God bless Ludwig Wittgenstein!
I just realized that the problem of mixing so called "faith" and so called "politics" is the word game problem. Good Lord... all the sermons explaining Jesus and his political problems out of the gospel side of the mouth and our present dilemma of "religion" and "politics" out of the epistle side of the mouth!
Everything Jesus said and did was "political." He indeed preached "politics" in the best sense of the word, and so should we, for as a follower of the Way of the Christ every single thing we do or say is political....
It is the separation of religion and government that the so called Founding Mothers were separating, not religion and politics! This is a later interpretation based on the presupposition that government and politics are one and the same; they are not, no more than religion and its politics are the same. And "faith" is simply the paradigm in which one perceives one's realilty. Hence, governing can indeed be one's "faith."
Keep the government out of religion and we'll keep religion out of the government. On the other hand, Government is Religion. And one can not, serve God and Government.
The (polis) power (fortis) of the Government is in-forced by Death, the (polis) Power (energes) of the Church is Life. You, one, can not, not you shall not, serve Life and Death.
As the early Church sang, "for "Force' is not of God..."
Faith and Politics....
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17 comments:
And we might hold with Hannah Arendt that the most important contribution of the Church to the history of thought is the idea of freedom from politics, i.e., freedom from the responsibilities of being a member of a polity, or political community (the city of man), to pursue the city of god. In that sense, even though you recognize the fundamental difference between politics and governance, even their opposition, for politics by definition is an artificial space where force is suspended ("necessitous men are not free men") you play a language game in blurring them. In the perpetual appeal to God's Truth, an idea which in the realm of politics claims not the stance of discourse, but the stance of the Absolute, of force, power, and authority beyond human language and understanding, you make yourself a-political.
Who is appealing to "god's truth?" "Trvth" is a philosophical term, not a theological one. And who is talking about absolutes?" And Hannah Arendt has no comprehension of the christian gospel if she thought that the Church contributed the idea of freedom from politics,i.e., freedom from the responsibilities of being a member of a polity or political community (the city of man) to pursue the city of god," for it is not possible. Jesus of nazareth was an example of that. He was not a christian, he was for christians the christ and his very word was political, indeed revolutionary in the eyes of most of those around him. Even this discussion is political is it not? "Truth" is not a part of the gospel. Even jesus did not get into that discussion. It was Pontius Pilate, the Procurator who brought up the subject, not jesus. And note you brought up the subject of an appeal to truth. It was some of the "Founding Fathers" who made "An Appeal to Heaven" as a sign (flag)of their argument.
I for one do not feel any freedom from the responsibilities of being a member of a polity or city of man. jesus himself was under the emperor and paul of tarsus a Citizen of Rome.
Anyone who thinks Christ's intentions, whatever those were, and the history of the Church (which is what Arendt was talking about) are the same thing is starting a few steps behind in any serious discussion of the relation between faith and politics. Paganism was not the only philosophical target of the Church in its formative years, but the humanism that underwrote Greek and Roman political thought as well. The Empire and the Church, and as early as the fourth century AD, the imperium of the Church itself, had to destroy the idea of zoon politikon and the vita activa for it to establish its own intellectual legitimacy. No one, at least not me, is talking about theology or philosophy, its just a historical point that seems pretty incontrovertible to me (you yourself in numerous conversations with me have dismissed all of that as "the way of the world" and therefore of no interest to you).
Arendt, an Augustine scholar by training, recognized as he did that politics rests on a set of assumptions about the human condition, the alienation we feel, our consequent collective self-sufficiency, and the project of collective living and active citizenship that perhaps results from these understandings, none of which coexist easily (or at all) with the claims of that the Church has made throughout time about its authority here on earth. If you deny that, and are unwilling to give me some kind of alternative narrative that corrects mine, then we don't have much to discuss, which is precisely the problem, and why this conversation is not really political except in the most generic terms. Whatever you want to say about truth, the fact is that the Mystery, and this comes straight out of you and Wittgenstein, is non-discursive, and therefore non-political in a very real sense.
With regards to the founding, true enough that the period was full of appeals to heaven and nature and nature's god, but I would point to the fact that religious publications decline dramatically during the revolutionary period and pick back up again in the early nineteenth century. I would also point to the Constitution, which thankfully, does not begin with "In the Name of the Father...," father being a language of paternal authority, and in some cases, of governance. The current pope is a perfect example of that tendency, as is the current president.
If you deny that ...then we don't have much to discuss, which is precisely the problem...
I notice that you do this in most of your arguries. And it begins with the presumption that only you have the authority to speak. Do you realize that this silences the other person and perhaps the possibility of something other than the dualism that you have, each time, set up?
What in your argument seems to be an either/or appears to me to be neither either/or or even both/and, but a neither/nor.
Anyone who thinks Christ's intentions, whatever those were, and the history of the Church (which is what Arendt was talking about) are the same thing is starting a few steps behind in any serious discussion of the relation between faith and politics.
Yes, Arendt was talking about the history of the Church. I am talking about Christ Incarnate in The here and The Now whenever the here and now is here and now.
There is no Christ outside of his Body the Church! Period! And since he is in the world, he must of necessity be political, in the political arena, but it is not the source of the life of Christ.
The Church is therefore in the world, and as wee see in Jesus, subject to it and its Powers, ruling and political, but Christ does not take this or that "side" or even try to stand "outside" of it. He can not.
Augustine sought to make the world the Kingdom of God, but this is not possible. "Flesh and Blood cannot 'inherit' the Kingdom of God," can not make the world the Kingdom of God, the best Mann can do is what we see now, the best world that Mann can make. And I am NOT talking about Heaven on earth or Heaven after death or life after death. Most Christians still believe like Augustine that we can make our world in our control, heaven on earth "with God's help." But no. That is NOT what I am talking about at all. The world under the powers that rule by death is dead; just not buried, and death is the end of it all. Sic transit gloria mundi. But there is a new world right here that makes for life and a world that death has no part in for even death in this world is a source of life, and it can only be accepted, when the invitation is considered of value, over and above the demands of the world.
One day I will try to write a "narrative" of it for you. But I don't think I can "sing the song in a strange land," even "if I could speak with the tongue of men or angels."
But I do see it.
I actually don't think the dualism is on my side of the argument, I am no atheist, and have spent a great deal of my life so far probing the relationship between the mysteries to which the church bears witness and the nature/character of the political.
I would suggest that the dualism is in on your side of the argument, or at least, its not a horizontal dualism, with sides delineated, but a vertical one, with the "way of the world" and its discourses submitted to that which is "over and above" the world. I am not saying that is bad, I am certainly not saying it is poorly thought out, but what I am saying is its capacity to be political is very limited, precisely because its rooted in something that you describe as "over and above" the concerns of the world that we, in and out of the church, share together. Thank you for using that language, because it demonstrates my point about governance from the previous post quite nicely.
Ultimately, you say you "cannot sing a song in a strange land." Work on that narrative, I will be interested to read it, but if you assume that things outside of your tradition or the church are a "strange land" that you cannot speak in, or refuse to speak in, then this precisely demonstrates my point about the dangers of mixing revelation and the political. Those who think politically think temporally, to use the formulation of Sheldon Wolin, and your renunciation of the that so-called "strange land" is precisely the problem in a world where everything, including the public itself, is being privatized and the spaces of the commons are disappearing. There is very little in anything you say that helps us solve this problem or explore new ways of living that reverse it, and I dare say your orientation threatens to turn rather quickly into a kind of petty identity politics.
I would add as well that there is a kind of false sense of victimization in your language that fits into the potential for identity politics and not much else. You accuse me of claiming the sole authority to speak and trying to prevent you from speaking, which is absurd, especially as I am a guest on this blog and sought out the conversation in the first place. Rather, you decline or dismiss speaking in the "tongues of men," or common speech in a shared language, which I would argue is the fundamental condition of conversation and politics. You self-consciously prevent yourself from entering the world of the "tongues of men" (apparently because it is beneath the "over and above" you seek) and then look to blame me for your absence from it.
So, are you saying that if I as an american move to Argentina, should involve myself in argentian politics? Vote etc.? It is against american law. I would lose my american citizenship if I did.
You can vote from abroad, people who work in the state department and the military do it all of the time. You can also have dual citizenship. I don't know exactly what law you are referring to, but it is probably meant to keep people from voting in two different places, whatever the merits of that, which are debatable. Likewise, my permanent address is in Sacramento, but I vote in Los Angeles, so I can't cast a vote in both the LA and Sacramento mayorial elections. Of course, this is all hypothetical, because you don't live in Argentina, and you don't vote! I'm not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, outside of some general point about "sovereignty..."
I would suggest this article which seems to say better what I am trying to say.
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0801&article=080110
Well that is a fine and good article, and it only makes sense that a serious Christian would oppose the War in Iraq, current American foreign policy, and great many other wars and policy schools past and present. "To whom do we belong" is a very serious question, and an important one, and I think the world is changing a lot quicker than our language and laws are in that regard. That being said, a sense of belonging seems to be a pretty interminable part of the human condition, and citizenship and nations remain one of the primary ways in which people seek to fulfill that sense of belonging. And until we figure something else out, they seem the only way that people of different religious or cultural persuasions can live together as part of a political community.
Now, to get back to your point, I do not see what the exact connection is between your earlier question and the article. Are you saying you are not a member of the US as a political community, or that is not the primary community to which you belong? I have no problem or criticism of that position, but why would (supposedly) losing your US Citizenship matter to you if that is the case? What is your complaint about that law you mention earlier? All it seems to say is, hey, if you don't want to belong here, cool, go belong somewhere else. I would refer again to the fact that I can't vote in Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Virginia at the same time, I have to chose, even though I will live in all three over the next year.
There is a deeper problem here, though. You seem to think that being a citizen means you have to agree with the nation or the government. Most of the people who opposed the War in Iraq did so as citizens first, and they were of a variety of different religious persuasions. The war was opposed far more fervently in Europe, which is a profoundly secular society. In fact, one could say that evangelical Christians were the primary base of support for the war here, decrying liberals and secular humanists as the "blame America first crowd" or appeasers. Now, I don't doubt his or your political positions on this issue, or the reasons you have those positions. That being said, citizenship seems to still be the most effective and powerful conduit through which an active citizenry can oppose or in the future prevent such actions on the part of their fellow citizens or their government.
A good quotation to follow...
"In dark times..." was the poet Bertolt Brecht's formulation; there are evil deeds, even evil deeds of novel sorts, but they are not what constitute the darkness. The darkness is what comes when the open, light spaces between people, the public spaces where people can reveal themselves, are shunned and avoided; the darkness is a hateful attitude toward the public realm, toward politics. "History knows many periods of dark times in which the public realm has been obscured and the world become so dubious that people have ceased to ask any more of politics than that it show due consideration for their vital interests and personal liberty" (Arendt, Men in Dark Times). People who have given up on the world, thinking that they can set themselves outside it, without revealing themselves in the world or in the public realm, but only in private friendships or solitary pursuits, do not understand that vital interests and personal liberty pursued without heed for the rest of humankind become meaningless."
- Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters
Could you comment:
May kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world my followers would fight...
and
I pray not for the world, but for them whom thou hast given me: because they are thine. And now I am not in the world, and these are in the world. and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy filled in themselves. I have given them thy word, and the world hath hated them: because they are not of the world, as I also am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from evil. They are not of the world, as I also am not of the world. Jesus, or for non christians who would challenge that, the johannine community's understanding of who who Jesus and they were
For us as followers of Christ there is only one way to live in this world, and that is the way of Love which we see not de-finited but opened-up, revealed by Jesus Christ.
To me, personally, politics is the world-without-Love(The World)'s way of ordering (in the best sense of the word) how people live with one another to keep peace. It is quite natural, quite human, and makes perfect sense and is logical and reasonable. It is natural. It is what is.
Love, in the NT's use of the word meaning neither philos, nor eros, nor classical Gk's meaning, but revealed in (NOT by as most preachers would have us us believe) Jesus Christ living of his life, agape, the Way (The Way of Love [Agape]) is the way of living with one another in this world living in it as citizens of the Kingdom of God, in, yes, IN the world which tries to live without God by its own paradigms). This is non-sensible, un-reasonable, il-logical, to the natural order of the world, for it is super-natural (Simone Weil), and the desire to do so is seen therefore as NOT natural, and acknowledged as such, and not of one's self, and hence a gift. So,
to paraphrase EYB:,
"In sinful times..."; there are evil deeds, even evil deeds of novel sorts, but they are not what constitute the sin. Sin is what is when the open bright spaces between people-- love, where people can reveal themselves, is shunned and avoided; sin is the hateful attitude toward Love, toward the Way of Love. "History knows many periods of sinful times in which Love has been obscured and the world becomes so dubious that people have ceased to ask any more of Love than that it show due consideration for their vital interests and personal liberty." People who have given up on the Love, thinking that they can set themselves outside it, without revealing themselves in the world of Love, but only in political relationships or solitary pursuits, do not understand that vital interests and personal liberty pursued without heed for the other in Love become meaningless."
It just hit me,
Jefferson said and so I guess believed that "The world belongs to the living." [Of course, this doesn't leave much for those of the past or future], but for us as Christians, as the Psalmist said, "the world belongs to God," and those of the past, present and future are fellow-partakers of, sharers-together of God's world.
For Jefferson then, the living have every authority to decide how to live together, it was their oikos, they could decide their own oikonomia . For us as children of God we do not. It is his oikos-- his house, his world and his is the way of our oikonomia-- economics, living together.
The is the baseline for all Christian statements in the Gospel Proclamation.
Yes, I could comment. Before I do, I'm still unclear on what you were doing with those previous points about Argentina, I think I understand what you were trying to do, but I don't think you had thought through communicating the connections you were making in your head.
All the same, yes, the kingdom of which you speak is not of this world. And if you take the logic of the quotation through to its conclusions, neither is the speaker. That is more or less what I wrote to you when this conversation began, which is that in order for something to be political, it has to be of this world, because politics is of this world, and things brought in from outside often have had the effect of stopping rather than creating politics. Thank you, for the second time, for affirming my argument in your own words. Now, that being said, I am not saying that the gospel lacks a politics that can follow from it (think about that speaker, Cornel West, that you saw). But, at least if I understand him correctly, someone like him is doing the tough conceptual work of using history and culture to observe and forge a political project faithful to how the gospel has manifested itself throughout that history and various cultures. Thus, a kind of jazz politics that comes out of the African American religious and aesthetic experience becomes useful language in which to articulate the vision of a better world where love and community are higher values than greed and power. Now, I am not a devotee of his, but his thought compels engagement to say the least. My dispute with you rests not on whether the gospel can have any place in human relationships, it is whether you are willing to do the work of translation required to convert something that is not of this world into something that is (not just in the world, but of it as well). If you are, then I have yet to see that effort fully manifest in our conversations, and if you are not, that is fine, good luck to you, but politics is not an appropriate word to describe what you are trying to do or thinking about, to get back to the original blog and my response. Over the course of the years, I have heard you pour a great deal of scorn on the public realm and be quite dismissive of the "way of the world," by which you have meant anything from tax rates to Stoic philosophy and everything in between. I get where much of that comes from, and you may in the end be more right than we know, but such prefaces to the ideas you want to share and the things you want to see happen come dangerously close to precisely the forsaking of the world (not just the earth, but the common world that human beings make and share together on the earth) to which the quotation I gave you referred.
The problem with your spoof on that is that sin and dark times are not interchangeable. Sin, if one buys into that language, is not something that happens every now and then, or something we slip into, or something we slip out of, it is the Christian language for the human condition, as your slight adjustment of the language demonstrates rather nicely. Dark times are episodes and events, spirits of certain times, and human beings have it in their capacity to be lights in dark times and shed light on not only the space in between us, but the fact that such space exists. Sin as a word strikes me as a different ball game, a very serious one, but not the same thing. Anyhow, I am not sure "sin" leaves us much to talk about, especially as most of those who brandish phrases like "sin" and so forth around have convinced themselves that homosexuality is a far more grievous sin than war. That is a sign of dark times, indeed.
As to the Jefferson line, I think you take that out of context and are setting up a straw man with which to argue, a tactic that no longer surprises me. In all banal reality, Jefferson was most likely talking about debt, especially the debt he inherited from the death of his father in law. Even so, I don't think the spirit behind that has anything to do with the contempt for the past or the future that you attribute to it, Jefferson could not have been an archivist, book collector, politician, statesman, nationalist, cosmopolitan, and builder of universities if he thought that the past or the future were nothing. I think the message behind it is that we should not be afraid of new things, new ideas, new ways of living, new constitutions being explored, a spirit we could use a little more of I might add. "But that is not the way we've been doing it" should not be a sound argument against something in and of itself.
I also am skeptical of the simple division you set up there (more evidence of where the either/or mentality really lies here). The "children of god" have changed the way they live together numerous times and continue to do so, and perish the thought, apparently without God's direct permission. Margaret wouldn't be a priest and B would not have lived to see her baptism if human beings in and out of the church hadn't decided they could do better for one another. I support gay marriage, both in line with the invitation to radically inclusive love in the gospel and the equalitarian principles of a secular republic, and the fact that Rome thinks otherwise or that its not what people are accustomed to doesn't really cause me to second guess myself.
Economy is the way people live together as you say, or part of it, but if that is true it is a human project, and as such it demands some kind of praxis, a praxis that ultimately needs to take place beyond the walls of the church, both physically and conceptually. If it doesn't, or if the precondition of it is that everyone be in church, then the church has become just another club, identity point, or secret society. And if that is the case, then in response to an earlier point you made, it is the church that is dead, and meanwhile power is doing just fine.
If the world of Power and Human Politics is all that we have to live-into here and now, indeed I renounce it, and am desperately trying to let go of it. "Thankfully" [though there is no one to thank in that world] nature will eventually take care of that. Yet if there is any Love outside of that world, "all shall be well."
I certainly never said that the world of "power and human politics" was all he have to "live into" here, but your formulation here is interesting for two reasons. One, it sets up an absolute distinction, of your own articulation, between the city of man and the city of god, and makes a clear choice for the latter. That is all fine and well, and I know that it comes out of a great deal of thinking and feeling, but it demonstrates that the "either/or" almost fundamentalist attitude alleged earlier rests on your side of this particular debate. Secondly, and related to that, you correctly associate the words human and politics. Human beings inhabit the earth, and while they are here they can be creators and destroyers of worlds, and creators and sharers of truths. Politics is not the only phenomenon that appears on the historical scene in this regard, but it is one of the rare and essential ones.
If it is what Psuedo-Dionysius called "mind beyond mind, word beyond speech, gathered up by no discourse, no intuition, by no name" that you're after, than that is wonderful. But politics, as I said at the opening of our discussion, requires minds, speech, discourse, and names to even be imaginable, much less operable. As such, it is not an appropriate word to describe what you were trying to talk about. After the wandering nature of your (non-)responses to my questions and criticisms, I am not sure what that was, but I am sure that you are even more unsure than I am, which makes for bad conversation. I won't bother your blogging any further.
Thank you, again, for acknowledging that I was right. Love you guys,
- matt
"Man cannot do what he cannot say he has done." - J.G.A. Pocock
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