that unites us. And it should be noted, Pareto optimality and market equilibrium are not the equivalent of a substantive common good. Furthermore, efforts to discern and advance a thick common good can only result in disaster and tyranny. Thus, in a capitalist culture we are constantly reminded to look out for #1, businesses are increasingly run with an eye not toward public service but toward increasing the value of the top executives' stock holdings, our youth respond to queries about why they want to do what they want to do with the mantra, "to make money," and worship is framed in terms of how it can meet my needs and what I get out of it.
Here we come to the heart of the matter. How does capitalism construct human relations? How do capitalist subjects relate to one another? It is not difficult to imagine the interaction of these interest-maximizing individuals quickly degenerating into Hobbes' war of all against all. Here the oft-repeated boast of capitalism's advocates that economy tames bellicose passions is pertinent. While one would be hard-pressed to make a cogent empirical case that capitalism has reduced either the frequency or ferocity of war, it is true that capitalism does redirect the clashing interests of homo economicus by means of the competitive agony that is the "free" market. This is to say, capitalism does not promise an end to the agony of conflict but rather diverts the clash of self-interested individuals in accord with the golden rule of production for the market. Capitalism, to play on Clausewitz's well-known aphorism, is war by other means.
Under the sign of utopian capitalism - capitalism with a human face that at least gave lip service to promoting the common good of human development - it was perhaps possible to overlook this global conflict as it slowly engulfed the world, a possibility conveniently aided and abetted by the infamous abstraction of the discipline of economics. Yet, with the advent of nihilistic capitalism, of capitalism shorn of its human face, this commercial war is ever more evident.(12) We are now submerged in an economy that is no longer concerned with the fiction of a mutually beneficial comparative advantage. The charade of mutual advantage is dropped; instead, we seek competitive advantage.(13) All that matters is winning the war.
And this war is total war. As the capitalist market has become total and totalitarian, as it has succeeded in penetrating every aspect of human life,(14) everyone and every relation is submerged in unending conflict that is capitalist market relations. Thus, while we may not all succeed as consumers under global capitalism - many are merely trying to survive - we all become competitors, competing even with our closest relations for resources, employment, market share, assistance, for the time for family and friends and prayer.
One of the clearer indications of the capitalist distortion of human relations along these lines is the way in which everything and everyone increasingly is treated like a commodity - a fungible good valued only in terms of how and how long it satisfies my interests. Thus, marriages are seen as (short-term) contracts, children become consumer goods or accessories, and our bodies are treated like so much raw material to be exploited for pleasure or manufacture.(15) And those objects rendered worthless as commodities by obsolescence - the old and infirm - are discarded (warehoused or euthanized).
Capitalism not only distorts the human subject and its relations with others, it also distorts the character of God and God's relation with humanity. On the one hand, God's involvement in history is reduced to the workings of the market. This is to say, God is not involved in history now sanctifying or redeeming humanity from sin; rather all God is doing now is managing sin in the hope that self-interest and the pursuit of private goods works out in the long run at least for the benefit of the majority. Indeed, some of capitalism's Christian defenders come within a hair's breath of a deistic conception of God.(16) On the other hand, we are told that God did not create enough. Scarcity is a constant threat. In this way, the God of capital becomes a cosmic sadistic Easter bunny, creating insufficient goods in order to prod or stimulate the competitive juices that undergird our creativity and productivity. In other words, God hides stuff from us so that we - at least those who survive - will grow in the process of competing and struggling to find and create it.
In sum, the problem with capitalism is that it construes our relations with one another and God in a manner that precludes genuine friendship and communion. Under capital, we relate to one another competitively, agonistically, and God, far from befriending us, far from seeking to deliver us from the sin-induced agony that is this struggle, instead presides over it like a prison guard staging a gang fight. Thus, even if capitalism works, it is still wrong because the agony it fosters and perpetuates among people and with God is antithetical to the true communion for which we were created, to which we are called, and which Christians are empowered to proclaim and embody. To this communion, this economy, this ordering of God's household, we now turn.
II. The Labor of Communion
The good news is that the civil war initiated with the Fall, and perpetuated by capital, has come to an end. Friendship with one another and with God is again possible. The name for this friendship is the kingdom of God, where those who build inhabit, and those who plant harvest and eat, and all are filled as we gather together - friends - at the heavenly banquet. The problem is that we continue to pray, "Thy kingdom come," which is but an acknowledgment that this kingdom is neither fully present now nor is it finally something we can construct.
The Divine Gift Economy
Does this mean that friendship is not possible, that the best we can hope for are capitalist relations as a kind of lesser evil? No, for the kingdom's being not yet fully present is not synonymous with its simply being absent. For unlike the God of capital, who is either an absentee landlord or a sadistic Easter bunny, Christians confess the living God who even here and now in the midst of the old age is actively inaugurating a new age, redeeming humanity from sin. The kingdom is already present. In this secular time between the times, this divine friendship appears in the community called church. There we are befriended by God in Christ in a manner that (already) foreshadows the (not yet) consummation of the world's befriending. There, through the means of grace, we are redeemed and sanctified. There, under the influence of Word and water, bread and wine, homo economicus dies and a new creation, a new subject is Spirit-formed. Unlike its capitalist counterpart, this is a corporate, ecclesial subject that is neither self-interested nor relates to others as commodities in an endless (business) cycle of competition and conflict driven by scarcity but instead participates in the divine gift economy of abundance and ceaseless generosity.
This redeemed subject is not an individual. It is rather a constellation of persons in communion, a corporate, ecclesial subject called the body of Christ. Moreover, this subject is creaturely, which means that it is fundamentally dependent on God and others. Manna spoils; food cannot be stored in barns; goods rust; the Eucharist is our daily bread. Dependency upon and responsibility for others is a principal characteristic of this subject (Gal. 6:2).
The concomitant of this mutuality is the shared love or common good that unites these persons in communion. Specifically, this ecclesial subject seeks a common, shared good that is nothing other than the friendship of all in the blessed Trinity. In this regard, the Christian subject is not fundamentally self-interested. After all, the gospel is clear that we can do nothing to advance our interest; we are saved by grace. Indeed, until recently the Christian tradition was uniform in denouncing the seeking our own advantage as sin (1 Cor. 10:24; Phil. 2:3-4; Rom. 12:1-2.). Instead, as a recipient of the gift of life in Christ, the Christian is freed to live life as a surplus, as Christ to one another, as Luther had it. The Christian subject lives life as a gift to be given freely to and for others, without fear finally of loss (Luke 9:24, Matt. 22:39; Mark 12:31).
It is important to note that the ecclesial subject can live this way because we confess a God who provides, who sustains, who created enough. In other words, scarcity is not a natural condition, much less a God-ordained goad to competition; it is the contingent consequence of sin. In Christ we receive all that we could possibly need - even the power of resurrection - such that we are indeed freed to live life as a gift, ceaselessly giving to (and receiving from) others.
All of which means that capitalism is not realistic, but nihilistic - denying God's sanctifying presence here and now - and that human relations need not be a matter of war, of struggle and conflict (barely) managed by the capitalist market. Rather, in Christ we have an opportunity to live in peace. In Christ, humanity is invited to participate in the divine gift economy where we are redeemed from the agony of sin and human relations are renewed in a christological pattern of offering, sharing, gift-giving, cooperation, and ceaseless generosity. In Christ, we can be friends, giving, and receiving the gifts that sustain life.
The Works of Mercy
At this point, one might press this account of Christian opposition to capitalism to flee from the abstraction that is known to plague economics and get concrete. That is to say, what concretely does this divine gift economy look like? Is it simply opposed to the business of the production and marketing of goods? The answer is "no." Christian opposition to capitalism is not a matter of categorically rejecting the production, distribution, and consumption of goods, nor does it entail the rejection of the market in toto.(17) To the contrary, the economy constituted by the life of the ecclesial subject outlined above encompasses all of those practices. And contrary to the commonplace that one cannot discern an economy in Scripture, in fact Scripture is replete with practices that constitute this divine economy. From the prohibition of interest, to gleaning and the jubilee years, from the expectation of a living wage to hospitality to the community of goods, to the exhortation to labor, and so forth we see the contours of the divine economy.
While a detailed study of Scripture would take us far in discerning the shape of this divine economy and merely repeat the promising work of others, I want briefly to call attention to a set of economic practices that are not as well known, particularly in Protestant circles, that grew out of the biblical witness and have been sustained through the ages, namely, the Works of Mercy.
The Works of Mercy, consisting of seven corporal and seven spiritual works, provide an outline of an economic way of life, a way of ordering material goods, that nurtures the friendship or communion of all in God. In other words, in these practices and in the life of the community that sustains such practices, we see an economy that is neither predicated upon nor sustained by endless conflict. This is an economy inhabited by the ecclesial subject whose form was traced above. It is an economy of giftexchange that is made possible by friendship - first and foremost God's befriending us, but also our befriending one another - and whose goal is the extension of that friendship to include (all) others.
Granted, under the pressure of modernity, which privatizes and individualizes such works, practices like feeding the hungry, harboring the stranger, admonishing the sinner, and bearing wrongs patiently, hardly appear to constitute an economy. At best, they look to us modern capitalist subjects like a hobby called philanthropy. But with a little (redeemed) imagination, we might begin to see how a community that engaged in such practices would in fact be about economic things and how these acts would entail systemic and not just individual practices. Indeed, although they often pass "under the radar," this economy exists even now, even in the midst of the global capitalist economy, in a variety of forms, from intentional communities and cooperatives, to efforts to explore and enact alternative markets and business models, to efforts like the Jubilee campaign to resist and reorder global capital.
If this seems far-fetched, consider that Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, observed that it was the church's practice of the Works of Mercy (specifically charity in the form of almsgiving and hospitality) that posed the greatest threat to the emergence of the so-called free market and he rejoiced that capital was able to break the back of the church, rendering its charity more sparse, thereby undercutting its spiritual and temporal authority.
* * *
We are told by the secular lords and their priests that the
end of history has come upon us in capitalism, even the nihilistic
capitalism that, apart from the cynical propaganda of those
same lords' speech writers and the pages of those same priests'
treatises, no longer even bothers with the pretense of the utopian
dream of mutual benefit. But these lords and their priests are too
late and their words can gain no traction, for the end of history
has already appeared. As Paul announced long ago, we are the
ones on whom the ends of the ages have come (1 Cor. 10:11).
In the church, the body of Christ, the divine economy is making
its way in this world. Through this ecclesial subject's labor of
mercy announcing and enacting the possibility of a community
of goods, a communion where all are sustained by the eternal
generosity of the divine bounty, homo economicus is being redeemed
from the fetters of the "free market" and the agony of
endless war. So, even now capitalist globalization is giving way
before the catholicism of grace that is mercy's gift and labor.
1 Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?" in The National Interest 16 (1989), 3-18; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard, 2000); Franz Hinkelammert, El Grito del Sujeto, 3rd ed. (San Jose: DEI, 1998), 227-45.
2 See, for example, Friedrich A Von Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978).
3 Amy Sherman, Preferential Option: A Christian and Neoliberal Strategy for Latin America's Poor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 219.
4 I am careful to qualify my dismissal of socialism this way because there are supernatural forms of socialism - by which I do not mean Christianized Marxist socialism - that avoid this critique and
actually comport with my constructive argument. See, for example, John Milbank, Being Reconciled (New York: Routledge, 2003), 162- 186 and D. Stephen Long, Divine Economy (New York: Routledge, 2001).
5 Cited in Henri DeLubac, Catholicism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 33-4.
6 Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1995), xiv.
7 See Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
8 See, for example, the work of Michael Novak.
9 See Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1981); and Milton L. Myers, The Soul of Modern
Economic Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
See also Samuel Gregg, Economic Thinking for the Theologically
Minded(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), 12-3.
10 See Robert Bellah, et al. Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper
& Row, 1986); Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2001). See also the vast body of literature on rational
choice, game theory, and institutions. When discussing these matters
with a former very successful manager at a large national corporation,
she laughed and said that the corporation was indeed a kind
of community - one where even the office plants were distributed according
to a competitive logic, a sentiment that I have heard repeated
many times from business persons.
11 Proponents of what is called "satisficing" in rational choice
theory dispute the maximizing character of the capitalist individual,
but thus far they have not succeeded in dislodging the dominant
anthropology with its interest maximizing.
12 It should be noted that this economic or commercial war is
not entirely distinct from traditional shooting wars, as the war on
terrorism has made clear. For more on these matters, see Andrew
J. Bacevich, American Empire(Cambridge: Harvard, 2002); Franz
Hinkelammert, "La caída de las torres," Pasos 98 (Nov/Dec), 41-55;
Hinkelammert, "La proyección del monstruo: la conspiración terrorista
mundial," Pasos 101 (May/June 2002), 33-5; Germán Gutiérrez,
"El ALCA y la guerra antiterrorista de George W Bush," Pasos 98
(Nov/Dec 2001), 22-31; Germán Gutiérrez, "Fundamentalismo y
sujeto," Pasos103 (Sept/Oct 2002), 17-28.
13 See Michael Porter's work, The Competitive Advantage of Nations(New York: Free Press, 1990) and On Competition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1998). Porter makes the perfunctory and
standard claim that modern economics is not a zero-sum practice.
The importance of the shift from comparative to competitive
advantage is subtle. Comparative advantage rested on the principle
that one should forgo an absolute advantage in favor of comparative
advantage, thereby preserving the opportunity of others to pursue
and benefit from their comparative advantage in precisely those
areas where one may have an absolute advantage but comparative
disadvantage. Competitive advantage no longer preserves the space
for the other's comparative advantage. Indeed, Porter is clear, attaining
a competitive advantage may mean persisting in what under
the older vision was a comparative disadvantage. In other words,
competitive advantage no longer privileges and reserves a space of mutually advantageous comparative advantage. The practice of some "big box" retailers of selling certain products at a loss in order to eliminate local competitors comes to mind here.
14 See C. B. Macpherson, The Rise and Fall of Economic Justice and Other Essays (New York: Oxford, 1987).
15 On marriage, see Gary Becker's reflections on marriage and children
in his The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1976). On children as consumer goods, see
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1982), 33. With respect to the reference to bodies as mere
raw material for manufacture, I am thinking both of recent debates
over stem cells as well as supreme court rulings that life forms are
simply chemical compounds that can be patented like any other
manufacture.
16 In defense of this claim, I offer one of the more blatant examples,
from Michael Novak: "The point of the Incarnation is to respect the
world as it is, . . . and to disbelieve any promises that the world is
now or ever will be transformed into the city of God. . . . The world
is not going to become -ever- a kingdom of justice and love. . . .
The single greatest temptation for Christians is to imagine that the
salvation won by Jesus has altered the human condition." The Spirit
of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Touchstone, 1982), 341-3.
Although this may be one of the more extreme examples, Christian
advocates of capitalism all share a similarly constrained account of
the difference Christ makes here and now.
17 See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), for a brief history of the market. See also Macpherson,
The Rise and Fall of Economic Justice and Other Essays.
A Certain Disavowal: The Pathos and Politics of Wonder
At this moment, three years into the latest military campaign calculated to decimate "the cradle of civilization," it seems appropriate to take a moment to reflect upon the broad phenomenon of filial ambivalence. The most infamous student of the violence exacted upon origins is, of course, Sigmund Freud, who culled together diverse literary, clinical, and ethnographic resources in order to describe a puzzling tendency—for him both phylogenic and ontogenic—to destroy and incorporate gods and fathers. In this article, however, I would like to call attention to a particularly controversial affective ancestor, and to some implications, both theological and political, of its own disavowal and introjection at the hands of its offspring.
* * *
It is a familiar scene: Socrates poses a characteristic "what is" to a bright young pupil, who responds with a number of theories that each turn out to be philosophically insubstantial. Suddenly, the interlocutor realizes he does not know the first thing about concepts he had thought he understood instinctively— like wisdom, justice, virtue, or, in the case of a young man named Theaetetus, knowledge itself. "I have a small difficulty," Socrates tells Theaetetus, "which I think ought to be investigated."(1) Socrates confesses that while he continues to gain knowledge of music, geometry, and astronomy, he "can't get a proper grasp on what knowledge [epistêmê] really is" (145e). In response to Socrates' persistent questioning, Theaetetus sets forth a few common-sense definitions of knowledge, but the "midwife of the mind" judges none of these ideas to be worthy of being born, because each relies upon a prior understanding of knowledge, which remains undefined.
Like so many other Platonic dialogues, this one remains unresolved, concluding with Socrates telling Theaetetus that at least he will have learned the good sense to "not think you know what you don't know" (210c). All told, this dialogue does little more than slip away from itself " and this seems to be the whole idea. The point is that there is no point; that knowledge rests on something fundamentally unknowable, because its object, also its condition of possibility, is totally inscrutable. Knowledge cannot know what it is to know. It is enough to drive a person mad.
Socrates is well aware of this, telling Theaetetus that his midwifery frequently reduces otherwise intelligent, manly young men to "get savage with [him], like a mother over her first-born child. "Do you know," he continues, "people have often before now got into such a state with me as to be literally ready to bite when I take away some nonsense or other from them" (151c). Theaetetus, however, is different. During the course of his conversation with Socrates, he provides three perfectly respectable doxai concerning the essence of knowledge, only to witness their inexorable dissolution under maieutic scrutiny. Everything Theaetetus thought he knew about knowing becomes strange and insubstantial, but rather than get angry or violent, he exclaims, "By the gods, Socrates, I am lost in wonder when I think of all these things, and sometimes when I regard them it really makes my head swim" (155d).(2)
The word for "I wonder" here is thaumazô, whose infinitive is thaumazein, which is often nominalized in English into wonder, awe, astonishment, or amazement. Wonder strikes Theaetetus as he loses his grasp on notions that had seemed utterly self-evident, sending him reeling, his head spinning. At least as it takes shape throughout this passage, then, wonder has very little to do with the calm pleasure with which contemporary usage tends to associate it. Rather, it is a dizzying, vertiginous, and destabilizing experience. And rather than telling Theaetetus to gird up his loins and get back to the work of clear thinking, Socrates says that this bodes well for the young man's future career as a philosopher. "For this is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering," he exclaims, "this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else" (155d).(3)
As it turns out, philosophy's beginning in wonder is both a curse and a blessing for anyone who would go about trying to figure out what wonder is. For while "the origin of all philosophy" would seem to make a perfectly respectable object of philosophical inquiry, it has a tendency to launch its interrogator immediately into a pseudo-tautological questioning of how philosophy, which is not itself without wonder, is supposed to go about examining the very wonder that gets it going in the first place. Following Socrates's lead, it has always been the work of philosophy to ask "what is." So, as John Sallis has pointed out, the problem with asking what wonder is, is that "the question comes too late. For when one comes to ask the philosophical question 'What is"?' ('ti esti"?'), one moves already within the opening [of philosophy]; and wonder has already come into play in prompting that opening."(4) How does one ask, "what is wonder," when it is wonder that prompts one to ask "what is" in the first place? This sort of puzzle, to make matters even more complicated, is precisely the sort of dilemma that gives rise to wonder. Whatever it is, it strikes when the understanding cannot master that which it presupposes; that which lies closest to it.
To appeal to everybody's favorite example, one tends to think one knows what a table is. But the minute a good Buddhist philosopher asks what a table is—whether a table has four legs, or whether it can have two legs, or one, or twelve; and how a table is different from a stool; and whether this table would still be a table if I cut half of it off, or removed the top, or flipped it upside-down—one comes to realize one has no idea what a table is. Thinking finds itself lost in wonder when it suddenly becomes impossible—and for that reason, imperative—to understand something totally ordinary: like a table. Like knowledge. Like wonder.
But among all the inscrutable objects, concepts, and processes one might name, wonder is singularly elusive, and for two reasons. First, there is the above-mentioned problem of wonder's irreducible anteriority. Wonder's sheer designation as "origin" provokes a certain degree of epistemological tail-chasing, as thinking tries to think that which gets thinking going in the first place. But there is something at once less lofty and less ridiculous at work as well, which is quite simply that wonder is uncomfortable. One tends to have a fairly low threshold for it: I can spend perhaps five minutes desubstantializing any given table, but then would generally prefer just to put my coffee cup down on it and get on with the day's work.
In fact, depending on its source and duration, wonder can be not only unsettling, but downright terrifying: to turn for a moment from Athens to Jerusalem, one might think of the "signs," "wonders," and "great terrors" that God performs to deliver the Israelites out of Egypt.(5) God turns the Nile to blood; sends frogs, gnats, flies, boils, hail; and finally kills the Egyptians' first-born sons, all in order to teach the Israelites to "fear" God. Unfortunately for the Egyptians, it is only after the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, and the drowning of the Pharaoh's army that Exodus tells us, for the first time, "and the people feared the Lord."(6) The word for "fear" in this context is yare'; the noun derived from it is yir'ah, and it designates that particularly biblical combination of awe, reverence, and abject horror in the face of a God who totally exceeds—yet at the same time constitutes—human understanding. In a moment of astonishing consonance with Socrates, the books of Proverbs, Job, and the Psalms all designate this terrified wonder as the beginning of wisdom (chokmah, which becomes sophia in the Septuagint).(7) Yet as the Hebrew Bible teaches again and again as God's chosen people fail to fear God properly (making idols, gathering too much manna, kvetching about how hot and dry the desert is) this particular complex of emotion is marvelously difficult to sustain. Intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, it is easier to run from wonder, or to close it down, than to remain with it.
Back in Athens, even Socrates domesticates wonder from time to time, most notably at the very moment he introduces wonder as the origin of all philosophy. "This is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering," Socrates tells Theaetetus, "this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else." The quotation continues, "And the man who made Iris the child of Thaumas was perhaps no bad genealogist—But aren't you beginning to see"the explanation of these puzzles, according"to Protagoras?" (155d). All of a sudden, Socrates leaps from the genealogy of Thaumas, or "wonder," the sea-god, to the game-theory of Protagoras. This strange gap, marked in a number of translations by a dash—seems to indicate that Socrates is leaving something out of his genealogy. And in fact, he is.
According to Hesiod's Theogony, Thaumas the wondergod is the son of Gaia (earth) and Oceanus (sea). Thaumas marries Electra, and their union produces Iris (rainbow), who races between the divine and human realms as a sign of the favor of the gods. Socrates commends this part of the story. What Socrates does not say, however, is that Iris is not the only child of this union. The passage in Hesiod reads as follows: "And Thaumas married deep-flowing Ocean's/ Daughter, Elektra, who bore swift Iris and/ The rich-haired Harpies, Aello and Oypetes,/ Who keep pace with stormwinds and birds/ Flying their missions on wings swift as time."(8) When Socrates tells Theaetetus that wonder gives birth to Iris, then, he neglects to mention that Wonder's other daughters are the Harpies. Like their sister, these winged creatures are employed as inter-cosmic messengers, carrying humans off to the underworld. Hesiod himself does not convey any particularly repellant characteristics in relation to these creatures, but by Plato's time, classicist David Kravitz tells us that the Harpies were thought of as "ugly bird-like monsters with large claws."(9) Apparently, they smelled revolting, and when they weren't hauling people off to Hades, they were sent upon unwitting humans to peck at them and steal their food, as a sign of the gods' disfavor. Even in the process of claiming wonder as the origin of all philosophy, then, Socrates only avows half of wonder's progeny, excluding the ominous for the sake of the amazing, and then covering his tracks by changing the subject.
If thinking were to dwell in the pathos of wonder, then, it would have to give up all efforts to purify itself of horror; to open itself to rainbows and Harpies, the redemptive and the ruinous, alike. Following the philo-theological traces of wonder's awesome, awful primordiality, thinking finds itself in the ambivalent nether-regions of Burke's (and Kant's) sublime, Pascal's abysmal awe, Otto's numinous, Blanchot's disaster, Lacan's real, Kristeva's abject, Kierkegaard's horror religiosus. The question of wonder opens the fascinating/repulsive, creative/destructive, astounding/horrifying, heirophanic/monstrous excess against which more "proper" philosophy takes pains to secure itself.
And it takes considerable pains. After all, especially as European thought makes its way into the early modern period, it is philosophy's job to know—to categorize, systematize, separate good from evil, find criteria of truth—and wonder's persistent attunement to the bottomlessness of knowledge severely inhibits any such projects. As the origin of philosophy, however, it is wonder that sets these projects in motion in the first place. So the Western philosophical tradition develops a staggeringly ambivalent relationship to this mood. A bit of wonder is necessary to get thinking off the ground, but too much of it begins to look like ignorance, or childishness, or worse, femininity. The self-professed heirs to Plato and Socrates therefore devise various strategies to ensure that wonder is eventually overcome by the philosophy it engenders.
A simultaneous avowal and disavowal of wonder can be found as early as Aristotle's Metaphysics, which concedes that the philosopher begins by wondering at simple things, but insists that the moment he learns the cause of each puzzling phenomenon, his wonder at it will cease. The philosopher progresses from an initiatory wonder into what Aristotle calls "the better state, as is the case in these instances when men learn the cause,"(10) proceeding in this wonder-eclipsing fashion up to the stars, through the intellects, and ultimately to certain knowledge of the First Cause. Aristotelian thaumazein, one might say, seeks the very resolution that Socratic thaumazein struggles to resist; for all the way up the ontological chain, causal knowledge gradually replaces the very wonder that conditions its possibility.
Perhaps the most fascinating working-out of this filial ambivalence comes from René Descartes. Descartes has fallen out of favor among contemporary continental philosophers and theologians alike, thanks to his installation of an autonomous, thinking "self" and a bloodless, conceptual "God" as reflexive stop-gaps, meant to keep the philosopher's clear and distinct ideas from draining into some vast sea of doubt and unknowing. In a treatise called The Passions of the Soul, Descartes categorizes every major human emotion, and locates the origin of all of them in wonder, or l'admiration.(11) Wonder is afforded this privileged position not only because Descartes is a good son of the ancients, but also because it is the only passion that precedes the distinction between good and evil. Descartes calls wonder a "sudden surprise of the soul," which strikes a person before he has the chance to discern whether the wondrous object is helpful or harmful—whether it is out to save or destroy him. Once this judgment is made, wonder gives way to anger, joy, hope, love, or fear. But wonder itself remains a passion of and for the indeterminate.
Descartes is therefore insistent that we free ourselves of l'admiration as quickly as possible, using it only as a temporary goad toward certain knowledge of things. He admits that a bit of wonder is "useful" insofar as it exposes the soul to something unknown. In fact, he goes so far as to say that those who are not at all disposed toward wonder "are ordinarily very ignorant."(12) That having been said, Descartes believes that too little wonder is a far smaller problem than too much wonder, which he calls astonishment (l'estonnement). "Astonishment," Descartes writes, "is an excess of wonder which can never be anything but bad."(13) Descartes therefore recommends that young philosophers calculate the causes of everything that strikes them as marvelous, so that their wonder might be closed off into the kind of certainty that secures the sovereign subject, in God's sovereign image.
Such a practice was not limited to young Cartesians. As it happened, the amassment and cataloguing Descartes recommended was being performed in earnest response to the influx of wondrous things from the trade routes into the so-called New World, Asia, and Africa. This collection of curiosities was systematized by Francis Bacon, who called wonder a kind of "broken knowledge,"(14) dispatching a small army of scientists to collect and discover the causes of every bizarre object and creature in the world. As a young man, Bacon told an imaginary prince in a moot court that the best way to gain sovereignty over his people was to keep a collection of wondrous objects, and to learn their secrets, so that "when all other miracles and wonders cease by reason that you should have discovered their natural causes, yourself shall be left the only miracle and wonder of the world."(15) Similarly, Descartes assures us that once "we" have physically and noetically mastered all that is wondrous, "we" will become "masters of ourselves"like God in a way."(16)
Twelve centuries earlier, St. Augustine had warned against precisely this sort of self-deification among those who seek to appropriate wonder. Augustine was particularly concerned with the work of astrologers who, unwilling merely to marvel at the celestial bodies, set out to chart and predict their courses. Augustine admits that God has given them this ability in the first place. The problem is that they themselves admit this, attributing to themselves the power and wisdom that belongs to God alone.(17) By mastering the most mysterious realm of creation, those who examine the stars make themselves into gods—not only in their own estimation, but also in the eyes of the common people who are "amazed and stupefied" by the astrologers' foresight, and who proceed to direct toward human beings the wonder (admiratio) of which God alone should be the object.(18)
As well-trod a critical path as this is, it is important to highlight once again the persistent symmetry between the self-identical, self-mastering self and its self-identical, other-mastering God. Furthermore, as both Descartes and Augustine demonstrate, the self can only gather itself together and become a godlike, noetically inviolable monad once wonder is out of the way. So with subjectivity, and indeed divinity, in the balance, it is not surprising that Western philosophy can't quite handle the wonder that gets it going. Wonder, after all, reveals the fundamental instability of all the would-be objects of cogitatio from which the thinking self would get its bearings, its certainty. Yet origins die hard, and so philosophy does not so much excise wonder as it does internalize it, making itself the source and object of wonder. "Like God in a way."
* * *
The question that remains, then, is this: what would it take to sustain the wonder that is inimical to the formation of the sovereign human subject—to remain with the wonder that Western philosophy has fled for so long? What would it mean to keep thinking within the sort of shocked unknowing that sets it in motion in the first place? And, perhaps most pressingly, would a sustained philosophical wonder even be a good idea?
The narrative offered far too quickly here, of wonder's death-by-internalization at the hands of its progeny, is certainly not without its exceptions. Like everything thinking represses, the ghost of thaumazein has haunted this progressively masterful tradition, returning now and again at the bidding of some poet, mystic, or misfit to rattle the floorboards of the house of philosophy. Hildegard, Eckhart, Bonaventure, Kierkegaard, Goethe. But it could be argued that the one such conjurer who finally got Western thought to listen to and for the ghost of thaumazein was a Catholic theologian-turned secular philosopher named Martin Heidegger, who famously locates a kind of parricidal tendency within Western metaphysics. For Heidegger, the entire heritage built upon the question "what is" hasn't got a clue what "is" is. Rather, for the last twenty-three or -four centuries, a progressively objectifying thought has been stockpiling bits of calculable knowledge about beings, closing itself off to the incalculable event of being itself. The reason philosophy does not question being is that it thinks it has already mastered it. After all, the word is used all the time—I am, you are, the table is—who (aside from a disgruntled philosopher or disgraced politician) would ever think to ask what "is" is? So for Heidegger, restoring thinking to its proper purview is a matter of getting thinking to realize that the amassing and cataloguing of objects only further estranges them from that which is-es them in the first place. Or, as Heidegger puts it in his later work, that being has abandoned beings to the forces of calculation and representation.
Above all else, Heidegger is concerned to get back behind this state of affairs to a thinking attuned to the being that abandons it. While his style (not to mention his vocabulary) makes a number of dramatic shifts, Heidegger is looking in each of his writings for a mood that might place thinking back into being's furious withdrawal and hold it there. And insofar as this mood will have to recognize and endure the sudden strangeness and indeterminacy of being—the most common stuff of all—the best candidate for the job looks a lot like wonder. But before announcing the advent or withdrawal of some "wonderstruck philosophy," or worse yet, a "philosophy of wonder," it might be prudent to ask whether or not wonder is a good place for thinking to be lodged, primordial or not.
In the Theaetetus, Socrates characterizes typical philosophers as perfectly hopeless in daily affairs. A philosopher will simply have to be excused, Socrates says, if he has no idea how to get to the marketplace, or where the courts are, or who is running for public office, or how to make a bed. He goes on to tell the story of the philosopher Thales, who was in such deeply contemplative awe of the stars above him that he fell into a well under his feet. Socrates says to Theodorus, "the same joke applies to all who spend their lives in philosophy" (174a-b). And two thousand years later, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt applies it to Martin Heidegger.
In an essay written for Heidegger's eightieth birthday, Arendt ranks Heidegger with the greatest philosophical giants of all time, even likening him to Plato. She goes on to say that those of us who would like to follow such powerful thinkers hit considerable stumbling-blocks when we realize they often make disastrous political decisions. Akin to, but far worse than, Plato's attempt to teach philosophy to Dionysus, the tyrant of Syracuse in 362 B.C.E., was Heidegger's commitment in 1933 C.E. to National Socialism, a commitment which Arendt, interestingly enough, attributes to an excess of wonder. Wonder, she argues, is just supposed to be a temporary goad—a "leaping spark"—that disorients the thinker momentarily in order to set her on a course to surer knowledge. Heidegger's mistake, she explains, was his "taking up and accepting this faculty of wondering as [his] abode."(19) Had he only taken his vision away from the philosophical clouds, she suggests, he would have seen the dangers beneath his alltoo- human feet. But he was too hell-bent on the coming of some metaphysical revolution to notice the deportations, the storefronts, the yellow stars, the burning of the temples. Heidegger, she says, is like the would-be philosopher-king of Plato's cave, hauled out of the everyday into the dazzling world of the Forms only to return to the cave with his eyesight ruined, unable to readjust his vision to the dark.
At the risk of sounding glib, this poses a serious problem. Drawing a line of direct causation between Heidegger's wonder and Heidegger's Nazism, Arendt's critique leads this reader, at least, to wonder whether Aristotle and Bacon and Descartes knew what they were doing when they reigned in thaumazein to secure the thinking self. What is the use of trying to re-open the wonder that metaphysics closes if wonder blinds thinking to the everyday world?
It might at this point be instructive to look to Heidegger's own understanding of wonder. While he re-formulates thaumazein a number of times throughout his authorship, a particularly compelling rendition can be found in a concept Heidegger thought too dangerous to discuss openly, deleting it from his lectures and only addressing it directly in work he knew would be published posthumously. In these materials, Heidegger entreats anyone who knows about it to stay silent about it; so at the risk of incurring the wrath of the last god, the mood is called Verhaltenheit, holding back-ness, usually translated as restraint or reservedness.(20) Two movements constitute this rhythm: Erschrecken, a kind of shock, or even terror; and Scheu, or awe. Holding itself back in Verhaltenheit, thinking exposes itself to the sudden uncanniness of everything it thought it knew: ideas, objects, and the thinking self itself. This vertigo then gives way to a kind of awe that anything can be at all. So if Erschrecken registers that that which is cannot possibly be, then Scheu sees that it nonetheless is; if shock recoils at the abandonment of being, awe marvels that being, impossibly, gives itself through this withdrawal—that beings cannot be, and yet beings are. Which is to say being happens, where being cannot possibly happen. It is at this point that Verhaltenheit gains an almost prophetic valence. Maintaining itself in the terrifying wake of being's withdrawing self-donation, awe not only attends to that which, impossibly, is, but also awaits the appearance or non-appearance of that which, impossibly, might yet be: something that might actually change the violent, objectified, being-abandoned state of things. While a certain shock withstands the sudden departure of everything that is, awe watches, in the midst of the impossible, for the arrival of the unexpected.(21)
Understood along these lines, a sustained wonder would require a ceaseless attunement to the uncanniness of the everyday, akin to Socrates' tireless questioning of the ordinary. If, in other words, wonder were truly wonder, it could not lead to the neglectful otherworldliness Arendt attributes to it, because bluntly put, there can be no shock at the sudden senselessness of the everyday without attentiveness to the everyday. To be sure, Heidegger himself was unable to sustain the vigilant holding-backness to which he calls thinking, falling instead into the lure of unquestionable partylines and slogans. Were it possible, however, genuinely to hold oneself in wonder's frightful oscillation, it would neither allow a capitulation to uninterrogated doctrines, nor open an escapehatch into some stratospheric other-world. It would rather transform the wonderer's relationship to this unusually usual world, revealing the extraordinary through the ordinary, precisely by revealing the ordinary as extraordinarily strange.
This would pertain especially to the so-called subject, Descartes' fundamentum inconcussum, "like God in a way." By holding the one who wonders in a place where her very self seems strange, wonder would obstruct the consolidation of the isolated, onto-epistemological subject that is sure it is what it is because it knows what it knows, or that it knows what it knows because it is what it is. Existing in the rhythm of Erschrecken and Scheu, the self could never become that transcendental subject for whom nothing is ultimately shocking or wonderful—the Augustinian astronomer, Cartesian cogito, or Baconian prince who proclaims his godlike self-sufficiency. Rather, selves would be left open, interdependent, vulnerable.
* * *
What, then, has any of this got to do with global conflict? What does it mean to offer a reflection on some primordial attunement to indeterminacy at this particular historical juncture?
It could be argued, at least provisionally, that the most dangerous theo-socio-political knots currently strangling the globe stem from the positing, and conflict, of inviolable certainties. The will-toward-mastery that asserts itself by obliterating uncertainty has had unspeakably violent effects on all sides of the so-called "clash" of the Mesopotamiansprung "civilizations," with everyone absolutely sure he is right. It could in this context be suggested that the impulse to domesticate and internalize wonder by making the Philosophical Subject into wonder's very source and object—like God in a way—has been perhaps most ironically incarnated in contemporary American military strategy. In particular, we have seen it animate the pretensions of "Shock and Awe," first deployed to launch the "Operation Iraqi Freedom" offensive of 2003.(22)
The treatise that outlines this tactic was written in 1996 by Harlan Ullman and James Wade, who describe Shock and Awe as an effort to amaze the enemy to such an extent that "it" will give up all hope of resistance. The aim of Shock and Awe is therefore not mass murder, so much as it is complete "psychological dominance," defined as "the ability to destroy, defeat, and neuter the will of an adversary to resist."(23) Shock and Awe entails, among other maneuvers: massive bombardment with conventional bombs (they suggest 300-400 in a day), the destruction of military and civilian infrastructure (access to power, roads, food, communication, and supplies), and calculated circulation of "misinformation" or "disinformation."(24) Ullman and Wade have likened the force of Shock and Awe to that of "tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, uncontrolled fires, famine, and disease," and have also called it "the non-nuclear equivalent of"Hiroshima and Nagasaki," which disarmed all Japan's suicidal resistance efforts by producing "a state of awe."(25)
Equating Shock and Awe not only with the disasters one tends to call "acts of God" (and find in Exodus), but also with the psychological effects of the atomic bomb, Ullman and Wade unwittingly justify Augustine's concern about the idolatrous imposition of wonder upon others. J. Robert Oppenheimer infamously linked nuclear, natural, and divine force upon channeling Krishna in New Mexico: "If the radiance of one thousand suns were to burst into the sky," Oppenheimer said upon seeing the blast, "that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One." Moments later, he intoned, "I am become Death—shatterer of worlds."(26) The idea behind Shock and Awe is to demonstrate that it would be as impossible to refuse to comply with the United States military as it would be to resist the shatterer of worlds, or to switch gods, to reject a commandment given in a pillar of cloud and fire. "The punishing air attacks rocked the Baghdad night Friday," one report put it, "with thunderous explosions that filled the skies with flames and huge clouds of smoke."(27) What could be the aim here but to provoke the kind of yir'ah that the Israelites express once the plagues have come, the sea has parted, and the Egyptians are dead on the shore: "Who is like thee, O Lord, among the gods?/ Who is like thee, majestic in holiness,/ terrible in glorious deeds, doing wonders?"(28) One had better give in to the force that can so wonderfully, awfully, light up the sky.
Shock and Awe, then, is the most extreme contemporary expression of the modern super-powerful ego's internalization of wonder, a wiping away of the whole horizon that, I have argued, stems from a refusal of all indeterminacy. Rather than undergo the awful uncertainty of wonder, the autonomous subject— or nation—masquerades as the only wonder in the world, ultimately imposing wonder, in the most terrifying ways, upon others. "Achieving Shock and Awe rests in the ability to deter and overpower an adversary through the adversary's perception of fear of his vulnerability," write Ullman and Wade, "and our own invincibility."(29)
And so, one might understandably argue, why not just get rid of wonder? Find a different mood for thinking, preferably one that's a bit less dangerous? But this leads us back to the problem, and the promise, of wonder's irreducible anteriority. It won't, much like any other ancestral ghost, just go away; in fact, the harder one tries to expunge it, the more disastrously it asserts itself. More positively stated, rather than imposing it on others, metaphysically or militarily, what if it were the task of thinking to remain with the wonder that keeps it vulnerable and unsure of itself?
Presumably, such a remaining-with would prevent the formation
of the usual protective ontological bulwarks: the Cartesian
subject, the God of the philosophers, and so on, not only
restraining the destructive will toward the mastery they undergird,
but also keeping the wonderer exposed to otherness, to the
arrival of the unanticipated in the midst of the ordinary. To be
sure, wonder puts thinking on the side of the vulnerable, rather
than the invincible. Opening itself to the wondrous, thinking
opens itself to the most horrifying of all, but there may be no
other way to expose philosophy, or politics, or religion, to the
possibility of the transformative than to expose it at the same
time to the possibility of the devastating. And so nothing could
be less escapist or other-worldly. For it would be through the
attunement to that which is most awful and most amazing that
thinking might keep itself attentive to the way ordinary things
tend to slip away from thought, and watch for the possible emergence
of something strange within the unthinkably beautiful, or
monstrous, or indeed enraging wonder of the everyday.
1 Plato, Theaetetus, trans. M. J. Levett and Myles Burnyeat
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), 145d.
Subsequent references to this translation of the Theaetetus
will be cited internally. References to other translations will
be noted.
2 Plato, Theaetetus, trans. Harold North Fowler, in vol. 7,
Works: Plato, with an English Translation, The Loeb Classical
Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1996), 155c. The Greek text is: Kai nê tous theous ge, ô
Sôkrates hyperphuôs ôs thaumazô ti pot esti tauta, kai eniote
ôs alêthôs Blepôn eis auta skotodiniô. Because of its retention
of Theaetetus' invocation of the gods, as well as the sense of
disorientation (rather than glee) that it conveys, the Fowler
translation is preferable, at least for these purposes, to Levett's
and Burnyeat's, which reads, "Oh yes, indeed, Socrates,
I often wonder like mad what these things can mean; sometimes
when I'm looking at them I begin to feel quite giddy."
3 ou gar allê archê philosophias ê autê, kai eoiken ho tên
logein.
4 John Sallis, "A Wonder that One Could Never Aspire to Surpass""
in The Path of Archaic Thinking, ed. Kenneth Maly
(New York: SUNY Albany, 1995), 255.
5 Deuteronomy 4:34. The words in Hebrew are 'owth, mowpheth,
and mowra', a derivative of yare', which designates a complex of fear and awe.
6 Exodus 14:31.
7 Proverbs 1:7, Psalm 111:10, Job 28:28.
8 Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Stanley Lombardo, in Works and Days and Theogony (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,
1993), 68.
9 David Kravitz, "Harpies," in Who's Who in Greek and Roman
Mythology (New York: Crown Publishers, 1975), 111.
10 Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 983a.
11 René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen
H. Voss (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989).
12 Ibid., A70, A75.
13 Ibid., A73.
14 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael
Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
15 Bacon, cited in Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of
Nature: 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 290.
16 Descartes, Passions, A152.
17 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Owen Chadwick
(Oxford: Oxford Press, 1998), 5.3.5; emphasis added.
18 Ibid., 5.4.4.
19 Hannah Arendt, "Philosophy and Politics," Social Research, 57, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 97.
20 Most of the material on Verhaltenheit can be found in
Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected
'Problems' of 'Logic', trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André
Schuwer (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), and
in idem., Contributions to Philosophy (from Enknowing),
trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1999).
21 This includes Heidegger's enigmatic figure of "the last
God." See, for example, Contributions, 12.
22 It should be noted that while this tactic composed the
initial war plan, many have argued that it did not work, and
some have insisted that it was not properly executed in the
first place. See Eric Schmitt, "Top General Concedes Air Attacks
Did Not Deliver knockout Blow," The New York Times,
26 March 2003, and Paul Sperry, "No Shock, No Awe, It
Never Happened," World Net Daily, 3 April 2003.
23 Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Jr., Shock and Awe:
Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington, DC: The Center
for Advanced Concepts and Technology, 1996) http://purl.access.
gpo.gov/GPO/LPS29021, "Introduction to Rapid Dominance."
24 "Rapid Dominance must be all-encompassing"It will imply
more than the direct application of force. It will mean the
ability to control the environment and to master all levels of
an opponent's activities to affect will, perception, and understanding.
This could include means of communication, transportation,
food production, water supply, and other aspects
of infrastructure as well as the denial of military responses.
Deception, misinformation, and disinformation are key components
in this assault on the will and understanding of the
opponent" (Ibid). See also "Iraq Faces Massive U.S. Missile
Barage," CBS News, 24 January 2003, and The "Shock and
Awe" Experiment: Compilation, Analysis, and Discussion of
Available Information on the Pentagon's "Shock and Awe"
Plan for Iraq, www.notinourname.net/war/shock_awe.html.
25 Ullman and Wade, Appendix A, Introduction.
26 Cited in "J. Robert Oppenheimer, Atom Bomb Pioneer, Dies," The New York Times, 19 February 1967.
27 "Massive Firestorm Targets Iraqi Leadership," CNN.com, 21 March 2003.
28 Exodus 15:11.
29 Ullman and Wade, Chapter 2.
Just War and the New Community: The Witness of the Old Testament For Christians Today
I. Introduction
Recently I received the following assignment from the editors of Princeton Theological Review:
War is a common theme in the Old Testament, but for all its narrative treatment, the portrait of Israel as a light to the nations in a context of political conflict remains theologically complex, and, at least at first glance, ethically perplexing. How does this portrait given to us by the OT witness shed light on how God's chosen people may live out their vocation as Christian witnesses in situations of global conflict today?
Naturally, such a challenging topic generates many thoughts, and I am grateful for encouragement from the editors to stimulate discussion among their readers.(1) I propose to take all aspects of the assignment seriously, including the two most difficult, namely: (a)the OT witness on war, on its own terms,(2) in all its ethical perplexity; and (b)the usability, if any, of this OT witness for the church today.(3)
II. Devloping a Hermeneutic: Thi ngs that did not Work
A. What, or Where, is the OT Witness?
First, we need to establish a usable OT hermeneutic, and to my mind this begins by looking where the OT points, and going on that journey. For there is no such thing as the OT witness. That is to say, the OT does not present a single, flat, monolithic "witness" to be extrapolated by balancing or synthesizing its various elements as found throughout. Instead, the OT presents an extended narrative journey, in which the destination is more important—more authoritative and normative—than the beginning or the middle of that experience. It presents a God who has singular expectations for the people of God, yet who faithfully travels with those people through all vicissitudes, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, without any qualifications such as parting by death.
We, in turn, can learn by joining that journey and following the story of that process. We are invited to participate in that journey, to learn from the mistakes and wrong turns as portrayed, to take seriously the considerable list of side roads that did not work out as expected. We can follow the Divine leading to the creation of a new community, a new people of God, leaving the old behind, and living and showing a new way for all. That new land, that destination for the journey, is proclaimed especially in a group of passages in Second Isaiah and in other, related, prophetic witness, as a new way of life for a new community of faith and practice.
In short, a major portion of the OT witness presents a sustained show-and-tell lesson on where not to go and what not to do, or at least on what is no longer the first choice, because it has not worked. It then goes on to describe the new way which is expected of the people of God instead. It is precisely that new way which constitutes the normative OT witness for us, the people of God today.
B. Jesus and the OT
Furthermore, the NT witness seems to point in the same direction, to the same final, normative OT witness. The Gospels report that Jesus of Nazareth specifically indicated that same OT description of the new community as his starting point for mission and ministry, and as his expectation for the people of God (e.g., Luke4:16-22, quoting Isa61:1-2; Matt12:17-21, quoting Isa42:1-4,9; Matt11:4-6, quoting or citing Isa29:18-19; 35:5-6; 42:18; 61:1). Precisely because the Evangelists pointed to the latest OT witness, the Gospel witness is inextricably connected to it.
As a result, we can take Jesus as guide for deciding which stage of the OT journey constitutes the OT witness for the church today. There is nothing Marcionite about this hermeneutic. Rather, it is more organic, growing from within the biblical witness, following the signals given in the text itself.
As a further result, we now have two different signposts for the journey, both pointing to the same destination. One is located in the OT witness, and one in the New. From our position, with two such verified points of reference, we can specify the location of our destination through triangulation, and we will soon go there to explore. But first, we need to do two things: (a)develop further the hermeneutics of earlier and later OT witness; and (b)travel through the prophetic critique of militarism on our way to arriving at the new community which no longer engages in war.
C. Revision and Updating Within the OT Witness
That the later OT witness takes precedence over the earlier has certain hermeneutical implications for the church today:
1. Avoid applying anything that has been changed or left behind, such as sacrifices, or the Joshua Conquest, or human kingship, even if God commanded it, or God worked with it, at one time.
2. In such cases (things that have been changed), the hermeneutical issue is not whether God ever commanded or approved or worked with something at some time in the past. Instead, the issue is whether something like that is still operative (for outmoded things, see below the list of "Things That Did Not Work").
3. In other words, for each subject or issue, the hermeneutical imperative is to ascertain what is the most recent, updated will of God for us, the new community of God's people.
4. This hermeneutic implies a clear conclusion: the whole Bible is not equal. That is to say, the whole Bible is not equal in authority and application for followers of Jesus Christ. If it were, we would still sacrifice a lamb in church every Sunday morning. Paul was right in Galatians5:3: it is all or nothing.
5. Given a significant contrast between the teaching of Jesus and something else in the canon of Scripture on the same subject, the teaching of Jesus takes hermeneutical priority. That is to say, the teaching of Jesus takes precedence and has greater authority.
6. When an issue is unclear, give priority to the prominent, dominant, timeless, major principles found in the biblical witness as a whole. For example, the love, mercy and forgiveness of God are prominent and dominant; so also is the almost irrational faithfulness of God no matter how badly people go wrong; also the relentless redemptive work of God no matter how improbable the apparent odds are for success; and so on.(4)
D. Things That Did Not Work
The hermeneutic outlined above implies that some things in the divine dealings with humanity appear to have been altered. Indeed, one can actually compile a list of such things which, at some point in the biblical story line,
a. God commanded, or approved, or accepted, or worked with;
b. but God changed, or dropped, or left behind, or superseded, or they did not work out, at some point along the way.
The list includes sacrifices and offerings, kingship, temple, Jerusalem, the Mt.Sinai covenant, earlier prophetic oracles using the Mt.Sinai Covenant as the criterion, promised land, chosen people (in the exclusive sense for salvific purpose), probably war, and perhaps other matters as well.
Again, the implications for Justified War in the witness of the OT for the church seem evident.
a. Ifthe main instances in which God commanded or accepted or worked with warfare occur earlier in the storyline;
b. and if, in the final portion of that storyline, the new people of God are expected to end warfare and all other forms of conflict;
c. then it follows that the OT witness on the subject of Justified War can be summarized in two words: "No more."
This is indeed where the OT witness ends up on the subject of Justified War or any other type of war, as I hope to show below. But on the way it passes through some interesting transitional territory, namely, a prophetic critique of militarism which does not altogether prohibit warfare but which seriously undermines both the ethics and the practicality of the enterprise. Our journey now goes through that terrain.
III. Antimilitarisim in the Prophetic Critique
"Choose life," said the prophet Jeremiah as a superpower attacked Jerusalem. "Do not fight—just surrender. Save lives."
Thus says the LORD: See, I am setting before you the way of life and the way of death. Those who stay in this city shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence; but those who go out and surrender to the Chaldeans who are besieging you shall live and shall have their lives as a prize of war. (Jer 21:8-9)(5)
Critique or rejection of the military option constitutes a running strand throughout prophetic thought. Bearing some affinity to the new community idea of ending warfare, and found in various forms, it includes the thoughts and theses outlined below. Most, if not all, of this critique was itself proclaimed specifically in the context of political conflict—in real life situations of war, siege, threat, or national security policy, whether in the making or the failing. Collectively, this anti-military theme in the prophets constitutes an important part of the OT witness on war and therefore on the doctrine of Justified War.
This calls for a word on the prophets and the political realities of the day. One cannot say outright that "the prophetic critique is uniformly against war." However, the stream of antimilitarism within prophetic thought seems to prepare the way for, or function as a transition to, the "no more war" requirement laid upon the new people of God in the later OT witness.
A major and constant need was national security, that is, physical security against hostile armies, and the big question was: "Where should we place our trust?" The standard answers, along with some prophetic alternatives, may be outlined as follows.
A. Trust God, Not the Idolatry of Military Power
One answer to the national security question was found in strong armies and chariot forces which could take the field against invading armies. In ancient Israel this was rarely realistic— only under David, perhaps Solomon to some extent, a few others for short periods. This method belonged to empires.
Isaiah criticized Hezekiah for trusting arms buildup instead of the creator (Isa22:8-11). Hosea10: 13says war will destroy the NorthernKingdom because it trusted the army. In fact Isaiah2:7-8 lists military power and idolatry together; Micah5:10-15 includes war horses and chariots in the same list as idols which God will "cut off." Micah1: 13 calls war horses and chariots the beginning of sin for the Jerusalem rulers, citing this as the sin of the now destroyed NorthernKingdom (cf.Mic6:16). The superpowers are no exception: the transgression of Babylon is viewing its military might as its god (Hab1:11).
B. Trust God, Not Fortress Cities for Defense
A second answer to the national security question was found in major defensive fortifications at selected sites. This was the standard answer in ancient Israel in the period of the monarchy, as witnessed in the archaeological remains today. The fundamental theory was to hole up behind safe walls and wait until the besieging army went away, or was driven away by the approach of a stronger army allied to those inside.
When we realize that "cities" in the world of the OT were primarily the equivalent of hilltop fortress castles, some of the prophetic passages which critique the cities (see below) make more sense. Surrounded by massive walls and entered through a heavily defended gate complex, they provided for storage of food, water, and weapons and were inhabited primarily by the ruling class. (To date virtually no normal houses for the general population have been found inside the walls.) The resulting picture is that the so-called cities were centers of power and wealth, injustice and oppression, and trust in human defenses for security. (Such "security" was only for those within the walls.)
That problem had started earlier, in Bronze Age Canaan. With the worship of Baal, religious ethics and the socio-economic structure worked hand in hand. In Canaanite mythology, Baal had fought his way to kingship over the gods, and the texts reflected a belief that in war he could protect his own. Baal was the god of kings and aristocracy, of palace and temple and fortress city, of priests and leaders and powerful land-owners, of the whole system of advantage for those with power. In short, he was the god of the privileged minority inside the walls, the god of those who used power as they wished. Bronze Age (Canaanite period) excavations have revealed a system of fortified cities that functioned as fortress castles for that ruling class, who controlled and exploited the great majority—those outside the walls.
The social ethics of this system contradicted everything taught at Sinai and learned by experience in the desert. The so-called conquest and settlement narrative pictures the Israelites terminating this system in Canaan, by attacking the oppressive kings and their fortress capitals (e.g., Josh12), and liberating the general population in the process. The latter could then join the Israelites at Joshua's covenant renewal ceremony if willing to jettison their former gods (Josh24).
But Solomon essentially restarted the Canaanite fortress system and its values (1Kgs9:15-19). By organizing an administrative system to use forced labor and collect heavy taxes, he virtually enslaved his own people (1 Kgs4:7-19, 22-28; 5:13-16; 10:15, 26; 12:4, 13), all as the prophet Samuel had warned (1Sam8). Solomon began a trend—the way of death—which led to the fall of both the Northernand SouthernKingdoms.
This system, created and sustained by military force in the name of national security, is what drew the prophetic critique. Amos3:10summarized the systemic problem:
They do not know how to do right, says the LORD, those who store up violence and robbery in their strongholds.
Hosea 8:14 said Judah has "forgotten his Maker" by multiplying fortified cities, and predicted (correctly) that they would be destroyed by war (cf.10:14). Micah5:10-15included cities and strongholds in his list of things constituting idolatry. Isaiah22: 8-11described the Jerusalem defensive walls and military water system enclosing them (Hezekiah's tunnel and the Pool of Siloam) as a failure to trust God.
Jeremiah predicted the fall of Jerusalem as well deserved for its sins of oppression (6:6-8) and arrogance (21:13-14), and he proved to be right.
C. Trust God, Not Military Alliance
A third answer to the national security problem presented itself in arranging outside help, and this, too, was often planned and relied on in ancient Israel. Strategic treaty or alliance, hopefully with the superpower which would win next time around, was a common method of defense in the biblical world. Like the fortified city method, to which it was usually linked, these alliances tended to fail also, and this was one reason that the prophets boldly denounced them on many occasions. For example, Isaiah30:1-3called alliance with Egypt rebellion, sin, and against God's will:
Oh, rebellious children, says the LORD, who carry out a plan, but not mine; who make an alliance, but against my will, adding sin to sin; who set out to go down to Egypt without asking for my counsel, to take refuge in the protection of Pharaoh, and to seek shelter in the shadow of Egypt;
Therefore the protection of Pharaoh shall become your shame, and the shelter in the shadow of Egypt your humiliation.
In other examples, Isaiah10:3-4said no outside help would avail; or again that Egypt would fail to deliver (20:1-6); and again that trusting Egypt instead of God would fail (31:1- 3). Hosea(5:13; cf.7:11), who at times appeared to be diplomatically challenged, called the seeking of alliance acting like a silly dove—fluttering between Egypt and Assyria. Jeremiah2:13-19called such alliances "two evils," namely, abandoning their God, and trusting other powers instead. Ezekiel17: 17-19predicted that Pharaoh, for all "his mighty army" (v.17), would not help the Jerusalemite puppet king. Lamentations4: 17 conveyed the pathos of eagerly watching for help that would never come.
It seems that ancient Egypt in particular was notorious for failure to help, for many of the above references are to that nation. The cynical observations on this point, set in the mouth of an Assyrian commander, were probably quite realistic (2Kgs18:19-25).
D. False Prophets Support the Military Option
Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are telling you not to serve the king of Babylon, for they are prophesying a lie to you. I have not sent them, says the LORD, but they are prophesying falsely in my name, with the result that I will drive you out and you will perish, you and the prophets who are prophesying to you. (Jer 27:14-15)
"What brought that on?" one might ask. Human nature, likely. Given that military power itself has attractions, and that pleasing those in power also has its attractions, one might expect to find voices claiming to speak for God supporting the powers that be in general, and the military option in particular. Because this happened, the prophetic critique of militarism had to counter the false prophets who supported militarism and other aspects of the power structure in various ways.
For example, in the NorthernKingdom, King Ahab's court prophets assured the king that God would give him victory in his proposed military venture. This opinion was, however, opposed by the lone voice of Micaiah son of Imlah, who not only said the opposite but correctly predicted the death of Ahab in battle (1Kings22).
Jeremiah in particular was forced into continuous conflict with falsely-prophesying opponents. One form of false message which he encountered and countered was the proclamation that all was well and would stay that way with regard to the state of national well-being (Jer6:13-14; 23:14, 17). In the process, he said, the false prophets "strengthen the hands of evildoers" (23:14).
Another form of false prophecy specifically proclaimed a false sense of reality regarding national security and the use of military defense. In countering this form Jeremiah sometimes had to be explicit about the destructive consequences (Jer5:12-13, 30-31; 27:14-15). In this regard the dramatic scroll-burning scene functioned something like false prophecy in that it denied a true but unwanted message about national security and foreign policy.(6)
Particularly intriguing is an apparent contrast between good news messages, which are to be viewed as inherently false, versus bad news messages which are more likely to be true. For example,
But listen now to this word that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people. The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that the LORD has truly sent the prophet. (Jer 28:7-9)
Does this not seem an odd set of criteria for distinguishing true from false? Apparently there was no need for a message from God in times of well-being, for that was the norm and the divine will for all people. But in times of crisis, of unfolding blunder and folly, divine messages of guidance were most needed for action in the crisis. As a result, prophetic messages proclaiming that all was well in the immediate situation ( "peace") were inherently suspect (cf. "'peace, peace,' when there is no peace" in Jer6:13-14).
One might wonder if religious leaders in all times and places who proclaim the divine will to use military force for national security or well-being are functionally operating in the mode of false prophecy. Is it a form of false prophecy to "make wrongful use of the name of the Lord" (traditionally, to "take God's name in vain"; Exod20:7; Deut5:11)? Possibly yes, in that it refers to promoting a given action on grounds that it is desired or supported by God when in fact it violates the revealed will, or nature, or "name" of God. This might apply whether it refers to the later OT witness, or any other period since then.
E. Do Not Choose Death: It Did Not Work
For all practical purposes, the military option was the way of death.
Because you have trusted in your power and in the multitude of your warriors, therefore the tumult of war shall rise against your people, and all your fortresses shall be destroyed, as Shalman destroyed Beth-arbel on the day of battle when mothers were dashed in pieces with their children. (Hos 10:13-14)
"Those who trust the military will perish by the military," might have been a prophetic aphorism at the time. Certainly, this is a fundamental idea preserved in the witness. For example, Amos6:1-3offered a vivid object lesson to this effect from previously destroyed kingdoms. Isaiah31:1-3lamented the coming fate of a SouthernKingdom which trusted in the Egyptian chariot force instead of the Holy One of Israel (v. 1), because the helper and the ones receiving help "will all perish together" (v.3).
In fact, the prophets were correct. The military defense option was indeed characterized by illusion, in view of the fact that it rarely worked despite the massive resources invested. A determined attacking army usually succeeded in the end. The fact that even the powerfully fortified cities of the Northernand SouthernKingdoms fell to attack and thus failed in their purpose is a matter of record in the archaeological remains.(7) In addition, refusal to surrender caused even more harm and suffering, and therefore constituted the greater of two evils, in the process of resistance. This is vividly witnessed by the frequent and important linking of the terrible and devastatingly real sequence of "sword, famine, and pestilence" in the biblical world.(8) For example,
Those who stay in this city shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence; but those who go out and surrender to the Chaldeans who are besieging you shall live and shall have their lives as a prize of war. (Jer 21:9)
The sequential link was primarily causal. War destroyed the food supply (or it was consumed during siege), and also killed those who produced it, thereby causing famine for the unfortunate survivors.
War also left large numbers of unburied corpses, famine caused malnutrition with its consequent lowered resistance to disease, and siege conditions eventually generated an extreme lack of hygiene, thereby contributing to the conditions which promoted plague.(9)
It is important therefore to realize that both starvation and war were closely linked to pestilence, and it is no accident that the ancient Near Eastern gods of plague were gods of war as well. Words on paper can hardly convey the horror of such circumstances or the helplessness and vulnerability that people of the time experienced, whether they lived within the walls or outside.
F. Instead, Choose Life: Trust, Repentance, Justice, and Enemy Well-Being
1. Trust God: an option based in faith. National security seemed so fragile precisely because the various human efforts to secure it usually failed. Were there no alternatives? There were, but they were difficult choices because they required giving up control.
One alternative was to trust God, submit to the foreign power, and pay tribute, in which case the invading armies did little harm. This option would avoid the terrible human costs of siege and total war. And so the prophet Jeremiah brought the word of the Lord to his king:
Bring your necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon, and serve him and his people, and live. Why should you and your people die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence, as the LORD has spoken concerning any nation that will not serve the king of Babylon? Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are telling you not to serve the king of Babylon, for they are prophesying a lie to you. (Jer 27:12-14)
The value here was on human life rather than on ego, or on some ephemeral appeal to "freedom." Also, by implication, the value was on re-allocating massive defense budgets and human resources from military use to the well-being of the general population. However, this option did not come naturally to people in power, for it had a certain cost in treasure, humility, and loss of face. Moreover, this response took no little faith or trust in God, no small commitment to obedience despite the cost. So it was easier said than done and rarely tried at all, whether in the biblical world or in any other place or time.
2. The road to security is repentance. Like Robert Frost, Hosea offered a final choice between two roads diverging on the yellow- brown deserts of the Middle East, and leading to two very different fates.
The words "way," "road," and "path" in the OT (as in Middle Eastern idiom to this day) often represented way of life, that is, habitual actions with attention to consequent moral status and ultimately to the fate or consequences to which these habitual actions lead (see, for a few examples, Pss1:1,6; 16:11; 119:35; Prov2:18; 4:14, 18; 6:23; 7:27; 14:12; 16:25; Jer21:8).
Background to this imagery is an important survival need in the desert, where taking the wrong path can be fatal because it will not bring one to the next water source in time. Hence the Bedouin proverb, "The path is wiser than the one who walks upon it," meaning the path was made by survivors who knew where they were going. So follow them. The same thought lies behind the pithy Bedouin proverb: "Shorter path, shorter life." That is, do not get ideas about shortcuts—they tend to be fatal. The same symbolic usage occurs in the Qur'an, starting with the Bismillah, "Guide us on the right path" (Sura1:5 and passim).
For Hosea, choice one of the two roads was destruction (chap.13), not preventable by depending on military leaders or fortress cities (v.10). Choice two was repentance for the idolatrous sin of trusting Assyria and military power:
Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity.
Take words with you and return to the LORD;
say to him, "Take away all guilt;
accept that which is good, and we will offer the fruit of our lips.
Assyria shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses;
we will say no more, 'Our God,' to the work of our hands.
In you the orphan finds mercy." (Hos 14:1-3)
Remarkable for its humility, in contrast to the hubris of trusting military force, this proffered liturgy for repentance ends by identifying the nation as an orphan, an image of total dependence and vulnerability. The assured divine response, should Israel so repent, was not only healing and forgiveness (v.4) but also a promise that God would make the nation flourish with wellbeing, which was surely the goal of the erroneous national security policy in the first place (vv.5-7). The prophet then reminded his audience of the final choice between idolatry and trust (v.8). The book ends with an editorial colophon of good advice: "Be smart: choose the right road" (v.9).
That there might still be time to repent before it is too late was an emphatic part of the prophetic witness (e.g., Am5:15; Isa30:18; 55:6-8; Jer3:11-14).
3. The road to security is social justice. Yet another variation on the theme of national security was the social justice prerequisite. As the Assyrian threat grew, Amos5:4-15proclaimed that the nation would survive if, and only if, it would establish or reestablish social justice.
Isaiah1:27-28brought the unwelcome message that Zion would be redeemed or rescued, rather than destroyed, by engaging in social justice, repentance, and right actions. Again, the presence of social justice would produce "peace," that is, overall security and well-being (32:16-18).
Jeremiah carried this message all the way. Even in the endgame, with Jerusalem under siege by Babylon, Jeremiah was adamant on this point. Instead of a message like "amiracle is coming" (as requested by King Zedekiah; Jer21:1-3), he proclaimed this word from the Lord:
Execute [social] justice in the morning, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed, or else... (Jer 21:12)
Unfortunately, his audience did not heed his words, and the "or else" is what happened.
4. Seek the well-being of your enemy. Incredibly, the message of Jeremiah about the well-being of his own people included the well-being of the enemy:
But seek the welfare of the [enemy] city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the LORD. (Jer 29:7-14)
Understandably, this message encountered opposition from false prophets, because it would seem to run counter to human nature. Nonetheless, the message stands, and with a practical element implied: working for the well-being of the enemy is ultimately a win-win situation. Moreover, given that "love" in the Bible primarily means commitment, especially to the well-being of its object, the message of Jeremiah sounds suspiciously like "Love your enemies." The later giver of that message also worked in the prophetic tradition, as we are about to see.
IV. Jesus in the Prophetic Tradition
The Gospels seem to portray Jesus of Nazareth as working self-consciously in the prophetic tradition. For example, "Do not resist [or fight back against]10 an evildoer" (Matt5:39), would seem to echo Jeremiah's message, "Do not fight—just submit" (Jer21:8-9; 27:12-14). And again, "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matt5:44) sounds much like Jeremiah's "seek the welfare of the [enemy] city ... and pray to the Lord on its behalf" (Jer29:7). Also, "all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matt26:52) sounds similar to the theme of "those who trust the military will perish by military force," found in Hosea10:13-14, Amos6:1-3, and Isaiah31: 1-3, as outlined above.
Jesus' awareness of working in the prophetic tradition is indicated by the way he includes this as an aspect of his own mission: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill" (Matthew 5:17). "Fulfill" means to finish, or bring to completion, what they had started. So the teaching of Jesus in these matters might not be entirely in the form of radical new ideas. To some extent it represented the divine will already revealed through the prophets and now reiterated and reinforced with the expectation that it should be obeyed. In short, some of the apparently more radical teachings of Jesus about nonviolence were not all that new or radical except insofar as he apparently insisted that these ideas were required by the new community of God's people and were to be carried into action. In addition, first century examples of Jewish nonviolent resistance to Rome were available as actual models, so the teaching of Jesus was not far-fetched even at the time.(11)
Like Isaiah and Jeremiah, Jesus apparently applied the doctrine of nonviolence to Jerusalem in its own political situation in his day. Having just declined the Maccabean option of leading an armed revolt (Luke19:35-40), he went on to predict, with eminently practical realism, that such a revolt would constitute a catastrophic blunder:
As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God." (Luke 19:41-44)
"You seem blind to the realities," might be a way to paraphrase part of that message in its political context. "You simply do not realize what makes for well-being. Trying to create wellbeing by military force will only lead to destruction by such force."
As things turned out, Jesus of Nazareth was right, as the Great Revolt (66-71 CE) and the Bar Kochba Revolt (132-135 CE) showed, though one cannot blame the rebels for trying. After all, the Maccabean Revolt (165-134 BCE) had seemed to "work," at least initially, in that it did succeed in throwing off foreign rule and establishing an independent Jewish state for a time. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., but in reverse, many of Jesus' contemporaries had a dream: "We did it once, we'll do it again." But the dream became a nightmare of brutal suppression, slaughter, and the Diaspora. "Lived by force, perished by force" could have been the epitaph on that terrible sequence and its consequences.(12)
The OT witness to the nonviolent option, reiterated and reinforced by Jesus of Nazareth, might actually make sense in a world of global conflict. In closing comments on the Sermon on the Mount, which included uncompromising emphasis on the nonviolent option (Matt5:44), Jesus emphasized the importance of acting on those words:
Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man... (Matt 7:24; emphasis mine)
"Be smart!" said Jesus, echoing the colophon to Hosea. "Implement the way of the new community. In doing so you will choose life." Or to paraphrase: "Iam the way " live like me, doing what I say and do. That is the road to life" (cf. John 14:6).
V. The New Community in Prophetic Thought
A. A New Way of Life
What if the OT witness were serious and literal about expecting the people of God to implement immediately ideas like "no more war"? Would that not bring significant bearing on the matter of Justified War for the people of God today? Ithink this is exactly what we find.
The latest or final OT witness to the divine will contains prophetic calls for a new community, a new people of God, and in fact a new order of things among the nations. These oracles constitute a group of passages which together convey a cluster of themes and emphases not found previously in such concentration in the OT witness. It's a different atmosphere in these passages; in fact, it feels like a whole new world.(13)
As a result, these passages seem worthy of treatment as a new development in that witness, and this is an idea I want to present for consideration now. The primary texts include Isa 65:17-25; 11:1-9; 9:1-7; 42:1-9; 61:1-4; 2:2-4; Mic 4:1-5; Jer 31:31-34; cf.Zech9:9-10. The main features of this new community are as follows:
1. Divine initiative. The new community is God's idea and initiative, not a humanly conceived Utopia (passim).
2. Something new. Creation of this new community is described as a new initiative, like a new creation, or a new heavens and earth (e.g., Isa65:11-18; 42:5,9; 43:18-19; 48:6-8; Jer31:31-34). In fact, the Isaiah collection explodes with newness; about half the OT references to creation outside Genesis are in Isaiah (15 out of 31). This discourse also cautions against clinging to the earlier terms of divine expectation (e.g., Isa65:17; 42:9; 43:18; Jer31:32). One can make an instructive list of the contrasts between "earlier" and "new," that is, between the themes which characterize earlier prophetic oracles and those which describe the new community.(14)
3. Different kind of covenant. The new relationship between God and humankind is described in one place as a "new covenant," which seems to imply that Mt.Sinai has been somehow changed or replaced (Jer31:31-34). The changed covenant now functions as a "light to the nations" (Isa42:6), whether that covenant refers to the new community (so NJPS) or even the new leader himself (so apparently NRSV).(15)
4. New ruler, new methods. The new community is led by a new kind of ruler, a chosen and anointed one, a servant (e.g., Isa42:1-7), using a new kind of leadership method:
a. with emphasis on teaching, thinking, knowing, understanding, counsel, instruction, and persuasion, in contrast to coercive force, such as military power (e,g., Isa11:2,4; 2:3; 42:2-4);
b. with the result that this kind of leader will cause no harm (Isa42:2-3).5. Social justice. Justice is mainly social, i.e., caring for all, rather than juridical or punishment-oriented (e.g., Isa42:3-4).
6. Restorative justice. Justice for dealing with wrong actions is more restorative, while retributive justice is virtually absent (e.g., Isa2:4; 11:3; cf.61:1-2).
7. No more war. The new community neither engages in warfare nor prepares for it, and in fact it envisions converting a militarized economy to food production (e.g., Isa2:4; Mic4:3; Isa9:5; Zech9:10).
8. No more conflict. Conflict is absent even from nature, which is no longer red in tooth and claw. Predators and former prey sleep together; carnivores turn into herbivores; lambs and toddlers are safe (e.g., Isa65:22-25; 11:6-8). Almost certainly this language is hyperbolic and symbolic, intending to convey the idea of no more conflict among humans.(16)
9. Extent: whole earth. All peoples and nations are invited or expected to join (Isa2:2; 11:8; 42:1,4; Zech9:10). Jerusalem and Mt.Zion are only rarely mentioned, and seem to be symbols for the new people of God, rather than the literal Judahite capital (Isa2:2-3; 65:25).(17)
10. Inclusive faith basis.
a. Membership and activity are strongly faith-based rather than based on mere human initiative and resources (passim).
b. Worship and other relationships to God seem primarily nonsectarian and nonexclusive, rather than requiring specific adherence to a central religion (e.g., Isa19:23-25). In fact, forming a new international people of God apparently calls for a new hymnal.(18)11. Implementation: divine-human partnership. Whose job is this? Implementation is described as a partnership, a combination of two things:
a. Divine initiative and power (passim).
b. The new people of God contributing willing hands, rather than sitting back and waiting to let God do it some day (Isa2:3).12. Spirit of God. A special initiator, and indeed a considerable force for change and implementation, is the Spirit of God, active and powerful in making things happen or empowering the people of God to carry out the new mandate (Isa11:2; 42:1,5; 61:1; cf.Joel2:28-29, quoted in Acts2).
13. Time frame: now. The new community is expected to get busy on this considerable agenda in the present, rather than waiting for a special future, eschatological era (Isa42:6).
B. Future or Present?
When is all this supposed to happen? Apparently the actions and values of this new community are to be implemented immediately. Still, the indicators for a time frame need a careful look. We might begin with a point on Hebrew grammar, namely our understanding of the certitude perfect verb aspect, both in general and in these passages. The certitude perfect employs the perfect verb aspect (which normally denotes a completed action) to represent something which is actually in the future as so certain that it can be described as if already accomplished. Certitude perfects are used in large numbers in these new community passages (e.g., for "judge" and "decide" in Isa 11:4).
But when? How soon? The "prophetic perfect," which was the name for this verb aspect in the old Hebrew grammars, was considered to imply a time frame in the distant, eschatological future. But this was based more on theological interpretation than syntactical evidence. Virtually every verifiable instance of the certitude perfect refers to the very near or imminent future, such as the three verbs in Numbers17:12: "The Israelites said to Moses, 'We are perishing; we are lost, all of us are lost!'"(19)
In reality, there is nothing peculiar about this, because we use it in daily life. For example, a colleague points out that we commonly use this grammar without realizing it when ordering food.20 "A waitress uses the certitude perfect all the time. After receiving lunch orders, she repeats to each person at the table, 'You had the chicken Caesar; and you had the cheeseburger. You had the beef quesadilla.' Now, she says this as if we had already eaten but before the cook even knows about the order. Restaurants may sometimes be slow, but if this use of the perfect tense were referring to millennia, we'd all be dust by the time the order was (ful)filled. In the OT use of the certitude perfect, God orders a new kind of community where the inhabitants are to feast upon peace, justice, and mercy, and God expects imminent (ful)fillment of that order, just as we do in a restaurant." In short, the time frame in both cases, whether biblical witness or restaurant discourse, is not the distant but rather the very near future—a virtual now.
Along these lines, Isaiah42:9 proclaims that earlier things are finished and something new is about to happen now:
See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare;
before they spring forth, I tell you of them. (Isa 42:9)
The question, of course, is what exactly are these new things? Verses6-7 give a list:
I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you;
I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. (Isa 42:6-7)
The list includes a call from God regarding right actions, with divine leading and protection, to keep some kind of commitment (covenant) which will bring light to the darkened international world and liberate people from bondage.
The implication is that God expects these actions now, in the present, without further delay or ado. That expectation would apply to the entire list of features of the new community, including no more war.(21)
VI. Justified War and the Old Testament Witness for Today
By way of summary, this piece offers the following take on the nature of the OT witness regarding Justified War for the people of God today.
A usable OT hermeneutic begins by looking where the OT points, and going on that journey, following the divine leading to the creation of a new community, a new people of God, proclaimed especially in a group of passages in Second Isaiah and in other, related, prophetic witness. The NT witness points in the same direction, that is, to that same later, normative OT witness.
That the later OT witness takes priority over the earlier has hermeneutical implications for the church today. We should ascertain whether anything in the OT which is described as commanded or approved or worked with by God in the past has later been changed. A list of things so changed or left behind might include sacrifices and offerings, kingship, temple, Jerusalem, the Sinai covenant, earlier prophetic oracles using the Sinai covenant as a criterion, promised land, chosen people (in the exclusive sense for salvific purpose), and warfare of every type.
This hermeneutical journey passes through some important transitional territory, namely, the prophetic critique of militarism which does not altogether prohibit warfare but which seriously undermines both the ethics and the practicality of the enterprise. This in turn prepares the way for the "no more war" requirement laid upon the new people of God in the later OT witness.
As a result, the OT witness