"The Jesus of the Gospels is not a great ethical teacher like Socrates, our leading humanitarian. He is an apocalyptic figure who steps outside the boundaries of normal morality to signal that the Father’s judgment is breaking into history. His miracles were not acts of charity but eschatological signs — accepting the unclean, promising heavenly rewards, making last things first.
He is more a higher Nietzsche, beyond good and evil, than a higher Socrates. No politician is going to tell the lustful that they must pluck out their right eye. We cannot do what Jesus would do because we are not divine."
"The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding. It is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them, make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair. If that is all they are, then we may as well make Socrates our redeemer."
Wills makes a good point: the Gospels are too profound to be reduced to neat political slogans. And yet there is a message of social justice that informs the Gospels and prescribes how a Christian must act in the world. A person who embraces preemptive war rejects the Gospels; a person who condones the torture or abuse of a prisoner is turning from Christ; a politician who favors the death penalty cannot call him/herself a Christian. A policy that favors the wealthy and punishes the poor has abandoned the core message of the Sermon on the Mount. A true Christian follows the politics of compassion. The theologian Karl Barth wrote about "the political service of God/ politischer Gottesdienst" (Gotteserkenntnis und Gottesdienst – 1938) as he watched the Evangelical church in Germany turn away from his Barmen Declaration. Are we still of any use / Sind wir noch brauchbar? Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked after ten years of Nazi rule in Germany. We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds / Wir sind stumme Zeugen böser Taten geworden. So, in the end, Wills is wrong to impose a strict separation of the Gospels from the political realm. A Christian is compelled to break silence and to act.
Christianity Jesus Religion Politik Theologie
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You can’t possibly be serious.
How is it charity when a politician takes money from someone (by threat of force) and gives it to another?
I can see lots of reasons for doing so (such as maintaining aggregate demand or social peace or as a form of insurance–like unemployment insurance).
But this isn’t charity.
It is not a politician’s job to ‘turn the other cheek’ when the consequence is thousands of others being killed.
I may decide (as an individual) to be charitable or to turn the other cheek, but to act that way as a matter of public policy is simply to abdicate your responsibilities as a public servant.
And what do Barth and Bonhoeffer have to do with the current situation? Isn’t it a bit, umm, un-Christian to liken the current political situation to Nazi Germany and turn Barth’s and Bonhoeffer’s comments into cliches? Or is it simply impossible for the Left to give up the parody of its ‘persecution’ by the Bush adminsitration?
@PierreM
Barth and Bonhoeffer were Christians in extremis whose writings and life stories provide clues for how Christians today may confront injustice. Also, they were up against the Deutsche Christen movement which has certain parallels to the right-wing evangelical movement in America today.
I would submit that a politician who enacts tax cuts for the wealthy while increasing the suffering of the poor may indeed be acting out of political expediency, but his/her behavior is unethical from a Christian perspective.
As for “turning the other cheek” in the context of war, it was President Bush himself who used bogus Christian iconography (along with bogus intelligence) to justify the invasion.
The columnist James Carroll has an excellent piece in today’s Boston Globe about religion and the Iraq War:
“Here is the difference between Abraham’s God and the gods of Ur or Egypt: This God acts not out of time, but in it; not in the other world, but in this one; not in heaven, but on earth. This Creator is invested in creation not in general, but in particular. Therefore history — what happens here and now — is of ultimate significance. This means that the value of mere abstractions must be measured against the real-world consequences of their implementation.
The war in Iraq today was launched without regard for such consequences, and we see the result. The genius insight of Genesis is that when God is understood as the God of history, then history — what happens in time among human beings — takes on absolute value. The ideal, therefore, must always be measured against the real.
The death of each man, woman, and child who has died in Iraq across the last three years equals, in the eyes of the God who called Abraham by name, the death of all that exists. Each person is of infinite worth. If war makers had calculated their decisions on this scale, they would have found another way to proceed. War must be a last resort, not a first reaction.”
Link:http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/04/10/iraq_and_the_legacy_of_abraham/
The Iraq War is THE moral challenge for Christians in the US today. Those who endorse it – or who choose to remain silent – are rejecting the basic tenets of their faith.
Think about it the next time you are in church.
And why would Bush’s supposed use of Christian iconography be less bogus than yours or Carrolls?
Carroll’s piece is a great example of unctious moralizing that in fact amounts to little more than pious quietism at best and the open collusion with our enemies at worst.
You have a choice: do good and avoid doing evil, as Aquinas said.
That doesn’t include loudly proclaiming your piety and then doing nothing out of vanity or fear while pretending that it’s restraint; or, even more perversely, likening the current situation for Christians vis a vis Bush to the Hitler regime.
Those of us who spoke out the Iraq invasion before it happened were ridiculed and mocked. And we couldn’t stop the war- maybe we could have done more. Now it is only the Bush-cultists and neocon dead-enders who continue to mock us. The majority of Americans are sickened by the war after three years of pointless bloodshed.
As for James Carroll, I recall he was scorned for speaking out against the Vietnam war as a Catholic priest back in the late sixties. He has been a consistent advocate for peace, and his words echo those of another critic of the Iraq War: John Paul II.
The current situation is for Muslims quite a bit like for Jews under Hitler. Untermenschentum. Morally, the Bush regime is probably below Hitler because even those nutters never dared to openly talk of holocaust, the way the Christo-Fascists of today threaten for example Iran with nuclear holocaust.
Aah, isn’t it great when we blindly believe reports that throw dirt on the Administration just because their content satisfies our political agenda?
Last time I heard the only person threatening to destroy anything with nuclear weapons was the president of Iran. Let’s keep things in perspective, shall we?
Maybe your opposition to the Iraq war was the morally correct thing to do. And even that’s arguable. Jesus did tell a parable about a man who rescues a donkey from a well during the Sabbath. The message being that we shouldn’t let preposterous laws and regulations prevent us from doing good (All of a sudden Darfur and Rwanda come to mind…).
Regarding economics, Jesus was also keen on personal responsibility and valued hard work and thrift. He never said “O, go and create a distorting set of incentives through taxation that keep people from working to the best of their abilities!”. He actually chastised the man who failed to use his “talent” wisely, even going on to saying: “For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away. Throw out the worthless slave into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth”.
Not exactly advocating equality of income and/or the construction of a socialist state, I’d say.
Anyways. The whole point is that we shouldn’t use Jesus as a puppet to forward our agendas, right? Especially when His views about so many topics can be interpreted so differently.