The City Spring 2011

THE CITY Of the Clarity & Certainty or Power of the Word of God, from the essays & sermons of Huldrych Zwingli circa 1522.

The Word of God is so sure and strong that if God wills, all things are done the moment that he speaks his Word. For it is so living and powerful that even the things which are irrational immediately conform themselves to it , or to be more accurate, things both rational and irrational are fashioned and dispatched and constrained in conformity with its purpose. The proof may be found in Genesis I: “And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.�

Note how alive and strong the Word is, not merely ruling all things but creating out of nothing that which it wills.

With God there is no such thing as past or future , but all things are naked and open to his eyes. He does not learn with time or forget with time, but with unerring knowledge and perception he sees all things present in eternity. It is in time that we who are temporal find the meaning and measure of longness or shortness. Yet what seems long to us is not long to God, but eternally present. If you think that God often fails to punish a wicked individual or nation, suffering their arrogance far too long, you are completely mistaken, for note that they can never escape him. The whole world is before him, where then can they hide from his presence? Most certainly he will find them. And if you think that he does not punish or save according to his Word you are quite wrong. His Word can never be undone or destroyed or resisted. Oh you rascals! You who are not instructed or versed in the Gospel pick out verses from it without regard to their context , and wrest them according to your own desire. It is like breaking off a flower from its roots and trying to plant it in a garden. But that is not the way: you must plant it with roots and the soil in which it is embedded.

A publication of Houston Baptist University

SPRING 2011

THE CITY Publisher Robert Sloan Advisory Editors Francis J. Beckwith Adam Bellow Paul J. Bonicelli Joseph Bottum Hugh Hewitt Ramesh Ponnuru Editor in Chief Benjamin Domenech Reviews Editor Micah Mattix Writer at Large Hunter Baker Contributing Editors Matthew Lee Anderson Ryan T. Anderson Matthew Boyleston David Capes Joe P. Carter Victoria C. Gar dner Coates Christopher Hammons Anthony Joseph Joseph M. Knippenberg Louis Markos Wilfred McClay Dan McLaughlin Matthew J. Milliner Russell Moore Robert Stacey Joshua Tr evino THE C ITY Volume IV, Issue 1 Copyright 2011 Houston Baptist University.

All rights reserved by original authors except as noted. Letters and submissions to this journal are welcomed. Cover photo by Katya Horner.

Email us at thecity@hbu.edu, and visit us online at civitate.org.

2

Publ ic P ol ic y & The Chur c h Mark Amstutz & Peter Meilaender

4

Ex ce p tion a lism & Aut hor it y Wilfred McClay on Public Policy & Mastery A Conversation with Elliott A brams Ted Bromund on the Exceptional Battleground Paul J. Bonicelli on Capitalism & Chile Erick-Woods Erickson on The Tea Party ’s Future Samuel Gregg on Solidarity & Socialism

20 31 46 53 57 60

B ook s & Cultur e Paul D. Miller on Christopher Nolan Julie Ponzi on Fatherhood Paul Cella on Whittaker Chambers Andrew Walker on Constantine Louis Markos on The Sacred Narrative

66 76 79 84 88

A Rep ubl ic of Letter s Hunter Baker

95

The Makers by Dorothy L. Sayers

18

The Word by John Knox

104

3

THE CITY

Mark Amstutz & Peter Meilaender

W

ith the election of a Republican House majority, immigration policy is probably temporarily on the back-burner. But it is not likely to stay there for long. Arizona’s controversial enforcement law last year criminalizing the presence of illegal immigrants showed clearly that this issue is coming to a head. The federal government’s inability to deal with the problems caused by immigration will lead ever more states and localities to address those problems themselves. The issue is an emotional one and appears to have been an important source of Tea Party motivation in the recent election. It is not going away.

Immigration has also been an issue of increasing concern among evangelicals. In 2009 the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) issued a policy resolution on the subject. Other evangelical denominations have done so as well. Authors such as M. Daniel Carroll R., Matthew Soerens, and Jenny Hwang have written books sympathetic to the plight of immigrants. William Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois, has shown interest in the issue, even introducing President Obama for a 2010 speech on immigration reform. The Christian Post, reporting on the speech, noted that ‚several of the evangelical community’s most prominent members‛— including not only Hybels but also Leith Anderson, president of the NAE, and Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission—‛were in attendance.‛ Unfortunately, increasing evangelical involvement on immigration policy has not been marked by great sophistication, either 4

S P R I N G 2011

theologically or politically. Moreover, the evangelical eagerness to speak out on this subject raises larger, simmering questions about the appropriate role of the church in public policy. In their rush toward relevance, evangelicals may be repeating errors of the Protestant mainstream—hardly an encouraging example.

To be sure, evangelicals are not alone in failing to think adequately about immigration policy. Indeed, Christian groups have become somewhat noteworthy for issuing unhelpful statements about immigration. In 2003, the Catholic Bishops of Mexico and the United States jointly issued a pastoral letter on the topic. While reasonably detailed, the letter was extremely one-sided. It focused almost entirely on the needs of immigrants, both legal and illegal, while giving virtually no attention to the issue of securing the border or the social costs of unenforced immigration laws. Among Protestants, the Wesleyan Church issued a 2008 position statement on immigration, and in 2009 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) approved a social policy resolution on the topic. Though considerably shorter than the Catholic pastoral letter, neither the Wesleyan statement nor the ELCA resolution was any less one-sided.

Despite the competition, however, the NAE’s 2009 policy resolution is among the weakest such Christian statements on immigration. It contains little substantive argument—unsurprisingly, since it is only a few pages long. Yet in its very brevity, it presents in concentrated form the typical weaknesses of these statements. It contains three short sections. The first, ‚Biblical Foundations,‛ identifies some relevant scriptural principles, supported by parenthetical references to various Bible verses. The second section, ‚National Realities,‛ offers an extremely cursory look at the contemporary immigration situation in the United States. And the third, a ‚Call to Action,‛ urges a number of policy measures upon the government.

A

quick look at what these three sections say—and what they fail to say—illuminates the statement’s most telling flaw, one shared by the other resolutions referred to previously. Consider the section on ‚Biblical Foundations.‛ It begins with ‚the truth that every human being is made in the image of God‛ and that, like Jesus, we are to show ‚respect toward others who are different.‛ These claims are surely correct. But they are so general that they tell us next to nothing about immigration policy. Both are fully compati5

THE CITY

ble with vastly different policies, ranging from the very open to the very restrictive. The document then mentions various migrations in the Bible, as well as the importance of hospitality toward foreigners in the Old Testament. Again, it is unclear what we should make of this. Those migrations occurred in a context very different from our international order of sovereign states. One might expect this difference to matter. But the statement does not consider the issue.

A similar problem pervades the section on ‚National Realities.‛ At the core of these few paragraphs is the claim that

many jobs and industries rely on immigrant workers. Current quotas do not grant enough visas to meet these needs, nor does federal immigration law provide sufficient opportunities to others who also come seeking gainful employment... Due to the limited number of visas, millions have entered the United States without proper documentation or have overstayed temporary visas.

The central ‚national reality‛ of immigration, it appears, is that we are admitting too few immigrants. But how many visas would be ‚enough,‛ and how would one decide that question? By considering U.S. demand for foreign workers? Or the number of foreign workers seeking to come here? Does it make a difference whether we are considering skilled or unskilled labor? How do we weigh the benefits to American consumers, in the form of cheaper goods and services, against the costs to American labor, in the form of wage competition?

Or how should we allocate visas among workers, family members, and refugees? All of these difficult but critical questions are simply buried beneath the bland assumption that we are not admitting ‚enough‛ immigrants.

Finally, the ‚Call to Action‛ makes a number of specific proposals.

These include appeals for the government to do the following: monitor the border with ‚respect for human dignity‛; ‚establish more functional legal mechanisms for the annual entry of a reasonable number of immigrant workers‛; reconsider (and, by implication, increase) the ‚number and categories of visas available for family reunification‛; provide a qualified amnesty for illegal aliens; protect the civil rights, especially with respect to fair labor practices, of all those present in the United States; and enforce immigration laws ‚in ways that recognize the importance of due process of law, the sanctity of the human person, and the incomparable value of family.‛ 6

S P R I N G 2011

One notes immediately the one-sided nature of these recommendations. Their focus is almost entirely on the shortcomings of current laws, the needs of immigrants, and the importance of a more open immigration policy. Little is said about the needs and concerns of current citizens, or the social costs of high levels of immigration.

Even the two recommendations that concede the need to monitor the border and enforce the laws emphasize not border security, but rather the inadequacy of current methods, and the dignity and sanctity of persons seeking to enter.

T

his brief analysis points toward a fundamental weakness characteristic of all the denominational statements mentioned thus far. A statement like the NAE’s operates on two levels, both of them wrong. One is a level of excessive generality. Recognition that all persons are made in the image of God, references to the Good Samaritan, allusions to Old Testament migrations of peoples— without considerable explication, none of these helps us reach meaningful conclusions about immigration. Perhaps some practices are ruled out by, say, a commitment to human dignity. By and large, however, these sorts of principles are simply too general to offer policy guidance to public officials.

At the same time, the statement also operates on a level of excessive specificity. To be sure, its recommendations are not extremely detailed—it does not recommend a specific number of work visas, for example, or scheme of family reunification categories. Nevertheless, it does recommend various measures, all of which line up on one side of the immigration debate, and none of which is justified by the statement’s arguments. The statement provides no argument explaining how many work visas would be ‚enough‛ or identifying a ‚reasonable number of immigrant workers.‛ It makes no effort to engage the difficult moral concerns surrounding amnesty. It does not help us to differentiate between border enforcement mechanisms that show respect for human dignity and ones that do not.

The statement, in short, seeks to move the public debate in a particular policy direction on the basis of principles much too vague to justify that direction, without providing any of the necessary argument in between. Yet that intermediate level is precisely where a more serious ecclesiastical analysis might actually be able to structure public policy reflection and offer some guidance.

7

THE CITY

P

resumably no single immigration policy is ‚the‛ correct Christian one. Christians can in good faith, on the basis of their own principles, defend a variety of positions, from amnesty and increased admissions on the one hand, to border security and reduced admissions on the other. In moving toward any policy recommendation, however, they must confront a number of difficult ethical and political questions, about which the church could indeed help us think more clearly.

By way of example, here are three interlocking ethical issues central to the immigration debate, about none of which the NAE statement has anything to say: 1. What is the purpose (or what are the purposes) of the state? Christians have often said that government is ordained by God to punish wrongdoers and protect the innocent. Similarly, the Preamble to the American Constitution lists a number of governing purposes: ‚to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.‛ How should American Christians think about goals such as these in the context of contemporary immigration? What might they imply about the importance of representative government and the rule of law? Policy recommendations ungrounded in some broader conception of the goals that politics ought to serve inevitably seem arbitrary.

2. What is the ethical relationship between citizens of a country and foreigners? Most people believe that we have stronger obligations toward our fellow citizens than we do toward others in the world. Is that correct? If so, what does it imply for immigration policy? Immigration restrictions are, after all, a way of embodying in law a preference for the interests of our fellow citizens over those of outsiders.

Connected to this is our belief that a government (especially a democracy) should represent the interests and desires of its own citizens. In its representative role, the state manifests the moral ties that bind citizens to each other more strongly than they are bound to nonmembers. In short, what do we owe, and to whom?

3. What is the moral status of the contemporary international order? Unlike either the world of Exodus and Leviticus, or that in which Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt, the contemporary world consists of independent nation-states, recognized as sovereign entities under modern international law, among whose sovereign rights (and duties) are 8

S P R I N G 2011

to control the flow of persons across international borders and regulate the distribution of national citizenship.

How should Christians evaluate this international system? What is the moral standing of international boundaries, of sovereign states, and of international law? If churches are to contribute to the moral debate on immigration, they must address middle-level political questions such as these.

Articulating principles—like compassion for migrants and hospitality to strangers—is important but insufficient in promoting a biblical perspective on complex issues like immigration, peacekeeping, or Third World development. Sorting out the ethical and political complexities of this middle level of analysis may not result in neat, clear policy recommendations. One suspects, indeed, that this is the real reason why the NAE—like the Catholics, the Wesleyans, and the ELCA—avoided them, opting instead for unhelpful generalities and unjustified recommendations. But if churches are to maintain their spiritual independence and moral credibility, they should refrain from issuing simplistic policy pronouncements without carrying out the hard work of political ethics. The danger here is more than simply offering poor advice; rather, the real threat to the church lies in the misuse of biblical authority for political ends.

I

t may seem unfair to spend so much time criticizing the NAE’s short and disappointing immigration resolution. But that statement provides a window onto larger issues, in which potentially much is at stake. Historically, Christian churches have varied in their level of political engagement. Some denominations, especially mainline Protestant ones, have been active in issuing pronouncements on a wide variety of domestic and foreign policy concerns. During the Cold War, mainline churches frequently offered advice on arms control and disarmament, nuclear strategy, the Middle East peace process, revolutionary wars in Central America, and the like. Evangelical and fundamentalist denominations, by contrast, made comparatively few pronouncements and were more reluctant to lobby government officials.

Ironically, as the influence of mainline Protestants has waned in recent decades, evangelical political engagement with both domestic and international political issues has increased. While many factors have contributed to the decline of mainline churches, their loss of 9

THE CITY

membership and public influence can be attributed partly to their shift in focus from spiritual to temporal concerns. As evangelicals become more involved in public policy issues, they must remember that the church makes its most significant contribution to public life by remaining true to its spiritual mission.

How, then, can evangelical denominations, or an umbrella organization like the NAE, effectively address important social and political concerns without abandoning their spiritual priorities? How can they bring a Christian perspective to bear on issues of public life without overspiritualizing problems or plunging into overly specific advocacy of policy? Following are some suggested guidelines and cautions for denominations seeking to offer thoughtful biblical guidance about public affairs.

1. Begin with a thorough understanding of the issues. If believers are to contribute to public policy debates, they must be knowledgeable about the problems they wish to address. Developing a competent understanding of an issue or problem is never easy. Policy issues such as climate change, financial reform, and nation-building are not only complex and multi-dimensional, they are also morally ambiguous, requiring trade-offs among competing moral goods. In the words of Peter Berger, ‚It is the easiest thing in the world to proclaim a good. The hard part is to think through ways by which this good can be realized without exorbitant costs and without consequences that negate the good.‛ Even when political actors possess significant knowledge about a problem, they emphasize different perspectives and values, making consensus unlikely. In the immigration debate, for example, some officials or advocates focus on border security, others on increased visas, and still others on due process for workers or legalization of undocumented aliens.

A well-known irony of legislation, moreover, is the frequency of unintended, even counterproductive, consequences. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), for instance, granted amnesty to millions of undocumented aliens on the condition that employers hire only legal workers in the future. But the federal government never established an effective system requiring employers to comply with the law’s hiring regulations. The heavy reliance of many business interests on undocumented workers also undermined enforcement of the employer sanctions. As a result, in the twenty-five years 10

S P R I N G 2011

since adoption of IRCA, the number of illegal aliens in the United States has continued to grow.

2. Distinguish between the Two Kingdoms. The church, as earthly representative of the universal Kingdom of Christ, can provide a distinct vantage point on the immigration debate. John Buchanan, editor and publisher of The Christian Century, describes the church’s perspective as follows: ‚Our loyalty is to a kingdom that knows no borders or boundaries. We proclaim a God who welcomes us as strangers, which impels us to welcome the aliens and strangers in our midst.

And we have a biblical teaching that says the law and the prophets are summed up in the command to love our neighbors as ourselves.‛ Needless to say, this is not the perspective of any temporal state.

The state’s perspective, however, is not therefore irrelevant. Believers should resist the temptation to treat spiritual and temporal responsibilities as synonymous, as if one could simply take spiritual ideals and apply them directly to political concerns. Christians have traditionally distinguished between the realms of spiritual and temporal authority. Martin Luther, following St. Augustine’s analysis in The City of God, described the different roles of church and state. The church, he taught, was the community of believers who proclaimed God’s love and grace, while the state was the temporal authority that provided order and justice through law and the coercive power of government.

In our own era, Carl Henry, founding editor of Christianity Today and an influential evangelical theologian, also argued that the Bible limited the duties of both government and church—the former, to preserve justice and order; the latter, to pursue the moral and spiritual task of evangelization. ‚The institutional church,‛ he wrote, ‚has no mandate, jurisdiction, or competence to endorse political legislation or military tactics or economic specifics in the name of Christ.‛ If government undertook actions inconsistent with Scripture, Henry believed the church had a duty to oppose them. Yet it should refrain from offering policy recommendations. The church can help structure the moral debate on an issue such as immigration, but it is government’s role to devise specific policy prescriptions.

One consequence of the Two Kingdoms distinction is that moral norms do not translate neatly into specific policies. All persons, for example, bear the image of God and therefore possess equal and innate human dignity. But this equal dignity does not automatically 11

THE CITY

create membership entitlements. The colleges where we teach admit only some students out of a large pool of applicants. A person may wish to work for a particular company, but the decision on whether to offer him a job rests with the employer, not the applicant. Membership in states is carefully regulated, requiring passports, visas, and other documentation before an alien may cross national borders.

Individuals are free to leave their own country, but do not necessarily have a right to enter another. Such distinctions are compatible with the norm of universal human dignity.

3. Start with Scripture, but move into ethics and political theory. Because churches have competence in spiritual, not temporal, affairs, organizations such as the NAE and its member denominations should emphasize what they do best—namely, preach the good news and illuminate biblical norms that can inspire and guide individual behavior.

The Bible is not a manual on politics. It offers little instruction to government officials on carrying out their public responsibilities. As a result, Scripture must be interpreted and applied judiciously to public policy concerns, avoiding simplistic judgments and refraining from over-spiritualizing temporal problems.

As one might expect, evangelicals, who believe that the Bible provides a full and sufficient revelation of God’s will for humanity, rely heavily on Scripture not only for personal spiritual concerns but also for social and political guidance. Thus it is not surprising that evangelical political advocacy seeks to justify itself with references to the Bible. For example, the 2006 resolution on immigration of the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC) spiritualized the immigration issue in the following terms:

We walk with Jesus who was a wandering Galilean and resident alien often without shelter or place to rest his head. As faithful Christians, we are to welcome the stranger amongst us, [sic] (Matthew 25:35) and to extend hospitality (Romans 12:13), for we as the church are also a pilgrim people—aliens and exiles in the world (1 Peter 2:11). In so doing, we serve Christ himself.

This is reminiscent of the NAE’s oversimplification of the issues, implying as it does that a handful of Scripture references settles the matter. The NAE statement suggests that the only relevant biblical norms are the supreme value of persons and hospitality toward aliens—even as it cautions against a ‚simplistic‛ emphasis on the rule 12

S P R I N G 2011

of law. Like the ECC resolution, its basic message is clear: regardless of how migrants arrive, they should be welcomed.

In considering American immigration policy, however, surely equal human dignity and empathy toward aliens are not the only relevant biblical and moral norms. Others would include the need for justice, the rule of law, and obedience to legitimate governing authority. No doubt the list could be lengthened. But rather than illuminating the difficult task of reconciling conflicting norms, most denominational statements, like those of the ECC or the NAE, simply affirm the inclusion of migrants, thereby giving precedence to the needs of undocumented aliens over other morally legitimate values.

T

his indicates the necessity of building, upon a scriptural foundation, a larger edifice of ethics, theology, and political theory.

A broader ethics should illuminate the relationships and obligations among human beings and the demands of the moral life.

Theology provides a framework for interpreting and applying Scripture and clarifies the nature of dual citizenship in the state and in God’s eternal kingdom. And political theory identifies fundamental challenges to building and sustaining communal order and justice, at local, national, and international levels. Together, these related endeavors constitute what we described earlier as the ‚middle‛ level of analysis, which would explore questions such as the purposes of politics, relationships between insiders and outsiders, and the foundations of international order. This broader philosophical and theological analysis, so notably lacking in the NAE statement, is necessary to move us from simplistic citation of the Bible to an adequate understanding of public policy issues, to say nothing of actual recommendations.

One of the benefits of exploring this middle level of analysis is to clarify why thoughtful Christians, working in good faith, nevertheless reach very different conclusions about political matters. Individual Christians come from different theological traditions. They endorse a range of political theories. In thinking about international relations, they may prefer a realist or a cosmopolitan perspective. But while biblical norms are binding, particular political theories are not.

The Bible does not dictate a particular immigration policy any more than it does a particular policy on health care, banking regulation, or oil drilling. All the more important, then, for churches, when they 13

THE CITY

offer official pronouncements on public policy, to make explicit their own theological and political presuppositions, as well as to distinguish between biblical principles and their own prudential policy recommendations. Their goal should not be to ‚win‛ any particular policy victory, but to help their members—and others—think more clearly about the possible political applications of biblical norms.

4. Remember that the moral legitimacy of regimes is more fundamental than specific policy issues. In assessing political life from a moral perspective, the fundamental question that must be addressed is not whether a given public policy is the most ‚moral‛ one. Rather, the most important moral question is whether the regime as a whole is one to which Christians can and should give their temporal allegiance. If the answer to that question is affirmative (as we believe it is in the contemporary United States), then the most important issue with respect to any specific policy recommendation is not whether the policy itself is ‚moral,‛ but rather what effect it will have on the regime. An apparently more ‚moral‛ policy that in practice undermines a just regime is less desirable than one that may appear less ‚moral‛ in the abstract but in fact helps sustain the regime.

In thinking about immigration, for example, it is not enough to ask what policy might best embody principles such as the equal dignity of all persons or hospitality toward strangers. One wants also to know about the long-term consequences of failing to control illegal immigration, the practicality of securing the border, the economic and political consequences of a large illegal population operating in a black market on the fringes of society, the economic effects of various immigration policies on American citizens, the international repercussions of different policies, and so on. This indicates what is so problematic, for example, in the NAE’s casual dismissal of a critical value like the rule of law, because sustaining respect for the rule of law is one of the most important regime principles undergirding a liberal democracy like the United States.

The fundamental ethical question, therefore, is whether or not a given regime is legitimate and just; moral concerns apply primarily to the choice of regimes, and only secondarily to evaluations of competing policy options. ‚[T]he choice of the form of government,‛ in the words of political scientist James Ceaser, ‚is the most important political question, so all other matters must be considered initially in this light.‛ The actual task of government is thus never simply to 14

S P R I N G 2011

discover the ‚most moral‛ policy, but rather, to devise the policy that will best realize the regime’s ideals and interests in a particular historical context. Whether or not a given policy helps sustain or undermine a particular regime is largely an empirical question on which church leaders have no particular expertise. This is yet another reason why denominations, if they are convinced of the moral legitimacy of the regime as a whole, should generally refrain from specific policy recommendations.

5. Teach first (and second, and third), before promoting action. Churches surely need to be concerned with temporal issues. But they should seek to influence public affairs not as an interest group or a lobby but as a teacher, illuminating moral norms and structuring moral debate.

If evangelical leaders wish to advance public justice, they can do so by crafting documents that contribute to a fuller biblical understanding of major public concerns. Such documents can not only assist public officials responsible for making and implementing policies but also help parishioners develop a perspective that is rooted in biblical and theological analysis.

The 1983 U.S. Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter on nuclear strategy stands as a classic example of the church’s effectiveness when it focuses on its teaching role. Titled ‚The Challenge of Peace,‛ the letter provided an authoritative description and assessment of one of the most difficult moral issues of the Cold War: the maintenance of large arsenals of strategic nuclear weapons that, if used, would have caused worldwide destruction.

Given the complexity of nuclear deterrence, the drafting of the letter was carried out over three years by a group of specialists, involving multiple hearings with noted theologians, ethicists, military experts, and national security strategists. To ensure broad public engagement, the bishops issued two preliminary drafts, in 1981 and 1982, which were circulated widely and publicized by the media.

Although the pastoral letter provided a number of recommendations, its main contribution was to assess the strategy of nuclear deterrence from a moral perspective, drawing upon biblical norms, the just war tradition, and the teachings of the Catholic Church. In the end, the letter not only contributed to a more informed laity and heightened awareness among government officials about the moral dimensions of nuclear strategy, it also helped to frame public debate about a major national security concern.

15

THE CITY

6. Pursue political initiatives with humility. Writing about Christian political action in the late 1970s, Michigan Congressman Paul Henry observed, ‚What is desperately needed is the moral humility to accept the fact that while God’s standards are absolute and unchanging, we as individuals are never able to know or apply them with perfection.‛ Throughout the mid-twentieth century, the most forceful proponent of humility in politics was Reinhold Niebuhr, who gained prominence by challenging the progressive idealism of Protestant churches. According to Niebuhr, because all human initiatives were tainted by sin, the goals and outcomes of political action could never be fully just. ‚The Christian faith ought to persuade us,‛ observed Niebuhr, ‚that political controversies are always conflicts between sinners and not between righteous men and sinners.‛ The task of moral politics was not to found Christ’s Kingdom upon earth, but to pursue proximate justice by promoting peaceful coexistence, public order, and human liberty, while mitigating the effects of excessive self-interest. In this task, Christians could play an important role by modeling virtues such as truth-telling, contrition, compassion, and forgiveness. More particularly, Christians could contribute to the development of free societies by reinforcing humility, without which political tolerance was impossible.

A perusal of denominational pronouncements on the immigration debate suggests that church groups do not always pursue advocacy with tentativeness and humility. The NAE’s statement, for example, expresses its views with high confidence, declaring, ‚The significant increase in immigration and the growing stridency of the national debate on immigration compel the National Association of Evangelicals to speak boldly and biblically to this challenging topic. ... Out of commitment to Scripture and knowledge of national immigration realities comes a distinct call to action.‛ As we have seen, the statement then goes on to make a number of specific recommendations, few of them within the competence of church leaders. Contrast the markedly more circumspect tone of the 2006 ‚Joint Statement Regarding Immigration Concerns‛ addressed to members of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod by Gerald Kieschnick, President of the Synod, and Matthew Harrison, Exective Director of LCMS World Relief: ‚The challenges of illegal immigration are real and solutions must be found. While we accept our Christian responsibility to care for those in need, it is not the role of the church to specify particular 16

S P R I N G 2011

civil legislation, either to its own constituency or to the government.‛ And in his supportive theological reflections on the subject, Paul Raabe of Concordia Seminary wrote, ‚The Lutheran church encourages her members to be responsible, active citizens. However, on the question of immigration laws, the Lutheran church does not have any special wisdom from the Word of God to determine which laws should be changed, if any, or how to change them. We leave that up to the consciences of individual citizens. But until the laws are changed, all Christians, including immigrants, should obey the laws of the land.‛

F

ollowing these six guidelines might well leave evangelical denominations feeling less likely to have a direct impact on the policy process. But they need not therefore exercise less public influence in the polity overall.

Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that religion in America was vibrant and influential precisely because it had no official, political role. In the late 20th century, mainline Protestant denominations saw their membership and influence plummet as many faithful believers came to view them as less concerned with preaching the Word of God than with taking fashionable public stances on high-profile issues. Their very decline opened the door for evangelical denominations, more intent on their ecclesiastical mission, to increase in popularity and numbers. It would be sad indeed if those same denominations, having helped to revitalize American religion, now found themselves tempted, by the siren song of political influence, to follow the mainline back into irrelevance.

Mark Amstutz is professor of Political Science at Wheaton College. He is the author of numerous articles and books, most recently International Ethics: Concepts, Theories, and Cases in Global Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

Peter Meilaender is associate professor of political sc ience at Houghton College. The author of Toward a Theory of Immigration (Palgrave, 2001), he previously contributed an essay to the Summer 2009 editio n of The City.

17

THE CITY

Dorothy L. Sayers The Architect stood forth and said: “I am the master of the art: I have a thought within my head, I have a dream within my heart.

“Come now, good craftsman, ply your trade With tool and stone obediently; Behold the plan that I have made— I am the master; serve you me.”

The Craftsman answered: “Sir, I will, Yet look to it that this your draft Be of a sort to serve my skill— You are not master of the craft.

“It is by me the towers grow tall, I lay the course, I shape and hew; You make a little inky scrawl, And that is all that you can do.

“Account me, then, the master man, Laying my rigid rule upon The plan, and that which serves the plan— The uncomplaining, helpless stone.”

The Stone made answer: “Masters mine, Know this: that I can bless or damn The thing that both of you design By being but the thing I am; “For I am granite and not gold, For I am marble and not clay, You may not hammer me nor mould I am the master of the way.

18

S P R I N G 2011

“Yet once that mastery bestowed Then I will suffer patiently The cleaving steel, the crushing load, That make a Calvary of me; “And you may carve me with your hand To arch and buttress, roof and wall, Until the dream rise up and stand— Serve but the stone, the stone serves all.

“Let each do well what each knows best, Nothing refuse and nothing shirk, Since none is master of the rest, But all are servants of the work— “The work no master may subject Save He to whom the whole is known, Being Himself the Architect, The Craftsman and the Corner-stone.

“Then, when the greatest and the least Have finished all their labouring And sit together at the feast, You shall behold a wonder thing: “The Maker of the men that make Will stoop between the cherubim, The towel and the basin take, And serve the servants who serve Him.” The Architect and Craftsman both Agreed, the Stone had spoken well; Bound them to service by an oath And each to his own labour fell.

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) was a prominent poet, essayist, translator and author . Reprinted with permission.

19

THE CITY

Wilfred McClay

A

good place to begin thinking about how we understand the balance of authority is to consider the title and contents of a book written almost a hundred years ago: American journalist Walter Lippmann’s influential book entitled Drift and Mastery, a signal work of the Progressive era, published in 1914. The same year saw the founding, by Lippmann and others, of a magazine called The New Republic, then as now a flagship of liberal and progressive thought.

Lippmann intended his book as an expression of the self-confident Progressive ideal: the belief that the infirmities of the human condition were no longer a permanent given, but lay within the ability of human agency to alter; and that the march of scientific knowledge, including social-scientific knowledge about the optimal ordering of human society, was granting human beings an ever-expanding power to control their circumstances.

That was mastery. And the alternative to this optimistic vision of human progress guided by science and social intelligence was not liberty, or spontaneous order, but<drift. And who could be in favor of something as amorphous and passive as drift?

Lippmann was writing at the triumphant climax of a long century of growing optimism. But by the end of that very year, 1914, the high point was already in the process of passing forever. With the onset of the First World War, all of Europe plunged into a bloody and selfdestructive cataclysm from which it has never entirely recovered.

To Europeans and Americans alike, the First World War stood as a decisive rebuke to all doctrines of inevitable progress, and indeed for some, to the very idea of progress itself. The mastery of which Lippmann had spoken so breezily had proven far more elusive and dou20

S P R I N G 2011

ble-edged than he could have suspected. Indeed, after the senseless butchery of the First World War, a level of mass mayhem entirely disproportionate to its rather obscure causes, it seemed that mastery has a shadow side, a negative component that grew in direct proportion to the acquisition of mastery itself. It was as if every form of mastery, every advance in human capability and power, contained the seeds of its precise opposite—as if the power to do good was always shadowed by an equal and opposite power to do evil.

At best, the advance toward ever greater mastery seems now like an ascent upon an ever narrowing ladder—the higher the altitude, the greater the vulnerability to catastrophic fall.

O

ne might consider whether this paradox—of progress shadowed by its opposite—holds in other realms, such as our progress in medical science. There our confidence might seem more secure. Whatever chastenings the modern world has received as a result of wars and other violence, we continue to believe in the rightness and efficacy of using modern science and medicine to prolong human life—so long, of course, as the life in question is deemed to be of the requisite ‚quality.‛ Only let an accredited research scientist stand before us and float the proposition that any scientific procedure, however morally troubling, might hold some promise for the cure of diabetes, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, herpes, or the common cold, and the matter is settled. The American public wants it. They are only too happy to give the man in the lab coat whatever he wants, especially if it is no skin off their own blastocysts. The thought that such scientists, like other humans, might have a limited perspective on the matter, and might occasionally be motivated by unvarnished self-interest, seems never to occur to our famously skeptical journalists.

There is, of course, real force behind the scientists’ appeals. No one who suffers from an incurable condition, or has seen a loved one suffer and die from one, can be immune to them. It is in our nature to cherish life. Even those of us who are convinced that a better existence awaits us beyond the grave are nevertheless naturally inclined to cling to our earthly existence. Such an inclination is sure to be all the more intense in those who hold no such belief, or hold it only tenuously. And it is an undeniable fact that remarkable medical breakthroughs occur all the time, so the hope for cures cannot be 21

THE CITY

dismissed as a vain one. Nor does it help matters that we live in an era in which shameless appeals to sentimentality and emotionalism have become the principal means by which public opinion is molded.

One feels constantly manipulated. And yet it would be cruel, even inhuman, not to be at least slightly moved by the pleas of celebrity sufferers such as Christopher Reeve and Michael J. Fox. ‚There go I,‛ we think to ourselves—or someone I know, or might have known.

Who could be so heartless as to deny them hope?

Let it be stipulated, then, that modern medicine’s achievements have been remarkable, and promise to become even more so in the years to come. Yet it takes no prophetic genius to see that medicine can have no cure for the unintended consequences that its progress will surely engender.

In the wake of the stem-cell controversy, much thought is being given to the moral trade-offs between the promise of medical progress and the multifaceted cannibalization and degradation of existing life. Others concern themselves with the problem of distributing medical care fairly and equitably. But I want us to consider for a moment a different concern, one that even the most implacable opponents of embryonic stem-cell research did not express. Let us suppose that even the cannibalization issues can be solved—that, for example, stem cells can be extracted from adults, placental tissues, umbilical cords, and such, without recourse to the destruction of embryos; that pluripotent embryo-like creatures can be concocted, and that all other similar issues can be satisfactorily resolved. Let us also suppose that all the problems of distributive justice in the provision of health care can be solved.

Suppose, in other words, a technological or political fix can be found to each and every moral dilemma. Would it follow that the progress of modern medicine be thereby rendered entirely unproblematic? Or might it not rather be the case that that the very meaning of suffering and death, and their place in the economy of the human soul, would be in the process of being cancelled, in ways that may be hugely consequential to us?

Let me be clear here that I am not endorsing some kind of moral masochism, or suggesting that we should all seek to embrace suffering, and rush back happily to a world without anesthesia. Nor am I trying to invoke religious interdictions, such as the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, that warn us against our effrontery if we cross 22

S P R I N G 2011

some invisible line. No, I am pointing to an inescapable irony at work in the progress of modern medicine, and to the fact that the high cost of medical care may be the least of the prices we are going to be paying for it.

W

hat recently presented the issue to me in especially compelling form was an old friend’s death from cancer. He was a very intelligent and convinced atheist, who had over the years been coming, little by little, to take the claims of Christianity more and more seriously, and to entertain the thought that all the things he valued in life might well be meaningless without the support of some transcendental grounding. He had watched my own development as a Christian with wary curiosity, and notwithstanding his deep-seated aversions, our friendship seemed to deepen with passing years. I thought it likely that someday we would have a serious conversation about it all. I believed he would listen to me, and I wanted to be ready for his questions when the time came. When he was diagnosed with the cancer, and it was clear that he might not have long to live, I thought ‚the conversation‛ would be coming soon, and so consciously began to prepare for it. I visited him repeatedly in his last days, each time hoping that this would turn out to be the moment when ‚the conversation‛ would occur. But it never did.

Maybe, in the end, he just didn’t want to have ‚the conversation.‛ Not that he was especially reticent in speaking about death. On the contrary, he practically reveled in it. But he was an exceedingly stubborn man, and it would have seemed a confession of weakness to him, to allow the mere fact that he was dying to be the cause of his reconsidering a lifetime’s settled opinions.

In any event, there was another reason why ‚the conversation‛ didn’t happen. And that was because he was too preoccupied with other matters—in particular, with an exhaustive search for a possible cure for his affliction. All over the country and the world, there are countless clinical trials going on, drugs being tested, therapies being experimented with, miracle cures being explored and touted. It is a full-time job just to research them all and sort through the conflicting claims to decide which one to try, and then to get oneself admitted for participation in the trial. He was understandably preoccupied with this search each time I saw him, and remained so until very near the end. As it was, he died in his bed at a prestigious hospital, of an 23

THE CITY

opportunistic infection contracted there, while awaiting his treatment for the cancer—a particularly hard irony.

Thankfully, he died in the presence of his wonderful family. And at the end he spoke to them of an inner serenity, once it was clear that all the pondering and choosing was past. That thought is some comfort to me. Still, I was left wondering whether he had really had sufficient time to come to terms with his death. And if he hadn’t, didn’t ‚the miracle of modern medicine‛ have something to do with it?

Here is an instance in which the very possibility of a cure—a possibility that, to repeat, was entirely reasonable to hope for, and that it would have been unthinkable not to pursue—may have robbed his death of its full meaning, and distracted him from a frank consideration of his ultimate condition. How different would it have been, had he been faced with the inevitability of his death some days and weeks before, as a terminal barrier looming before him like an insurmountable mountain? Would he have been led to give more serious thought to it all? Might we even have had ‚the conversation‛?

A

nd so we return to the paradox with which we began. It’s a problem has already been with us for a long time. It is a variation on the theme that Aldous Huxley famously sounded in Brave New World. It is the shadow side of our growing mastery of the physical terms of our existence, a shadow that grows in tandem with the mastery. One sees the same thing in a more banal, but for that very reason more sobering, phenomenon reported not long ago in an issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Two Vermont psychologists relate therein that:

a steadily growing number of students who are struggling with depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, and other problems visit campus health-care services...for the sole purpose of refilling prescriptions...[They] tell us they are not interested in working toward an understanding of their lives [but] ask only that their regimens of psychotropic medications—antidepressants, Ritalin, tranquilizers, and others—be continued or adjusted.

Unfortunately, one cannot help but be disappointed in the psychologists’ less-than-resounding arguments against such behavior.

The pill-popping students may be woefully mistaken, but they are not stupid. They are right to sense that there is not much of substance 24

S P R I N G 2011

behind the psychotherapeutic curtain. If the soul is nothing more than chemistry, a collection of manipulable states, then why not skip the moralizing, and just go ahead and manipulate them?

Indeed, what these young people are doing increasingly mimics the modus operandi of the adult world. If we can comfortably forestall the cosmic questions until the very last moment, and beyond, then why should we not? Evasion, rather than belief or unbelief, is the watchword of our day. (‚I’m not afraid to die,‛ said Woody Allen, ‚I just don’t want to be there when it happens.‛) But this task of evasion will become more complex in the years to come. How will we make sense of death if it comes to be viewed as something with no intrinsic meaning, but chiefly as a piece of bad luck, a matter of bad timing— the misfortune, for example, of contracting the disease before the march of inevitable medical progress had caught up with it? Or worse yet, how can we ever be reconciled to death when it becomes understood as something almost entirely accidental, and largely preventable?

One can easily imagine that there will be surprisingly little room for joy or exuberance in such a world. More likely, it will be a tightly wound world, permeated with bitterness and anxiety and mutual suspicion, in which human life will be at one and the same time deeply devalued and fiercely guarded.

W

ith growing mastery comes growing responsibility—and the need to assign accountability. In a world without God and without contingency there will always be someone or something at the bottom of everything bad that happens. The moral economy of a controlled world will demand that a villain be produced. Someone must be to blame. It will always be the twitch of the surgeon’s hand or the slip of the obstetrician’s forceps (or a slip-up by the managers of some future human hatchery), rather than the will of God or fate, or simply the imperfections of a fallen world, that explains deformity or death.

Not medicine alone, but every facet of modern life is vulnerable to this tyranny of mastery, or the illusion of mastery. We are entering an era in which there is likely to be a more and more brisk market in scapegoats. There will be one, or more, for every ill, since we are now ‚too smart‛ to fall for the idea that anything is truly beyond the reach 25

THE CITY

of human agency, and that calling something ‚God’s will‛ is anything more than an act of rank mystification.

But notwithstanding the proliferating need for scapegoats, much of the burden of blame will devolve upon ourselves, since in being set free to choose so much about our lives, we will almost certainly find ourselves more and more anxious about, and dissatisfied with, the choices we make. It need hardly be pointed out that the expansion of choice does not always make for the expansion of happiness. Everyone knows the sense of inexplicable relief that comes when a hard decision is taken out of our hands by the flow of events. That relief will become rarer. Everyone knows the aching hollowness of ‚buyer’s regret,‛ when we were allow to ‚make the call,‛ and we blew it.

That ache will become more familiar. The more we claim mastery, the more it will all be our own fault.

The more our lives are prolonged and extended, and the more death becomes seen as an avoidable evil whose precise moment should be ‚chosen,‛ rather than an inherent feature of human life, the more we will come to live imprisoned by a compulsive and narcissistic dread of all risk. We may even begin to look with horror and distrust upon our own children, since the possible consequences of such risk—the gulf between life and death, which will yawn before us as a chasm between eternity and extinction—will be too vast, too horrible, and too fully avoidable, to be contemplated. Salvation and life-extension will become the same thing. Hence, the price of living a life to the fullest will be deemed too high. The typical man of the medical-miracle future will not be an Ubermensch. He will be more like an obsessive-compulsive handwasher who lives in constant dread of other people’s germs, and ends up living the life of a wealthy hermit, like a latter-day Howard Hughes.

That such a world would drain human life of its dignity and vigor is not hard to imagine. Just as the treatment of the soul as a mere congeries of manipulable psychological states renders inner life meaningless, so the infinite extension of life will render life infinitely trivial. ‚Death is the mother of beauty,‛ intoned the great postChristian poet Wallace Stevens; ‚hence from her,/Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams/ And our desires.‛ Such words sound weird, even pathological, to the modern secular ear. And yet everyone who has ever read The Iliad knows that the gods of Homer’s epic are rendered less admirable, less noble, and less beautiful than the 26

S P R I N G 2011

human warriors, precisely because these gods cannot die, cannot suffer, and therefore cannot live lives of consequence. All they can do is meddle in the lives of mortals, who have to play the game of life for keeps.

The real beauty of human character is something different from mastery. It is something like the beauty of weathered wood, a beauty grained and deepened by its graceful and dignified incorporation of the elements within which it exists. Our dignity exists not only in our drive for mastery (and that is surely a part of it) but also in our acceptance of the limits on our will—in how we come to terms with our defeats, our failures, our decay, and our yielded territory, and nevertheless trudge ahead to a destination we could never have chosen at the outset, because we could never have had the wit to imagine it.

T

his discussion underscores the fact that public policy is always an effort to address itself to the human condition—to the kinds of creatures that we are, and aspire to become—to the hopes and expectations we bring to the pursuit of happiness. This is why the proper study of public policy involves acknowledging the importance of ideas in history. What do ideas have to do with happiness? Well, everything. Because life is a game of expectations, and the pattern of expectations to which the pursuit of happiness conforms itself at any given time—that age’s vision of feasible felicity, so to speak, and the means one uses to reach it—is itself a product of the dominant ideas of the time: ideas about life, death, God, nature, causality, moral responsibility, and human possibility.

In a word, what we believe about the world’s structure and meaning will determine what we think happiness is, and how we can act to gain it for ourselves. What we believe provides the basic structure of what we expect.

If we had lived at a time, like that of Homer’s Greeks and Trojans, in which the forces of nature are understood to be the uncontrollable playthings of Zeus and Poseidon, or inscrutable Fate, happiness would be an elusive and chancy thing. But in an era of growing mastery, when those forces are ever more completely under our control, expectations change, and happiness becomes something that all human beings can rightly aspire to, in the here and now, as a natural expression of their natural human endowment. There is no more 27

THE CITY

characteristically modern assumption than the belief that it lies within our power to find happiness.

So what happens when the forces of nature suddenly surge out of control? Well, one thing that happens is that we find our modern habits die hard. We expect mastery at every turn, and fly into a rage when we don’t get it.

C

onsider the example of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As the events associated with that tragic event were unfolding, one would have thought that the fury and carnage of Katrina, and the widespread suffering in its aftermath, rather than representing what used to be called an ‚act of God,‛ could be blamed entirely on the crimes of commission and omission perpetrated by current political leaders, from the mayor of New Orleans to the governor of Louisiana to President George W. Bush. It is striking how quickly the ‚blame game‛ and the manipulation of angry emotion became a conspicuous part of the many dozens of television images hauntingly depicting the violence and squalor and vulnerability into which so many New Orleanians were plunged by the catastrophic events around them.

Here is a portion of an interview with Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, conducted by Anderson Cooper of CNN on September 1.

Landrieu had just finished praising the relief efforts of some of her fellow Louisiana politicians, when she was interrupted by Cooper:

Cooper: Senator, I’m sorry . . . for the last four days, I have been seeing dead bodies here in the streets . . . and to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other—I have to tell you, there are people here who are very upset and angry, and when they hear politicians thanking one another, it just, you know, it cuts them the wrong way right now, because there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman has been laying in the street for 48 hours, and there is not enough facilities to get her up. Do you understand that anger?

Landrieu: I have the anger inside of me. Most of the homes in my family have been destroyed. I understand that, and I know all the details, and the President— Cooper: Well, who are you angry at?

28

S P R I N G 2011

One wondered at the time what was stopping Mr. Cooper from at least bringing the woman’s body in off the streets himself. Instead, surrounded by devastation and suffering, the star reporter used the body as a prop, and homed in on what was, to him, the most urgent consideration of all: who are you angry at?

That, indeed, was the question of the hour. Hardly had the rain stopped falling on the unlucky Gulf Coast than the search was on for certifiable villains. The game was in motion, and the very stones and waters cried out for vengeance. In the campaign to score political points, an impressive litany of charges was assembled in record time.

But, as a handful of sober observers knew at the time, the villains were no longer on the scene. The most crucial errors made were made many decades before: in the inadequate construction of the levees and navigational channels, and in the imprudent patterns of development in vulnerable areas, encouraged by well-intentioned Federal policies. All of these added up to a catastrophe many years in the making. But such a complex explanation did not supply a satisfying answer to the crude question, ‚Who are you angry at?‛ There are several points to be made here. The first is an empirical one. The physical setting of New Orleans—subtropical and soggy, lying mostly below sea level, steadily sinking, surrounded by large, powerful, and unpredictable bodies of water, and subject to tropical heat, tropical diseases, and violent tropical storms—is and will always remain challenging in the extreme. It is a comment on the fragility of the place that, as bad as Katrina was, it could easily have been far worse—which means that things far worse will have to be envisioned and planned for if the city is to be fully rebuilt.

New Orleans is a city in which one has always been reminded, at every turn, in ways both banal and profound, of the degree to which existence itself is contingent, and human mastery an illusion. No one living for long in New Orleans can fail to understand this; it is a lesson that the city’s limitations, and particularly its intimate contact with the power and terror of the elements, teaches very well. This is emphatically not the lesson, however, that has been drawn from Katrina, or that undergirds much of the debate in its aftermath.

When ‚someone‛ is always to blame for calamity, it must mean that everything bad happening in the world can ultimately be attributed to the malfeasance of some human being or human agency, and can be fixed by some other human being or agency. We are, or should be, 29

THE CITY

masters of our existence, and we should never tolerate real or perceived lapses in that mastery.

But increases in rational mastery over the physical terms of existence do not necessarily make us happier, or safer—and may even have the opposite effect. The more that some things become mastered, the more intolerable are those remaining areas in which our mastery is not yet complete. This parallels very neatly the observation made by Tocqueville that times of revolutionary upheaval occur when social expectations are rising, and his prediction that the growth of social equality in America would exacerbate, rather than relieve, Americans’ sense of class injury and class resentment.

It can only add to our already keen sense of grievance when we find that the areas eluding our mastery are likely to proliferate in years to come. Storms and earthquakes will continue, as will plagues and epidemics and accidents and other things beyond our control, including the appearance of drug-resistant strains of disease that we thought we had conquered. Even with the finest imaginable Department of Homeland Security, there may be other 9/11 attacks, other scares, poisonings of water systems, subway and bus and ship bombings, and instruments of terror that few of us can now imagine. The illusion of mastery has already made it hard for us to absorb the blow of such events in a mature way, and move beyond them productively. Instead, we spend more and more of our time asking ourselves, ‚Who are we angry at?‛ We must free ourselves from that idea of mastery. We must recognize instead that most political problems involve intractable conflicts between contending parties, conflicts that can sometimes be managed or ameliorated, but only rarely solved; and that most attempts at comprehensive solution bring a whole train of new problems in their wake. In other words, we must rediscover the value of a particular kind of knowledge, inseparable from experience—a virtue called prudence, which weighs the imaginable against the feasible, and guides us toward understanding not of the glories of public policy, but of its limits.

Wilfred McClay is the SunTrust Bank Chair of Exce llence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chatt anooga, where he is also Professor of History.

30

S P R I N G 2011

A Conversation with Elliott Abrams We are honored to have as our guest for this issue’s interview Elliott Abrams, one of the foremost intellectuals in the sphere of foreign policy and currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Let’s begin with this broad question: what are your thoughts regarding America’s place in the world today under President Obama—namely the differences in foreign policy approaches and America’s role in the world under this administration as opposed to the prior one. I think not just of the way we approach the Middle East, but also to nations like India. What are your thoughts on the differences, and how they have matched up with your own expectations?

I think there is a very marked distinction between the Bush view and the Obama view. It’s not unique. This is not the first time successive presidents have had a very different view. I worked for Ronald Reagan and obviously Jimmy Carter, and they had very different views as well. The Bush view really was one of American exceptionalism, both with respect to the nature of the society internally and with respect to America’s role in the world. And that really does not seem to be President Obama’s view. There is the famous remark of his that we, of course, think we’re exceptional, but so do the Belgians, the Dutch, the Greeks.

That’s a very different view. It seems actually to denigrate American exceptionalism, with respect to American society and history. But also, to me it’s redolent of the view that I associate with the democratic party in the 60’s and 70’s where America was viewed not as the last best hope of man on earth, not as the greatest force of peace, but rather as kind of a dangerous place, as a place that was associated 31

THE CITY

with violence and war and oppression. And therefore, a place that needed to be restrained both by its own voters, but also by global institutions such as the UN, which would prevent us from doing things that we oughtn’t to be doing. So it’s really quite a different view.

Now, you mentioned India, and India’s a very good example of the way in which much of the criticism of the Bush Administration approach is a caricature and is erroneous. For example, there was a tremendous outreach to India, and I’m very happy that President Obama’s building on it, and just went and spent several days in India. It’s very important. But he didn’t start it. You might say it started under Clinton and it got a tremendous boost under President Bush, because he did not believe that the United States should run the world, dominate the world. He did believe in multi-lateral diplomacy and he did believe in partnerships, particularly partnerships among democracies, which is something we tried without much success, but we tried to promote. And his feeling was India, as the world’s most populous democracy, was a natural partner for the U.S. in the course of this new century. So, he tried to build on it.

The rest of Southeast Asia is, as you know, a mixed bag.

Indeed. I saw Malaysia’s prime minister speak at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York about a month ago, and he talked about the movement toward, “a movement of the moderates.” In finding moderate Muslim countries to work with, do you think that here are opportunities therein Southeast Asia? Or do you think that a lot of that is just going to be a tough road?

I think there are great opportunities, particularly in Indonesia and Malaysia. These are large and important Muslim majority countries. In this sense, it is unfortunate the president began speaking to the Muslim world in Cairo, because that tended to teach the lesson that the Arab world is really the heart of the Muslim world. It certainly is not, when it comes to population. And it certainly is not when it comes to developing democracies, where Southeast Asia is obviously way out in front. I think we have real opportunities.

Let’s talk geopolitics for a second. These are countries that do not wish to be dominated by China, none of them. And that is true, of course, even if the ones that are not democracies, like Vietnam. We have, in a certain sense, natural allies here, in an effort to counter 32

S P R I N G 2011

balance what maybe a Chinese effort at domination. So you know, lots of opportunities of Southeast Asia.

I think it’s a very good thing that the president has visited North Asia now, because he went to India and then onto Korea. But there is something that ties the Middle East situation and the Southeast Asian or general Asian situation together. And that is, they depend on American leadership. What I find, when I talk to people in the Arab world is that they are asking the same thing the Israelis are asking which is, who is in charge of this region? It’s been the United States since World War II. Is it going to be Iran in the future?

In Asia, the question, of course, is asked by China—and no one is fighting the notion that China will be a great global power. As a matter of fact, we want China to be a responsible global power. The question is whether China’s power is going to be counter balanced by the United States and I certainly hope the answer is yes. And I think that is the question that is being asked now by the president.

Let’s talk about Korea for a moment. What do you think of the American presence within Korea, and what do you think ought to be our proper attitude toward the North going forward?

Well, I need to start by saying, you know, I’m not an Asianist. Because, when I see people who I feel know nothing about the Middle East answering questions about the Middle East I think, ‚Hey, shut up, what do you know about that?‛ That being said: once or twice in the past, we, the United States, have talked about starting President Carter withdrawing forces from Korea and that was a mistake which Congress fortunately prevented him from making. The Koreans too, I think, have mixed views about this. Obviously, many Koreans would like the United States out and many millions of others think of us as critical to their security, particularly in the face of a very strange regimen in the north that seems to be about to under go a transition, to someone who’s a teenager, practically, who is going to run the whole country and just was recently made a three or four star general< on the basis of merit, no doubt, and military acumen.

It comes right after Eagle Scout.

Yes! So we have a role there and the role is to provide a certain degree of stability. In the long run, this is a very difficult situ33

THE CITY

ation because in the long run, we should all be in favor, in theory, if the reuniting of Korea into one democratic country. But I know that if I were South Korea and I would wonder about this, because North Korea is so desperately poor and its population is larger. If you think of the inclusion of Germany, of East Germany to West Germany or the uniting of East and West, the West German population was much larger. And the gap, though it was significant, was nothing like the bizarre gap in the case of Korea, where the Kim family has reduced North Korea to practically starvation and medieval backwardness.

Even if it takes decades, it’s going to be an extremely difficult thing.

You talked about our presence within Korea. America’s presence around the world is going to be something that is likely to be more of an issue within the new Congress. There seem to be so many members who are willing to put defense spending on the gradation of cuts. And I wondered what your thoughts area about that generally and about some of the different pushbacks that exist within both the conservative movements against this new view. Who do you think has the right of it and which direction should we go?

It’s a very interesting question. I was very struck during the 2010 campaigns, at the role that Sarah Palin played on this question. In many of her speeches, to tea party audiences she said, don’t cut the defense budget, cut everything else, but we don’t want to cut the defense budget.

I have no doubt that there is fraud and waste in the Pentagon. It’s inconceivable that there shouldn’t be. It’s a government agency. There are going to be plenty of inefficiencies, but fundamentally, I think that it is a mistake at this juncture to be cutting the defense budget, which is not so large, compared to various times in the past.

I think we missed one terrible, or we missed on great opportunity and it was a terrible mistake. And that is, when the Obama administration started to spend its TARP money, the president was looking for shovel ready projects and it is now clear, at the end of two years of Obama, that he didn’t find too many. And I think the administration has acknowledged this. Well, there were a lot in the Pentagon.

And the administrations, for ideological reasons, did not want to spend the money on defense related matters, and that was a huge mistake, both in terms of the economy because there were shovel

34

S P R I N G 2011

ready projects that would have created employment and in terms of national defense.

This is going to be a very interesting debate within the Republican Party. I don’t see much isolationism, I have to say. I see one or two people, I mean, one associates this with Senator Rand Paul and that’s probably an unfair charge to make against him to say isolationist.

You’d have to define the term and he’s not asking that we stop trading with foreign countries. I agree with the view that we do not have a revenue problem in the federal government, we have a spending problem and the solution to the problem is to stop the amazing amounts of red ink. We are likely to have an inflation problem soon enough.

But it seems to me that if you look at the world that we face, this would be a very inopportune moment to start doing what unfortunately the British have now had to do and dramatically cut back on their global role.

Besides this debate within the Republican Party, there is also a debate that occurs within evangelicals—who obviously make up a significant chunk of the base for both the Tea Party moment and the American center-right—about not just about our role in the world, but our role in the Middle East. What are some of the lessons Christians and evangelicals, in particular, ought to take from what’s happening in the Middle East right now and what our relationship ought to be with Israel going forward?

I was in Israel in October and spoke to a group called the Jewish People Policy Institute which is Israeli, and I’ve been thinking about not just Israel as a country, but about the relationship with Jewish communities around the world. There were people there from all over, from Israel, of course, but from all over the world—Canada, Australia, Europe, Latin America. And I said to them, you know, America really is an exceptional country, particularly if you compare it to the countries of those that you from Europe live in, in many ways, but I’ll give you one way that’s critical for everybody here: we have Christians.

We have a country whose majority religious group is Christians, unlike any country in Europe, with the possible exception of Poland today, I would say, where there are real Christians—in that case, Catholics. So this is a very interesting question. I try to explain to people from other countries that the critical Israel lobby in this coun35

THE CITY

try doesn’t consist of Jews, it consists of Christians, evangelicals primarily.

Look, I think that the United States has a very important role in the Middle East protecting moderate regimes in the Arab world and protecting Israel. And this is a critical moment because of the rise of Iran.

People are saying this is a critical moment, every year, but the rise of Iran actually is, to use technical political science language, “a big deal.” And everybody in the Middle East knows it.

That’s the formal term.

That’s the formal term, yes. Everybody knows it and everybody talks about it constantly. If you ask why the UAE is building such a large and expensive air force, or why the Saudis want this arms deal with us, or why the Israelis want to buy ‚bunker buster bombs.‛ Or why several countries are experimenting with, so far, civilian nuclear power, Iran is the answer. So we have a critical role at this juncture, because Iran is seeking hegemony in the region.

Iran has a Mediterranean boarder because of Hezbollah and Lebanon. Iran has a border with Israel effectively because of Hezbollah and Lebanon. I remember in the Bush administration we had a heavy debate over whether it could possibly be true there would be a relationship developing between Hamas and Iran. And many experts said not possible because Hamas is Sunni and Iran is Shiite. Well, you know, ten years later, it’s obvious that the key foreign support for Hamas comes from Shia Iran. They’ve gotten over their theological disputes at least to this extent.

Israel is quite isolated in the world. And it’s hard to see that getting better in the near future because of the political situation so many European countries where you have a growing alliance between Muslim communities and the hard left and you might even add some on the far right. It’s a combination of Muslim anti-Semitism, hard left Anti-Americanism and anti-Israelism and far right anti Semitism. It’s a witch’s brew, so they are not going to get much help there in the near future and they are going to have to, in Israel to rely largely on the United States and I hope that we prove reliable.

Do you think that the current administration has a proper view of our relationship with Israel or do you think they have made some errors along the way so far?

36

S P R I N G 2011

I think they have made a lot of mistakes. Some of them are made in good faith in an effort to move things forward towards peace. But they are mistakes made out of ignorance. The best example here is the obsession with settlement construction and construction in Jerusalem. I think President Obama and George Mitchell, the envoy, meant to move forward towards peace talks and it was out of ignorance that they became obsessed with the notion of stopping construction of Jerusalem and in the settlements. They put President Abbas of the Palestinian authority in a corner, because once we, the Americans, said that negotiations could not take place until there was a settlement freeze, he really could say no less. He has been pretty candid in public and even more so in private in saying he was cornered by this American demand. So that’s an example of a diplomatic error, let’s call it.

There is a deeper program too. I think that some people in the administration seem to see Israel as a burden and a pain and a bother.

This is true in the U.N. for example, where the administration seems to want to go through four years without ever vetoing anything.

In the Bush administration our feeling was that any time you could veto something in the U.N. Security Council, you had a good day.

You could go home now because things weren’t going to get any better that day, because we were standing up for America. We were standing up for American values. We were telling people who were going to do something terrible, ‚No, you are not going to do this. We are going to use our power to prevent it.‛ And I mean, we didn’t do it every day. I think the Bush administration in eight years had roughly fifteen vetoes, one or two a year on average. It wasn’t as if you were destroying the U.N., but you were making a point. Once you’ve made it clear that you will veto, you are much less likely to have to do so, because in the negotiations over the content of any resolution, you are able to say, ‚look, Washington is going to veto that, you can’t put that phrase in. Work with me on getting language that we can accept.‛ Understand, if the feeling in New York is that President Obama doesn’t want to veto anything, you’ve lost your leverage and you are oddly enough more likely to get either a terrible resolution or to have to veto it in the end.

But this is the impression that at least I get—that Israel is seen as a burden on the United States and I think for American Jews, of whom 37

THE CITY

there are only a few million, but particularly American evangelicals, that’s a foreign notion that Israel should not be seen as an ally, not as a force for good in the region but rather as some kind of burden on the United States.

That’s a deeper policy problem than just making an error in a negotiation, as I think they did on construction. The Cairo speech the President made his first year in office compounded those errors because he seemed to suggest that though we would carry the burden of Israel, it was a burden. And then he made a number of other mistakes in that speech, which will, I’m afraid, go down in history.

What do you think the response of this administration would be to Iran if they take some significant strides forward and do you think that they will be able to handle that situation?

I don’t understand the policy. I understand the effort to get, to negotiate the settlement and to use sanctions to force the regime to get there. That’s a very wise thing to do. President Clinton started trying to do that, President Bush tried to do it.

You have the option of allowing them to get a nuclear weapon and you have the option of bombing Iran, always. What three presidents have now tried to do is to create a third option, a diplomatic option— diplomacy backed by sanctions to create enough pressure on Iran so that the regimen backs away from nuclear weapon.

That’s a wise thing to try to do. We are trying to do that now. We all hope it works because the options are very bad. The mistake the administration has made, the Obama administration has made, I think, is to suggest that should diplomacy fail, the game is over and they can get a nuclear weapon and then we will worry about containment and deterrents.

First of all, from a negotiating point of view, that’s a foolish stance to take. I was really very unhappy when, in 2009 and 2010, Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen on several occasions said it would be catastrophic to strike Iran. I think the message that the military should be delivering is that we have plans and will carry them out. Even if privately they want to tell the president they think it’s catastrophic, don’t say that publicly.

The message to Iran’s regime should be, ‚You are not going to get nuclear weapons. You can invest tens of billions of dollars and suffer from these economic sanctions, but it will be for naught, because in 38

S P R I N G 2011

the end, it’s not going to happen. You are not going to get nuclear weapons.‛ That, it seems to me is your best hope for getting a negotiation.

Now, the administration has been down playing that military option, which I think from a negotiating point of view is foolish. If we ever get into a negotiation, they are so intent on avoiding the military option that I worry that they will accept a bad deal, which will have the effect of ending the sanctions without ending the Iranian nuclear program. And since there will be a deal that presumably the U.N. will bless, it makes it a lot harder on the Israelis to go ahead with the military strike in the absence of an American strike.

I think that we should be willing to carry out a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities—not, I hasten to say, not a war with Iran, not sending American troops to Iran, not a third war like Iraq and Afghanistan—just a military strike, an air strike, one time on the key nodes of their nuclear weapons development system.

President Bush has obviously just released a book on his decisions in terms of various things throughout his life, but also throughout his administration. Do you think that the president’s decisions when it comes to foreign policy will, for the most part, be vindicated by history?

I do. I think the president is right in saying, he doesn’t worry about that a lot, because he won’t be around. You know as he has sometimes put it when he was president—he is reading biographies of George Washington, seeing historians try to come to a fuller understanding of Washington—history takes a while. So, I think he’s right not to worry about it.

I think he was confronted with a great challenge to our country on 9/11 and he took up that challenge. And I think that you will be able to find in the course of history and as people write memoirs, plenty of mistakes, in every administration. Mistakes are made every day including by the president, but the fundamental decisions were right—the fundamental decision that we could not allow this safe haven in Afghanistan for the people who had killed 3,000 Americans.

The fundamental decision about Iraq was right. You cannot possibly see evolution toward a decent stable democratic Middle East with Saddam Hussein’s kingdom in the middle of it invading other countries and developing weapons of mass destruction, and using them.

He had used them against Iran. People forget that the way that we 39

THE CITY

had limited Saddam Hussein at that point was the no fly program and the U.N. sanctions. Both of which were eroding very quickly at that point.

That’s not the only thing the president did in foreign policy. Obviously it’s the most consequential in many ways because of the loss of American lives. But just as an example, the outreach to India—as you mentioned, I think that if we can build on it in the course of the nest two or three or four presidencies, build a real partnership between the words greatest democracy and the world’s most populous democracy. This partnership is going to be critically important for Asia and for democracy in the world. Unfortunately, some things were diverted—for example, the president had wanted to address the immigration issue in relations with Mexico and that really just got put on the back burner after a 9/11.

The president’s support for Israel, which was a key part of his foreign policy, was also right. I still tell people that if you read the president’s speech to the Knesset in 2008, you’ll find it is a great speech in the history of Israel and in the history of Zionism. So there are many facets to this foreign policy, but I think that in the long run, history will be kinder than the left wing professors, and journalists, who are writing the first draft.

Ambassador Bolton has been critical of the apparent slate for the 2012 election saying that there is not enough heft on foreign policy issues, particularly enough understanding of these issues to defend a robust approach to America’s presence in the world, regardless of what you think about that. What do you think that some of these newly elected figures and some of these rising figures on the right ought to be looking at in terms of guidance when it comes to foreign policy, learning both from the good things that the president did and from other sources?

Well, on the Bolton comment, part of the problem is that historically the United States has been better governed and more often governed by former governors than former senators. There’s an obvious reason for that, I think, which is that the role of chief executive of the state and that of chief executive of the country are closer than the role of being a legislator is to that of being president. And I think some of the problems of the Obama administration are a product of the fact that neither he nor his closest advisors had executive experience.

40

S P R I N G 2011

The largest staff he had ever been in charge of before becoming president was, I think, 32 people.

As a senator, yes. But of course, most governors are not foreign policy experts. Governors are busy and that’s not their forte.

So you have this problem and you have to deal with it. And I think you know, the question is really, ‚What do you believe about the world and about America?‛ Senator Obama was no foreign policy expert, but he had a coherent set of beliefs. I happen to disagree with them. I think they are wrong.

But he had them and they are coherent. I think I would say John F. Kennedy had a coherent set of beliefs as a senator too, and his were mostly right. As we look at the potential gubernatorial nominees for the republican nomination for president, obviously ones that people mention.

It’s probably right that they have not spent a lot of time thinking about foreign policy, but I think we’ll find as they present themselves to the nation, that some of them do have a coherent set of views. It isn’t obvious that a guy who is a speaker of the House of Representatives in Florida, would have a coherent set of view, but Marco Rubio does, for personal reasons among others. So I don’t know that it’s true that each of these potential candidates lacks heft and lacks a coherent view, we’ll find out. If they do, then you know, they are going to need to do the kind of thing that George Bush did back in 2002.

And ‘99, which was kind of long term tutorial.

I don’t mean a one week thing, I mean, just over a period of months spending more time on traveling more, and getting more familiar with it. I’m not a politician, but my sense is that the governor might be a good model for Republican nominees because I think that people are going to want somebody who can say, ‚I know how to manage. I am an executive and I balanced a budget. And I can do this.‛ I think the Democratic Party’s approach—we’ve seen some of this in 2010 and I think we’ll see it in 2012—will be to say, ‚things may not be going great, but you can’t overreact by electing these crazy rightwing Republicans.‛ That was an approach used in a number of elections of 2010 and it worked in some places. And I think it’s sensible for the Democrats to take that approach in 2012 and so the question is really, is the Republican ticket likely to be vulnerable to that charge? If the Republican nominee who is quite obviously a moderate managerial type, the 41

THE CITY

answer is going to be no, and that it seems to me makes, creates a problem for the Democrats.

A question about Pakistan. Former president Pervaiz Musharraf is in town today, I think speaking at the Ethics and Public Policy Center as a guest of former Senator Rick Santorum.

Politics make strange bedfellows.

Indeed it does. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about our dealings with leaders around the world who we really maybe forced to work with in situations like we were forced to work with Musharraf. Are there lessons to be gathered about how that was handled and that could be applied to future situations, perhaps elsewhere?

A very interesting question. First, it’s obvious that we have to work with a wide variety of people in the world, some of whom are not democrats, some who are actual scoundrels. I think President Reagan taught us that you can do that without compromising your standards. You just have to speak very candidly.

I have in mind his approach to the Soviet Union. He was very clear about saying, you are going to end up on the ash heap of history and your system is doomed and nevertheless he negotiated with them. If you were in the Gulag, even though you saw Reagan negotiating with the Soviet leaders, or as he put it, ‚the one who lived long enough for him to meet with them,‛ you knew there in the Gulag that Reagan was not going to sell you out. You know that he had certain principles. And that is, I think, is the first thing to say—it is important for a president to keep repeating what we believe in.

This is going to be true if there is a negotiation with Iran. I think President Obama has been remiss after the June 2009 elections in not making very clear and repeatedly clear whose side we are on in Iran, which is that of the Iranian people against the regimen. That’s a first lesson.

A second lesson I think we learned from George W. Bush, which is that personal relations can matter. He tried. He tried to establish personal relations with people as really nasty as Putin and in that case, in the end, failed. But that was Putin’s fault, not Bush’s.

But Bush tried to have good personal relations. I was in the Oval Office very frequently for meetings he had with foreign leaders of phone calls he had with foreign leaders and it mattered that he had 42

S P R I N G 2011

established a relationship of trust with them so he could call either to ask them to do something or to ask them withhold criticism of the US or merely to bat something around and ask for their opinion. He tried that in the case of Putin and after a while, I think he says in the book, realized that Putin was trying to push Russia in a very different direction. But it wasn’t a mistake to try.

I think it is unfortunate that President Obama has not developed, it seems, these kinds of personal relationship with foreign leaders. You can’t develop, or you shouldn’t develop, a personal relationship with Saddam Hussein. But there are a lot of people out there who are—I was going to say imperfect. We are all imperfect. But there are a lot of them who have a very mixed record, as presidents, or kings, or Shaifs, or Prime Ministers.

President Bush was very good at trying to make it clear to them, ‚I’m not against you. Any criticism I offer is really an effort to see how you and I can move things forward.‛ He developed a pretty good relationship with President Mubarak, even as he was calling for democracy in Egypt. I think that’s another critical lesson to learn, but the Reagan lesson is even more critical—that is, you can in fact deal with all sorts of people and systems including enemies, like the Soviets, if you make it clear publicly, as well as privately, what it is that you believe in and what America is going to be aiming for.

I can’t leave out South America. What do you think is going to come out of the situations in Venezuela and out of sort of the shifting natures of things within South America as a whole? Are there opportunities there for moves towards democracy or do you think it’s going to be a rough road.

I have to say the Obama administration has made it more difficult. First, the terrible policy towards Honduras, which seemed to have us backing a Chavez candidate over he candidate the people and the elected institutions of Honduras wanted. Secondly, there has been a kind of diffidence for too long toward Columbia, which is really one of our allies in the region. Whose presidents have been pro American and which is with us and is struggling against drugs.

There was a huge shift back to democracy in the Reagan’s second term. This is when really all the military dictatorships disappeared and one after another. When Reagan came to office, there were hardly any democracies in Latin America. There were civilian govern43

THE CITY

ments say, in Mexico, but it wasn’t a democracy. Beyond Costa Rica, it was just about nothing. By the time Reagan left office, the switches had begun or were consummated everywhere. Not least because of pressure of the United States. So, if you look at Latin America today, it’s not that they’ve gone back to military dictatorship—that has not happened. What has happened is people have lost faith in democracy and free markets, so you have leftist populace governments arising in several places.

I think the problem here is that they’ve lost faith in the free markets without ever trying them. The one place that really did try it was Chile, of course, which is a really fantastic country and which is ahead of us in many ways. Their Social Security system is better than ours. In other countries, like Argentina, they never really tried free markets. They had a kind of crony capitalism, and people vote against that and they are right to have voted against it. It’s not free.

They need a move toward an open economy. Marco Rubio is the person who talks about this best—they need an economy where what you become in life doesn’t depend on what your father was. There is real social mobility and real economic opportunity. They did not really achieve that. They’ve been unable to overcome tremendous ethnic and racial divides between largely white descendants of Spanish and other European settlers, colonial elites, and a largely Indian working class, an underclass of poor people without real economic opportunities. So there is a reaction and the reaction, unfortunately, is not against the economic policy alone—it’s also against democracy.

There are some models here to move ahead. Brazil, interestingly enough, under its most left wing president ever, may provide a model of movement toward a more open economy. Some of the other cases, it seems to me, are going to have a very troubled path towards stable democracy and open markets.

You bring up free markets, and this is an issue that is challenging within the faith community, particularly among youth. We’ve spoken before with American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks regarding their Values & Capitalism program and all their other programs that are trying to offset this. There is certainly been a shift within younger evangelicals away from power of capitalism and the power free markets. What do you think are some of the lessons they ought to be learning when it comes to the power of free markets to improve the plight of the power and the underclass?

44

S P R I N G 2011

I think it is not surprising that younger evangelicals are wrestling with this. It goes back to the ‚two cheers for capitalism‛ issue and the question of the moral content of capitalism, particularly when we see some of the negative excesses that it can produce. And I think you have put your finger on what’s right here—that is that people need to look at the plight of the poor in other systems, under any other system where there is government control of the economy.

Because what you are doing by rejecting that approach is condemning many poor people to a life of poverty. You are closing the escape hatch for millions of people who would have a better life.

A good economic system by itself offers economic opportunity and the escape from poverty that no other system offers. It does not offer you a system by which to order your life. It does not tell you what virtue is. But that’s what God does, that’s what religion does. Young evangelicals should learn that of course our economic system doesn’t answer those ultimate questions for you—no economic system is going to do that! You need to infuse that system with your belief.

I would say the same thing, by the way, about our political system.

The founders did not believe that holding free elections and allowing freedom of speech and press would produce a virtuous people. They believe that a virtuous people could use those institutions to remain free and that people would remain virtuous because of their fear of God, not because of election results.

I would draw a connection here between the political and the economic systems we have. Those systems are the right systems, so long as they are infused by goodness, by virtue, or—to put it the way we used to two hundred years ago—by the fear of God. A God-fearing people will use those institutions to remain prosperous and free.

Elliott Abrams is currently senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relation s. He is the former senior director for democracy and human rights, senior director for the Near East, and deputy n ational security adviser handling Middle East affairs in the George W. Bush administration. He prev iously served as assistant secretary of st ate in the Reagan administration.

He blogs at: http://blogs.cfr.org/abrams/ Benjamin Domenech is Editor in Chief of T H E C I T Y .

45

THE CITY

Ted Bromund

T

he United States is an exceptional nation. Most Americans would not regard that as a controversial statement.

And there is a good reason for that: it is true. The U.S. is the world’s oldest and most stable capitalist liberal democracy, older even than Great Britain, which did not become a mass democracy until the late nineteenth century.

It was the first nation founded in an act of rebellion against a colonial power. It was the first nation founded on the belief that the rights of man are inherent and God-given, and that the powers of the government derive from the consent of the people. It was, therefore, the first nation to recognize that the state must be limited to the powers granted by the people, and to recognize explicitly that the state was founded to secure their rights. It was the first nation to be based on a separation of powers, and on the clear subordination of the military to civilian rule. And it was the first nation to state all of this in a constitution that was publicly debated and democratically accepted.

Other nations—Britain, most notably—share in some of these traditions, and that is not surprising, because the United States was deeply influenced by ideas born in England in the 17th century. But precisely because the U.S. was founded—whereas Britain evolved—the U.S. exemplifies these virtues in their purest form. That is why it is exceptional. And that is a fact that has been recognized by Europeans for centuries.

46

S P R I N G 2011

Many of the great works of American interpretation—from Crevecoeur’s ‚Letters from an American Farmer,‛ to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, to Lord James Bryce’s American Commonwealth, were written by foreigners who accepted that America was exceptional, and wanted to understand why. And hundreds of other eminent Europeans—from Charles Dickens to Charles Dilke—visited the U.S. for the same purpose: to understand a place that was like nothing else in the world.

By and large, foreign conservatives disliked the U.S., while foreign liberals liked it. There was a good reason for that: the U.S. was founded on classical liberal values, and with its acceptance of modernity, its everyday equality of manners, the freedom of movement within it, its mix of immigrants, and the protections and praise it gave to property-holding by all classes, it was, in the terms of the nineteenth century, a profoundly liberal country.

Of course, as European observers realized, the United States was also deeply conservative in its attachment to the order established in 1776 and 1787. But that core of conservatism, the more perceptive among them concluded, was precisely what made it possible for it to sustain its classical liberalism, what prevented it from breaking down as the traditionalist European conservatives hoped it would.

American scholars agreed with the liberal Europeans. Much of American scholarship was devoted, in one way or another, to explaining why the United States was exceptional. The effort reached a peak with Frederick Jackson Turner’s theory of the frontier, but it continued well into the 20th century. From David Potter to Henry Steele Commager to C. Vann Woodward, eminent historians—most of them liberals—wrote books taking issue with Turner’s theory, but not with his belief in exceptionalism. After World War II, indeed, this belief led to the creation of American Studies, an entirely new academic discipline founded on the argument that, now that the U.S. was a world power, we needed to understand ourselves, and explain our unusual ways to others, with greater clarity.

Those ways were, indeed, unusual. Most Americans believe the U.S. is exceptional, but we often forget just how unusual a country this is. The U.S. has a remarkable free speech tradition, which gives tremendous protections to the press and to those accused of libel. It separates church and state in a way that is still rare, even in Europe.

It gives rights to those accused of crimes that are unparalleled in his47

THE CITY

tory, or elsewhere in the world. It has a more open government than any other nation, one that gives citizens unprecedented access to its doings.

And, while like all nations it controls its borders, it has welcomed more immigrants from more places than any other nation in the world. Indeed, the popularity of the U.S. as a destination for immigrants is the ultimate proof that it is, in truth, exceptional. Emigration is the greatest and most democratic election in the world, because it is based on the individual decisions of millions. The U.S. has been winning that great election since it was founded.

In some ways, such as its very liberal abortion laws, the U.S. is exceptional in ways that conservatives dislike. But by and large, conservatives today celebrate American exceptionalism. That is curious, in a way, because so much of what makes the U.S. exceptional is liberal in origin. But that simply goes to make Tocqueville’s point: the U.S. has a liberal tradition and a conservative attachment to it. As Matthew Spalding of The Heritage Foundation put it in a recent essay, America is an exceptional nation, ‚but not because of what it has achieved or accomplished. America is exceptional because, unlike any other nation, it is dedicated to the principles of human liberty, grounded on the truths that all men are created equal and endowed with equal rights.‛

N

ow, wipe all that from your mind. Forget the history, forget Tocqueville, forget generations of scholarship, forget the existence of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, forget the heroes like Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy who testified to it, forget the fact that almost all of us are the children of immigrants, and forget the evidence of your own eyes. In the American academy today, and in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party, the claim that the U.S. is exceptional is viewed with skepticism, or with scorn.

This is a difficult fact for most Americans to accept, or to believe, but for these elites, the word ‘exceptionalism’ is criticism, not praise.

In the academy, where I spent more than twenty years, ‘American exceptionalism’ is treated, at best, as a myth born of self-righteous national chauvinism. At worst, it is a badly-disguised code word for knuckle-dragging reactionaries and closet fascists. Nothing pinpoints you as a conservative in the American academy faster than referring 48

S P R I N G 2011

to American exceptionalism without a sneer, and nothing ingratiates you faster than dismissing anyone who believes in it as a dangerous right-winger and an historical ignoramus.

President Obama was educated in this academy—BA from Columbia University, JD from Harvard Law—so it is no surprise that he shares its dismissive attitude toward ‘American exceptionalism.’

When asked by a reporter in France if he believed in it, his response was characteristic: ‚I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.‛ It is one thing—and it is quite right—for an American president to recognize that other nations have their own patriotisms. Americans are not shocked by this: in fact, they are only shocked when citizens of other countries are not proud of their homelands. But it is quite another thing for an American president to make American exceptionalism into a statement of personal opinion, into something that is as valid, or invalid, as any other opinion.

All nations may be special to their citizens, but the United States, historically, is unique. If the President of the United States cannot bring himself to make this claim, which is both true and a basic part of fulfilling his duty as the leader of the nation, then he has aligned himself with the claim’s opponents, albeit it with the gentler ones.

That is something that no previous president, from either party, has done.

T

hat pattern has carried through in the President’s nominations.

The foremost example is Harold Koh, the former Dean of the Yale Law School , now Legal Adviser to the State Department.

Koh recognizes that the U.S. is an exceptional nation. For him, this is a serious problem, one the American judiciary needs to redress. For example, in a 2003 article ‚On American Exceptionalism,‛ published in the Stanford Law Review, Koh acknowledges that the U.S. affords far greater protection than most countries to speech and the press.

For Koh, this is cause for a measure of concern:

On examination, I do not find this distinctiveness too deeply unsettling to world order. The judicial doctrine of “margin of appreciation,” familiar in European Union law, permits sufficient national 49

THE CITY

variance as to promote tolerance of some measure of this kind of rights distinctiveness.

So, the U.S.’s differences from the rest of the world are not ‚too deeply unsettling‛ and, thanks to EU law, can be tolerated to ‚some measure.‛ What a relief. But how far, exactly, should they be tolerated? In a footnote, Koh gives his answer: the courts should reinterpret the U.S.’s free speech tradition so it does not cause problems abroad:

…in a globalizing world, our exceptional free speech tradition can cause problems abroad, as, for example, may occur when hate speech is disseminated over the Internet. In my view, however, our Supreme Court can moderate these conflicts by applying more consistently the transnationalist approach to judicial interpretation.

And that is not an isolated example. For Koh, all American exceptionalism is bad: the only relevant question is which part of it is the worst. He concludes the most ‚dangerous and destructive‛ aspect of American exceptionalism occurs when ‚the United States actually uses its exceptional power and wealth to promote a double standard.‛ By ‚double standard,‛ Koh does not mean that the U.S. does one thing while encouraging or forcing other nations to do another. Koh criticizes the U.S. for declining to ratify the Kyoto Protocol or the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court, but these are simply examples of the U.S. not ratifying treaties that Koh endorses. Other nations remain free to ratify, or not to do so.

For Koh, ‚double standard‛ simply means that the U.S. is doing something that he dislikes, and something that differs from the policies of other nations. But being different is inherent in the right of self-government, which is fundamental to American exceptionalism, and, indeed, to its sovereignty. Treaties like the Rome Statute, important though they are—and as bad as conservatives correctly believe them to be—are ultimately unimportant compared to the right of self-government that Koh is denigrating. What his essay amounts to is the fact that his policy preferences have won out abroad, but not in the exceptional American political system. He therefore attacks American exceptionalism, and seeks to weaken it, so he can get his way.

It is revealing that, since Koh wrote, and especially since President Obama was elected, interest in American exceptionalism has experi50

S P R I N G 2011

enced a sudden rebirth. That is testimony to its reality, and to its power. In his victory speech on November 2, then Senator-elect Marco Rubio of Florida spoke for many conservatives when he stated that ‚Americans believe with all their hearts<that the United States of America is simply the single greatest nation in all of human history, a place without equal in the history of all mankind.‛ Of course, the left has not taken this resurgence lying down. Michael Kinsley has characterized exceptionalism as ‚the theory that Americans are better than everybody else,‛ while Peter Beinart describes it simply as ‚an anti-government ideology.‛ If the stakes were not so high, the sight of all these eminent liberals condemning exceptionalism, a belief with deep roots in the classical Western liberal tradition and one defended—until recently—by many distinguished liberal historians, would be laughable. The critics know neither their own history, nor that of their country. And worse, they don’t care.

T

he problem that liberal elites today have with American exceptionalism is simple to sum up. Before the mid-1960s, many liberals believed in it. But then 1968 happened, and the New Left took over the academy and the intellectual leadership of the left and of the Democratic Party. The New Left was not rebelling against American conservatism, which in the mid-1960s was still nascent. It was rebelling against American liberalism, and—among much else— against its belief in the basic goodness and exceptionalness of America. Modern American conservatism is, in origin, a rebellion against that rebellion, fortified by the neo-conservatives who split away from American liberalism when they realized it was being taken over by the radicals.

More moderate Democratic leaders—Bill Clinton, preeminently— have resisted the New Left, but the tendencies of the party’s activists and elite are fundamentally opposed to American exceptionalism. It is in their hearts, and they can do no other. For the post-war liberals, the U.S. was liberal and modern. For the New Left, it is Europe that holds that crown: to believe in American exceptionalism is to believe that the U.S. should not be Europeanized.

In short, the attack on American exceptionalism springs from the political preferences of the New Left. And Barack Obama is a man of the New Left. His dismissive treatment of American exceptionalism places him more quickly and accurately than anything else he has 51

THE CITY

said. Bill Clinton was heralded as the first Baby Boomer President, but if the Baby Boomers were the Generation of 1968, that title really belongs to Obama. The realities of governing, as he is painfully discovering, will pull Obama one way, but his New Left instincts—as reflected in his nominations, and his public remarks—pull him the other, in a direction that Truman would have scorned.

These instincts will be—indeed, are being—hailed as the triumph of liberalism, but in reality they are an attack on it, and on the tradition of American exceptionalism. They are equally an assault on the conservative belief that the United States must uphold the source of that exceptionalism, the legacies of 1776 and 1787. For the first time in its history, the United States has a president who has broken with the bipartisan tradition of his predecessors by refusing to state, proudly, that the nation he leads is exceptional.

The President has nothing to gain from refusing to state this, so he must believe it. That is why American exceptionalism is back in the public eye: many Americans are uneasily aware that the movement the President leads rejects it. This recurrence of interest in exceptionalism should be no surprise: the contest between exceptionalism and the New Left has shaped American politics since 1968. If it defines the contest in 2012, that is ground on which conservatives—and liberals faithful to the creed of their ancestors—should be eager to fight.

Ted Bromund is Margaret Thatcher Senior Research Fe llow at The Heritage Foundation.

52

S P R I N G 2011

Paul J. Bonicelli

S

hortly after the rescue of the 33 Chilean miners this past October, Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal heartily proclaimed, ‚It needs to be said. The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.‛ As they learned the details of the story, fans of capitalism took it for granted that he was right, but the reaction from some on the left—an outpouring of criticism from one corner of the public square—was such that you would have thought he had said something outrageous and unprovable.

Perhaps the reaction to Henninger was so strong because he hit a nerve: the left knows that socialism is tired, lacks vision and results only in failure while the free market and entrepreneurialism demonstrate progress and improve well-being. In the midst of the Chilean miners’ crisis, socialist economics was collapsing in Europe and its more modest companion, the statism we are currently enduring in the United States, was being pilloried mercilessly. Therefore, it was just too much to have the Wall Street Journal tout the salvific character of capitalism in the Chilean desert.

Henninger’s claim was based on the fact that all of the vital tools used in the rescue were available because of the existence of capitalism. That is, the capitalist system, by rewarding innovation, hard work and reinvestment of profits, encourages an untold number of minds to create, invest and labor to bring forward products to fulfill all manner of human needs, even those needs not contemplated at 53

THE CITY

the outset. Henninger lists several products used at the collapsed mine that are made by private companies who are, of course, in it for the profit motive: most importantly, the special drill bit developed by the small Pennsylvania company, Center Rock, Inc.; high strength cable from Germany; fiber optic cable from Japan; a cell phone from South Korea’s Samsung that contains its own projector; and some remarkable copper fiber-laced socks that keep down the moisture and thus foot odor and infection while the miners were trapped in their close, hot and humid quarters.

Not one of these companies thought about how their products might one day be used to rescue 33 trapped souls in Chile. But that doesn’t matter. ‚Running in the background,‛ says Henninger, is a system that is continually making progress happen for the sake of every human need—imaginable and unimaginable.

N

ow to the critics, those wounded devotees of socialism who cried foul at Henninger’s thesis. I read some of their opinions and what I found was mostly obfuscation accompanied by bluster. One communist rag, Workers World, actually tried to make a comparison to Hurricane Katrina—blaming capitalism for the poor response because the United States has something called a ‚capitalist government.‛ (And I’ll take the poor response of the federal, state and municipal governments of the United States to Katrina any day over the response of the communist government of the Soviet Union to the Chernobyl disaster.) But most of the objections to Henninger were along the lines of ‚What about the role that X played in the rescue?‛ as in ‚What about the Chinese crane used at the site?‛ Well, what about it? The crane, no matter who made it, does not represent an innovative technological breakthrough that served as a necessary tool to get the men out. That would be like saying that a highway built by the U.S. federal government upon which trucks traveled to deliver food and water to tornado victims is what ‚saved‛ lives. I’m more impressed by those entrepreneurs whose innovations in storing and preserving food and water actually made it possible to save disaster victims from dehydration and starvation. Cranes and highways are important, but let’s be reasonable: this is a point about the nature of innovative technology which is not that hard to grasp.

Another objection: ‚What about the Chilean state-owned copper entity (Codelco) which actually found the miners?‛ First, finding the 54

S P R I N G 2011

miners is not the same as saving them. Government agents as well as private persons have been finding trapped miners for centuries and NOT saving them. Second, the history of Codelco is a mix of public and private activity. While it is true that Codelco is a public entity chaired by the minister of mines, it was formed by the dictator Augusto Pinochet who is famous for having the Friedmanite (University of) ‚Chicago Boys‛ advise and run the economy of his authoritarian yet considerably free market state.

There is a reason Chile’s economy has performed the best in Latin America for decades. In 1990, Chile’s new democratic government made major reforms to the state-owned company. New leadership, which had inherited a lethargic, indebted and unproductive government-run business, made it much more like a private corporation willing to take steps to survive in a competitive global marketplace.

Pay was reduced and tied to gains in productivity, and a new law allowed the company to form partnerships with private firms.

Codelco is not the strongest entity and the debt is still high, but it is hard to argue that it represents a shining example of state socialism.

And finally, there was this objection: ‚What about the role of NASA in ‚advising‛ the Chilean government?‛ True enough, NASA helped keep the men alive, offering medical, psychological and nutritional advice, as well as advice on the size and shape of the capsule fashioned to draw the men out. But none of these advisory inputs was unavailable in the private sector. Since it operates essentially as a hybrid of the public and private sectors, it is hard to argue convincingly that NASA’s role in aiding the miners amounts to the state saving them. Ultimately, the capsule about which NASA provided advice was pulled through a hole drilled by a Pennsylvania company’s high tech drill bit, one not made available by government efforts.

No, it was not the bureaucrats of any government agency or stateowned enterprise that supplied the absolutely necessary innovative products to saves the lives of the miners and bring them back to the surface. Rather, capitalist entrepreneurs did that because they had a habit of making a profit by serving the needs and demands of their customers. The rescue was simply a byproduct of the best economic system man has ever known that rewards human creativity and ingenuity with profits and at the same time manages to enhance human well-being rather nicely. Ideas and efforts that were primarily employed in the search for profits also increased, shall we say, life, 55

THE CITY

liberty and the pursuit of happiness—in the case of the miners, quite literally. Not a bad system at all.

After all, what economic system is more to be preferred than one that can sustain and rescue 33 trapped miners from near certain and horrible death through innovation motivated by profits? Surely it is not a system that can provide no innovation or technological breakthroughs—if there is a socialist technological breakthrough, I would be happy to learn of it. Surely it is not a system that strains to provide for nothing more than the fulfillment of daily needs, a system that piles obligations, waste, and fraud on the backs of future generations, a system which after about two generations will collapse in bankruptcy? Such accusations can be made toward American capitalism, of course—but the difference here is that when directed toward the United States, we are criticizing failings<not intentional attributes!

I

t is important not to miss this profound yet simple point. It contains a lesson I feared had been lost on Americans when they voted for a left-liberal like President Obama in 2008. Henninger’s statement should not be that controversial: there is only capitalism to thank when there is an innovative breakthrough that improves our well-being because the profit motive spurs the most minds and desires for new products and services. Socialism can only be a parasite—or steal technology as in the case of the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, etc. It was especially gratifying to observe the socialist president of Bolivia at the site of the rescue as capitalism saved his countrymen. Providence has a great sense of humor.

So, let us celebrate free market capitalism, an economic system in which flourishes companies like Center Rock, Inc, of Berlin, Pennsylvania, founded by then 26 year-old Brandon Fisher in 1998 who loves the mechanics of oil drilling. He spends his days in the hard labor of the mind and body in search of profits that allow him to service his customers. On his company’s website, he offers a short narrative on their experience in Chile, discussing the innovative elements they deployed in this endeavor of rescue and expressing thanks to God. Let us be thankful for a nation where he is free to do both.

Paul J. Bonicelli is provost of Houston Baptist University and former assistant administrator of USAID. 56

S P R I N G 2011

Erick-Woods Erickson

I

t is not often that I articulate my precise view of the world, but with this opportunity, let me explain it to you. We, as a largely secular society, are on the road to hell. Along the way there are fewer and fewer good intentions, but greater maliciousness in a secular world toward those of us whose worldview is oriented toward Christ, particularly when we engage in political activity.

Some critics may respond by noting that Christians are no longer thrown to the lions, so clearly we are not as bad off as we once were.

But I would argue it is the tyranny of the small things that, over time, accumulate to a much worse place. We may not have Roman Emperors throwing Christians to lions today, but what we do have are Chinese oligarchs throwing Christians in re-education camps, and an abundance of American editorialists praising China for its progress.

Depending on the region of the country, being ‚too Christian‛ or ‚not Christian enough‛ could have an impact on the race. In more and more areas it seems being too Christian, or at least openly professing faith in Christ, is used as an attack on anyone who stands for political office.

In Kentucky, Senator-Elect Rand Paul had on staff a former rock musician who at one time had, for lack of a better term, ‚praised the devil.‛ The musician subsequently made a profession of faith in Christ and changed his ways. Yet he became the subject of scathing attacks. Paul himself suffered attacks from his opponent, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, for not being Christian enough— never mind that Conway fully embraced the secular left’s agenda.

57

THE CITY

In South Carolina, the attacks went in the opposite direction. A group of Christian activists hopped up on self-righteousness attacked South Carolina Governor-Elect and Christian convert, Nikki Haley, for not being Christian enough.

This is the world we live in. It is what it is. A friend once said to me that if you have not been persecuted, you might want to double check your salvation. The good news in all of this is that such mudslinging did not take. The voters rejected these attacks. There are, however, troubling signs on the horizon. And I fully expect that over the next few years, we will see the opponents of believers attempt to drive a wedge between believers and conservatism, seeking to end the current surge of activity from independents and former Republicans called the Tea Party.

Within the Tea Party movement, a small but vocal group of activists is demanding that elected leaders ignore social issues. The press has picked up the chorus, echoed it, and made the group sound larger than it is. Were a pro-life group to insist that small government conservatives only talk about abortion, the press and public would ridicule the pro-life groupâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;yet when the fiscal libertines say the same, the press applauds and expects the public to clap as well.

This is where our political discourse is headed: an alliance of fiscal libertines who have put on their willfully ignorant blinders to the costs of an out of control society and liberals who are back to calling themselves progressives as they disrupt and disintegrate society into their vision of secular utopia.

A

ll, however, is not lost. The Tea Party movement showed itself this past year to be capable of waging intra-party struggles to move candidates to the right. Polling has consistently showed the vast majority of tea party activists are both fiscally conservative and socially conservative, and while they view fiscal issues as predominate, they are not prepared to abandon the defense of marriage and the unborn.

Consider the Club For Growth, a group that only considers the fiscal conservative bona fides of its candidates. Yet it is also as good a barometer on whether a candidate is pro-life or not as organizations like National Right to Life. Club For Growth-backed candidates tend to dislike government sanctioned and government funded killing of children. This bodes well for the future.

58

S P R I N G 2011

Then there is the general public. Surprisingly, we live in a country that has grown more pro-life even as it has grown more secular. In a number of races around the country, unapologetic pro-lifers beat proabortion advocates in swing districts. Eleven of the twelve proabortion candidates targeted by Americans United for Life lost their elections. Fifteen of the twenty pro-abortion candidates targeted by the Susan B. Anthony List lost. The tide favors the cause of life.

A

round the country there remains a sense that the United States has been set apart for something great. The opinion elite continue to argue that the United States is fading and China is rising, that there is nothing exceptional about who we are as a nation. The people continue to disagree, but I believe this view will only win in the long-term if new leaders work to change the course of the country. We face a society collapsing in on itself with fewer nuclear families, an embrace of sin incompatible with social stability, and an increasing reliance on government instead of family and church to meet the needs of the poor, elderly, and unemployed.

This should not surprise us. Society is, over time, on the slow slide down the road to a secular hell. Government is populated by the fallen as a means of limiting the impact of our fallen nature on our fellow man, but it is only a temporary limit. Whether in the form of the amoral secular left or in the violent advance of Islam, the faith and beliefs of the Christian are under constant attack.

Yet I encourage friends who get depressed by this to take heart and be of good cheer. After all, we believe this story is already written, the ending is already known, and the judgment already ensured.

This knowledge ought to compel us in our daily lives and political fights to be happy warriors to the very end—the knowledge of God’s abiding grace. For all the little political fights we are having today, the wins and losses tabulated by the media or the opinion elite, we should be confident and joyful—for we know the larger fight, the battle for our freedom from the tyranny of sin, is already won.

Erick-Woods Erickson is editor of Redstate, a political commentator on CNN, host of a daily show on Atla nta’s WSB Radio, and co-author of Red State Uprising (Regnery).

59

THE CITY

Samuel Gregg

W

hen the financial crisis began spreading chaos throughout the economies of North America and Europe in the last quarter of 2008, sales of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital reportedly soared throughout Western Europe. It’s unlikely this reflected a revival of genuine interest in Communist alternatives to market economies, less than twenty years after totalitarian socialism’s collapse in Eastern Europe. Marxist thought, however, does seem to attract attention whenever those economic systems broadly labeled as ‚capitalist‛ enter periods of significant instability. Thousands of Western intellectuals, for instance, were drawn to the lure of Communism during the Great Depression, despite compelling evidence of the human and economic destruction being wrought by Marx’s heirs inside the Soviet Union.

One of the attractions of Marx’s thought was the notion that everything, be it politics, religion, or literature, could be explained by the dialectics of history—or, more specifically, the workings of economic history. Among other things, this involved observing changes in the means of production and asking who benefited. As a way of thinking, Marxism dovetailed neatly with the spread of philosophical materialism, positivism, determinism, and social Darwinism throughout nineteenth-century Europe.

There was a half-truth to Marx’s deeply economistic outlook. Economic developments can radically reshape social, political, and cultural life. But Marx was wrong insofar as he underestimated the manner in which particular moral convictions can themselves significantly shape—for better or worse—economic institutions and practices.

60

S P R I N G 2011

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, for instance, did not just reflect Smith’s analysis of particular economic transformations occurring in eighteenth-century Britain. Smith’s articulation of an intellectually powerful case against the mercantilism of his age also flowed from his conviction that mercantilist economic systems were not only profoundly inefficient but also deeply unjust. The injustice lay, in Smith’s view, in the manner in which mercantilist institutions (such as guilds) unduly inhibited the spread of entrepreneurship, investment, capital accumulation, and free trade across the globe. Mercantilism, Smith understood, simultaneously condemned large numbers of people to poverty while legally privileging others whose wealth was at least partly derived from their closeness to political power.

The spread of Smith’s ideas and a belief in the values underpinning them facilitated significant developments in economic life throughout nineteenth-century Britain and Europe, sometimes in surprising places. Between 1815 and 1870, for example, the economies of the then fragmented German states moved away from mercantilist, cameralist, and interventionist arrangements towards deregulation and free trade. The initial impetus for economic liberalization came from government officials in Prussia who had read Wealth of Nations and regarded the growth of economic liberty as one way of spreading freedom more generally throughout the German-speaking world.

T

here are also modern instances of similar value commitments helping to drive economic change. The market liberalization agendas of the 1980s symbolized by the Thatcher government in Britain and the Reagan Administration in America were propelled by more than economic necessity. They were also underpinned by the discrediting of neo-Keynesian ideas (which themselves embodied a range of normative beliefs) in the 1970s, as well as a widespread desire (especially evident in ‚Anglo-Saxon‛ countries) to assert the value of liberty over what were considered excessive concerns for economic equality and security.

The centrality of moral principles to economic life becomes apparent when governments attempt to push the economy in directions at odds with a society’s morals and culture. One prominent example of this was the Obama Administration’s healthcare legislation. The widespread opposition of Americans to Obamacare was a source of puzzlement to most Europeans (including many conservative Euro61

THE CITY

peans) who simply could not understand why anyone would object to the state’s assumption of such a central role in the provision of health care.

Many Americans believed that Obama’s recent health care legislation would unreasonably constrict people’s economic choices, incentivize people to take less responsibility for their own lives, facilitate the further bureaucratization of healthcare, and, perhaps most significantly, expand the government’s control of the American economy.

No doubt, there was and remains much worry about the economic inefficiencies associated with any government monopoly. Yet a strong value component was central to all of the above-listed concerns. This may also account for the continuing opposition of a steady majority of Americans to Obamacare—an opposition which played a major role in the Democrat Party’s losses in the 2010 mid-term elections.

But while moral beliefs have an important impact upon economic life, the manner in which they are given institutional expression also matters. This is illustrated by the different ways in which people’s responsibilities to those in need—what might be called the good of solidarity—are given political and economic form.

I

n much of Western Europe, the language of solidarity permeates public discourse to an extent that often surprises Americans. At the same time, it is widely assumed throughout Western Europe that this moral responsibility should be primarily articulated through state action. This helps explain Western Europe’s extensive welfare states. It follows that even minor efforts to reform social welfare programs or reduce the welfare state’s size are often regarded by many Europeans as a heartless assault on the value of solidarity.

Thus the rather modest welfare and labor-market reforms presently being implemented in Spain, Greece and France have sparked considerable moral indignation (and not just from welfare recipients) despite widespread acknowledgment that such reforms are inevitable. Obviously there are many whose negative reaction is partly driven by consciousness that such reforms mean that the days of notvery-demanding jobs for life may be numbered. Nevertheless it’s also true that many Western Europeans genuinely believe the good of solidarity is threatened by efforts to move beyond the present and economically unsustainable status quo, precisely because of the state62

S P R I N G 2011

oriented institutional expression given by Europeans to the surely uncontroversial proposition that we are our brother’s keeper.

While Americans are often regarded as more individualistic than Western Europeans, this perception is partly driven by the different economic and institutional expressions that Americans have often given to the idea of concern for neighbor. This was among one of the distinguishing features of America that struck the French social philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville when he visited the United States between 1831 and 1832. The emergence of social and economic problems, Tocqueville noted, did not elicit demands from Americans for the government to ‚just do something.‛ Indeed, Tocqueville marveled at the relative absence of government from American life and the corresponding vitality of civil society, especially when compared to the state’s all-pervasive presence in his native France.

Tocqueville quickly realized, however, that this ‚absence‛ of the state was not symptomatic of a callous disregard by Americans towards their fellow citizens in need. Though Americans tended, Tocqueville noted, to dress up their assistance to others in the language of enlightened self-interest, he observed that Americans usually expressed the value of helping those in need through the habits and institutions of free and voluntary association. In short, Tocqueville wrote, Americans banded together to try and resolve social and economic problems through voluntary associations. Some of these associations (like churches) had a more-or-less permanent presence in American society. Others lasted only as long as a particular economic or social problem persisted. As a consequence, the same pressures for centralized top-down government-led solutions and all their economic implications that prevailed in France were not present in the young American republic.

I

f the foregoing analysis is substantially correct, then the implications for successful economic reform are twofold. First, reform efforts cannot consist simply of policy adjustments. They also need to be associated with arguments about the ways in which proposed changes express and institutionalize a range of moral axioms.

The reluctance of European political leaders such as President Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister Zapatero of Spain to explain their welfare changes in value terms means they are reduced to articulat63

THE CITY

ing technical arguments which, as valid as they are, simply do not resonate with large numbers of Western Europeans.

The second challenge is for policy-makers and the citizenry as a whole to understand that particular values are better actualized in certain economic and political settings than others. Seeking to realize the principle of solidarity primarily through the welfare state and heavy labor market regulation, for instance, has contributed to a tendency to think that our obligations to those in need are exhausted by paying the taxes that fund welfare programs. It has also facilitated a breakdown in what might be called intergenerational solidarity throughout much of Europe. The desire to guarantee employment security, for example, is one of the main causes of the catastrophic levels of youth unemployment in countries like Greece, Spain, and France.

In the last sentence of the last chapter of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes made the observation that ‚it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.‛ The context of his concluding thought was Keynes’ effort to explain some of the normative concerns underlying his attempt to revolutionize economics as a social science. However one regards Keynes’ policy prescriptions, he certainly understood that it is at our own peril that we downplay the nexus between moral convictions, the institutions in which they are realized, and our economic cultures. Contemporary governments, policy-makers, and citizens would do well to remember this.

Samuel Gregg is Research Director at th e Acton Institute.

He has authored several books including On Ordered Liberty, the prize-winning The Commercial Society , and Wilhelm Ropke’s Political Economy. Portions of this piece originally appeared at The Witherspoon Institute ’s ThePublicDiscourse.com .

64

THE CITY

Paul D. Miller

C

hristopher Nolan’s cinematic opus is not unique mainly for its nonlinear storytelling, plot twists, surprise endings, or mind-bending backdrops. Nolan does excel at these things, but he has ample predecessors. Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) pioneered nonlinear storytelling on the silver screen well before Memento (2000). Plot twists and surprise endings have been a staple of cinema at least since Alfred Hitchcock revealed that Norman Bates’ mother was dead at the end of Psycho (1960). Intellectually challenging backdrops are common to science fiction, one of Nolan’s clear inspirations, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix (1999).

Nolan combines these elements with skill and style, but his most unique contribution to modern cinema is that he almost the only tragedian working in film today. The spinning top in Inception (2010)— an instantly iconic image—sets up the latest in Nolan’s signature surprise endings, all of which herald an unexpected, terrible turn of events. Almost alone among major studio productions, Nolan’s films tell stories of downfall, destruction, and deceit brought about by heroes’ fate, flaws, and failures. His ability to do so and still reach a wide audience and turn a profit is nearly unmatched in modern cinema, and suggests that his films speak to a nascent and inarticulate spiritual hunger and cultural need.

Tragedy is one of the oldest forms of storytelling. It grew in ancient Athens most famously in the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In the millennia since playwrights in nearly every culture have taken up stories of suffering and downfall caused by a noble hero’s flaw, iron laws of fate, or the implacable power of circum66

S P R I N G 2011

stance or gods or both. Aristotle, the first and greatest theorist of tragedy, argued in his Poetics that ‚tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude,‛ specifically of events ‚inspiring fear or pity.‛ The central element in a tragedy is the plot or action: tragedy, for Aristotle, is primarily a sequence of events portrayed in action that lead inexorably downward. Tragedy is not, fundamentally, feelings or soliloquies. A monologue inspiring fear or pity would simply be a poem, not an ‚imitation of an action,‛ and therefore not a tragedy.

A tragic plot is especially effective if it incorporates four elements: necessity, surprise, reversal, and recognition. Aristotle argues that the plot must proceed along a necessary chain of cause and effect, not by chance or randomness. ‚The effect is heightened when, at the same time, [the outcome] follows as cause and effect,‛ because the tragic conclusion could not have been otherwise. A terrible but random event—say, an earthquake—inspires pity but also detachment, while a terrible event resulting from human choices and happenings that followed necessarily from them are terrifying because we can see how it could happen to us. Second, more obviously, surprising events have a greater emotional impact. Third, complex tragedy involves a sudden reversal of the situation (peripeteia). A ‚reversal of the situation is a change by which the action veers round to its opposite.‛ This happens when a character takes an action intending to achieve one outcome (to save another’s life, for example) and instead achieves its opposite (in this case, the other’s death). Finally, complex tragedy includes recognition—‚a change from ignorance to knowledge‛—typically when a character comes to realize a terrible new reality or is made suddenly aware of the reversal.

The best plots contain these elements in conjunction. ‚Recognition, combined with Reversal, will produce either pity or fear; and actions producing these effects are those which, by our definition, Tragedy represents.‛ Tragedy is a story of events that follow human choices and actions, culminating in a surprising change of fortune and recognition of a terrible new reality in a way that inspires fear and pity in the audience. When done right, tragedy ascends to the highest form of poetry and, even if based on historical characters, transcends mere history, because ‚poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.‛ 67

THE CITY

Perhaps because of the fame and influence of the greatest of ancient tragedies—Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex—tragedy is often a story of a noble hero’s downfall. In Sophocles’ masterpiece, Oedipus is King of Thebes. He embodies the ideal of Greek manhood: he is wise, magnanimous, courageous, intelligent, and concerned for the welfare of his people.

It is precisely Oedipus’ virtues that lead to his downfall. When Thebes is stricken by a plague as punishment for an unknown but terrible offense against the gods, Oedipus puts all his intelligence and energy into a selfless effort to find out what has offended the gods so deeply—only to discover it is he himself who had unknowingly murdered his father and married his mother. ‚The hero of the play is thus his own destroyer; he is the detective who tracks down and identifies the criminal—who turns out to be himself,‛ according to Robert Fagles. In the climactic scene of surprise, reversal, and recognition, Oedipus utters a fearsome lament: ‚Dark, horror of darkness—my darkness, drowning, swirling around me crashing wave on wave—unspeakable, irresistible headwind, fatal harbor!‛

T

ragedy is largely absent from contemporary American cinema.

Among the American Film Institute’s list of the top 100 American films of the last century there are few tragedies. The Godfather (1970), in which the final sequence reveals the culmination of Michael Corleone’s gradual downfall from honest citizen to chief Mafioso, might qualify as a tragedy. The element of surprise is lacking, as is recognition (which does not come until the final moments of The Godfather Part III). Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) contained elements of tragedy, including surprise and recognition, as did Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). There are other prominent films that inspire fear and pity, including The Deer Hunter (1978), Platoon (1986), and Goodfellas (1990), but lack elements of a complex tragic plot and are more straightforward dramas.

The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), a boundless resource of data on films, categorizes films by reference to 25 different genres, including animation, musical, sport, and biography: tragedy is not one of them. The website’s list of the Top 250 films of all time is also light on tragedies. Among the handful of films with tragic elements listed on IMDB but missing from AFI are David Fincher’s ni68

S P R I N G 2011

hilistic Se7en (1995), Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (1980), and Cool Hand Luke (1967).

The scarcity of tragedy in cinema is understandable. Tragedy requires a higher level of emotional sophistication than action or comedy. Film is probably more populist and commercial than ancient Greek stage work. Literally hundreds of millions of people, almost all without any education in art criticism or art history, from diverse cultures across the world, watch films every year. Crafting an emotionally sophisticated story that resonates with a broad, diverse, uneducated audience is a major challenge. Films are driven by the relentless logic of the box-office to seek a story and characters that appeal to the greatest number of ticket-buyers and it is simply harder to make a tragedy with broad appeal than most other genres. Stories of suffering, loss, fate, and character can pack an enormous emotional punch, but for that reason put many viewers off because of the large emotional investment they are asked to make in the viewing.

By contrast, Ancient Athenians grew up with both a more cohesive worldview and smaller, more intimate social situations. They were accustomed to certain expectations of what counted as art. It’s no stretch to consider that common Athenians were thus probably more sophisticated viewers of staged narrative than today’s moviegoers.

Y

et Christopher Nolan makes tragedies. Five of his six studio films can be counted as tragedies or containing strong tragic elements—Batman Begins (2005) being the lone exception.

Each features a noble protagonist who embodies some elements of courage, intelligence, and good will (a warning—spoilers follow if you have not yet seen these films and wish to be surprised). Police Detective Will Dormer in Insomnia (2002) is a generally good cop who catches bad guys (and only falsified evidence to convict a real criminal who would otherwise have escaped). Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight (2008) is a concerned citizen waging a secret vigilante war against organized crime to retake his city for law and order. Alfred Borden in The Prestige (2006) is a magician and showman devoted to his craft who wants to stage the greatest magic trick of all time.

Leonard in Memento (2000) is a widower seeking to avenge his wife’s murder. Cobb in Inception (2010) wants to clear his name and earn his way back home to be with his children.

69

THE CITY

Each protagonist experiences a downfall of one sort or another, usually mixed with some elements of surprise, reversal, and recognition. Nolan tweaks the rules of the genre, however: he engineers his plots so that the surprise and the recognition are primarily the audience’s, only secondarily (if at all) the protagonist’s. Borden is so intent on keeping his magic trick secret that it leads to the execution of his twin brother, whose existence is only revealed in the film’s closing minutes. Dormer is forced to confess that he accidentally killed his partner and covered up the evidence before he himself is ultimately killed. Batman experiences several downfalls: he fails to hand off his crime-fighting mantle to the new District Attorney, Harvey Dent, because Dent himself turns out to be another villain; he compromises his ideals by spying on the entire city to catch the Joker; and, finally, in the film’s surprise reversal, he accepts responsibility for Dent’s crimes to preserve Dent’s reputation and abruptly flees, a hunted outlaw.

Nolan’s two most brilliant tragic endings are in his first and his latest films. In Inception, after two hours and twenty-seven minutes of breathless and multilayered action, as we feel the end of the film closing in upon us, Nolan slowly pans to a spinning top, a single wordless shot accented by a deafening tympanic score, giving us an abrupt and simultaneous surprise, reversal, and recognition—and then he rolls the credits. The audience realizes in the final seconds of the film, that it is possible Cobb may (or may not) be caught in a wakeless dream, unable to tell the difference between dreams and reality, inventing ever-expanding explanations for himself to justify his willful refusal to wake up. If this is the case, Cobb’s downfall was complete before the film ever started, but the audience only wakes up to the fact at its conclusion.

As brilliant and captivating as Inception’s ending was, Nolan’s masterpiece of tragic endings is Memento. Leonard murders a stranger in cold blood and simply pretends he has exacted vengeance. What makes the ending profoundly and unsettlingly shocking for the viewer is the knowledge of Leonard’s mental condition. Leonard has anterograde amnesia and cannot form new memories. He tires of his quest for vengeance, so he chooses to lie to himself. He murders one of his antagonists and records for himself that he has found and killed his wife’s murderer. As his true memory of the event fades, he no longer remembers his deliberate lie and takes comfort from the 70

S P R I N G 2011

forged record of his vengeance. His noble quest has degenerated into murder and self-deceit on purpose.

Uniquely, there is a reverse recognition, a passing from knowledge to ignorance: Leonard is self-aware at the moment he commits murder, but forgets shortly thereafter. The audience, however, experiences a moment of awful and shocking recognition as we realize Leonard’s willful and deliberate crime.

Yet Nolan does not just make tragedies. He makes money. His six studio films have collectively grossed nearly $2.5 billion. The Dark Knight (2008) was the fourth film in history to make more than $1 billion at the global box office and remains the seventh-highest grossing film of all time, and Nolan’s four major releases prior to Dark Knight averaged a respectable $158 million globally. On average his films make four times as much as they cost, a good bet for the studios. Memento (2000) made close to an eight hundred percent profit for its studio on its tiny $5 million budget, and has become a cult classic since its release.

The critics are equally warm to him. He has a lifetime average rating of 75 percent across all six of his major releases on Metacritic and 87 percent on RottenTomatoes, websites that collect film critics’ reviews and calculate a percentage of favorable ratings out of the total.

Three of his films have cracked ninety percent on RottenTomatoes.

Five of them are on IMDB’s Top 250 (including, as of this writing, Inception at #8 and The Dark Knight at #10). He averages 3.5 stars out of 4 from Roger Ebert, including four-star reviews for both Batman films and Inception. He won the American Film Institute’s award for Screenwriter of the Year for Memento (which also received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations). He has been nominated for scores of other honors, including two nominations for Best Director by the Directors Guild of America (for Memento and The Dark Knight).

Inception garnered eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Original Screenplay for Nolan, and four Golden Globes, including Best Director.

Critics and the box office rarely agree, and rarer still is consistent agreement between the connoisseurs of high art and the consumers of pop culture on so many works by a single auteur. Yet they agree on Nolan. How does he do it? And what does his success mean?

71

THE CITY

T

he success of Nolan’s films speaks to an inchoate thirst in the movie-going public for what we might call real stories. Real stories are ones that reflect true things about life, human nature, and the world we live in. Most films depict cardboard caricatures, not human beings, and take place in a fantasy world where good always triumphs. That Nolan’s films make money and win praise shows that movie-goers sense something true in them.

Specifically, they sense the truths of tragedy. Tragic art is witness to the truth that there is unavoidable evil in the world. Bad things happen, bad things that we sometimes bring on ourselves, bad things that sometimes do not resolve into a happy ending. In this life, tragedy is sometimes not just a very real possibility, but a daily reality.

Romantic comedies, action and adventure films, family and animated films—any film with a happy ending—avoid this truth because in those films the good guys always win. Some films, like Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), portray the darker and harder parts of life, but by ending happily teach that any evil can be overcome and any difficulty is ultimately temporary.

Tragedy presents the opposite view. The success of Nolan’s films suggests people feel in their bones that reality may not have a happy ending. Sometimes there are no good guys. Sometimes evil triumphs.

In the end, we’re all dead.

Yet there’s more here than just morbidity or depression. In Biblical language, tragedy preaches the doctrines of original sin, total depravity, and the corruption of creation. Thematically, tragedy is the Ecclesiastes of narrative genres. It is the artistic corpus that says ‚I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me.

All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind,‛ (Ecclesiastes 2:17), which would have served well as Dormer’s last words in Insomnia. It says ‚In the place of judgment—wickedness was there, in the place of justice—wickedness was there,‛ (3:16), which is Bruce Wayne’s unrequited lament about Gotham City. It says: ‚I saw the tears of the oppressed—and they have no comforter; power was on the side of their oppressors—and they have no comforter. And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive. But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun,‛ (4:1-3), which may be the viewers response upon witnessing Cobb’s awful fate. Tragedy is also the Jeremiah of art: ‚The heart is deceitful above all things and 72

S P R I N G 2011

beyond cure. Who can understand it?‛ That verse would serve as a good epitaph for Memento.

Tragedy reflects true things about the corruption of this fallen world and the depravity of the humans who live in it. Tragedy derives its power and even its popularity from the fact that people hunger for the truth, and tragedy speaks at least one true thing.

That does not sanctify tragedy. Just because the genre can serve these ends does not mean every individual tragic composition does.

More importantly, it is not clear that we should dwell overmuch on the corruption of this world, even if it is true. Ecclesiastes is only one of 66 books that God put into his Bible. In another, he explicitly commands us ‚whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things,‛ (Philippians 4:8). We live in a corrupt and fallen world in which much evil happens, and God pointedly did not command us to ‚think about such things,‛ but rather their opposites.

So should Christians enjoy tragedy? Is the frisson we feel watching Nolan’s sudden tragic endings edifying? Augustine gives us some guidance. In his Confessions, he famously agonized over his love for the theater. ‚I loved to feel sad and went looking for something to feel sad about,‛ he wrote, and so ‚I was carried away too by plays on the stage.‛ But he saw how strange it was to take such pleasure in tragic happenings. ‚Why is it, I wonder, that people want to feel sad at miserable and tragic happenings which they certainly would not like to suffer themselves?...What a wretched sort of madness!‛ He speculates that it is because watching suffering allows the spectator to feel compassion, which is a virtue that we rightly take pleasure in.

I would add that watching tragedy, especially the moment of recognition, is a vicarious experience of confession, of recognizing and naming evil in ourselves. And Aristotle argued that tragedy culminated in catharsis, the purgation of fear and pity from our souls. Tragedy can, it seems, edify.

Augustine might have used that as an excuse to bless tragedy: tragedy is a tool for sanctification because it helps us practice compassion, evoke confession, and purge fear. But Augustine is not that naïve. ‚There can be no real compassion for fictions on the stage,‛ he argued, because it does not demand that we take any real action or make any sacrifice, which is also why it cannot evoke real confession.

73

THE CITY

And it is flatly wicked to love tragedy for the sake of the cathartic pleasure we get from our compassionate response: the truly compassionate man desires that no tragedy occur in the first place.

Augustine begrudgingly concluded that ‚Some sorrow, therefore, may be approved of, but none loved,‛ that we may enjoy tragedy but within bounds. Art can educate, but, as Plato knew, it can also poison. We may be edified by tragedy because it reflects true things about this world, the one marred by The Fall. But it does not reflect true things about the world ultimately considered.

Life is not, in the end, a tragedy. It often feels that way now. But God has promised that in the end all wrongs will be put to right.

Tragedy depends for its power on the victory of injustice, but Christ defeats all injustice in the end. Revelation 19 depicts Christ the Conquering King astride a white horse waging war with justice, armed with a sword coming out his mouth with which to strike down the nations, dressed with a robe dripped in blood, followed by the armies of heaven, defeating all evil. Two chapters later, in the new heaven and the new earth, God will ‚wipe every tear from their eyes.

There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.‛ The good guys win in the end. Pain, suffering, and evil are not the most profound truths of life. Tragedy is only a true art form for this world, not for the next. The universe is actually a comedy.

N

olan has enriched contemporary cinema with a spiritual sensibility absent from most other films. But it is not necessarily a Christian spirituality. It is closer to a pagan one. He would find much in common with the Romans’ view of fortuna and the Greeks’ of fate. His works deserve the same critical, wary appreciation as those of the great pagans of the West like Virgil, Boccaccio, Goethe, the Brontes, or Ingmar Bergman. That is no mean company to keep, but it is not the company of Augustine, Dante, Milton, or Jane Austen.

It would be fascinating to see Nolan take on two different film projects. First, Nolan should try to film one of the classic tragedies, like Oedipus Rex or King Lear. Stripped of special effects, science fiction, or convoluted plot gimmicks, Nolan would be forced to zero in on the plot and characters that give tragedy its heft. Some scenes in his films can feel rushed, and he relies overmuch on musical cues to keep pac74

S P R I N G 2011

ing during moments of character development and dialogue. Like the conventions of a fugue or a symphony, Oedipus or Lear would force Nolan to work within the tight restraints of his medium and concentrate the energies of his frenetic and sometimes diffused filmmaking.

Second, Nolan should try to tell a truer story than a tragedy. He should try to tell the story of the ultimate triumph of justice. Nolan has the right vehicle available: The Dark Knight Rises is set for a 2012 release. By the conventions of film trilogies, this must be the story of the hero’s final triumph. The Dark Knight was the story of the hero as suffering servant. The Dark Knight Rises must be about the hero as conquering king. This is the hardest story-arc to pull off in cinema, in part because it is almost impossible to avoid the overtly Christian overtones and to overcome audiences’ ingrained distrust of the heromessiah. Arguably Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King (2003) is the only recent film to successfully tell this story (of course, it made $1 billion and won the Oscar for Best Picture).

Nolan is clearly drawn to stories of darkness and disappointment.

Marshaling his considerable filmmaking skills to tell a profoundly different story, one that ends with hope and light, will show if there is any greater breadth or depth to Nolan’s vision of human life and meaning. Let us hope there is.

Paul D. Miller is assistant professor of international security studies at the National Defense University.

Previously, he served as director for Afghanistan on the National Security Council staff and a political analyst in the U.S. intelligence community. Dr. Miller watches too many movies and plans a second ca reer in screenwriting in order to justify it.

75

THE CITY

Julie Ponzi Somewhere More Holy: A Bewildered Father, Stu mbling Husband, Reluctant Handyman, and Prodigal Son, by Tony Woodlief. Zondervan, 2010.

I

f powers of observation were sufficient equipment for admittance into the Kingdom of Heaven, Tony Woodlief could trade his in for the fast pass, a pocketful of e-tickets, and a season pass without blackout dates. When you add to these a capacity for moving and thoughtful commentary on those observations, compounded with a talent for noting the charming and delightful, I suppose he also should be the grand marshal of the afternoon parade. But as his recent book, Somewhere More Holy: A Bewildered Father, Stumbling Husband, Reluctant Handyman, and Prodigal Son, demonstrates, these gifts of wit, charm, and even wisdom do not in themselves prepare a person for the real and unimaginable tragedy of living in this world.

To be human is to be limited. We by ourselves cannot know everything that we think we knowâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;at least not in that fullest sense of knowing, where to know is to do. No matter what our talents or our intelligence, the tension between knowing good and doing good is a burden we all must bear. All the more frustrating is the fact that recognition of this tension does not make the burden any less difficult to carry. The hill is steep; the cross is heavy; and there will be every temptation to drop it along the way.

Woodliefâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s particular temptations have been and are steeped in grief. Blossoming into faith together with his wife, they had to bust through a ground that was untilled or unfertilized in their own up76

S P R I N G 2011

bringings. They took pride in their spiritual accomplishments and great joy in the gift of a darling and bubbly little daughter who seemed to be a seal of their commitment to Christ and to each other.

Tragically, their daughter took ill with an incurable form of brain cancer at the tender age of three. As their precious daughter lay dying, they discovered they were expecting another child. Joy was overshadowed by grief and pain, impossible and desperate worry which eventually turned into a burning and abiding anger and bitterness. It seemed a cruel joke to be called upon to welcome a new child into the world so soon after having to bury another.

Yet Woodlief describes his attempts to grasp hold of his proud belief, in the beginning, that he could do it all ... alone. He could bury his daughter. He could care for his growing family and his griefstricken wife. He alone could manage the demands of his job, the yearning in his heart for the expression of his talent, his grief, his anger and his faltering faith. He took to heart the one word piece of advice shared with him by another man who had lost a child: Endure. But in this proud form of endurance, he found that he closed his heart to God. Being unwilling to share the burden of his cross, he dropped it. He could not endureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;at least not alone.

A

s the tragedy of life tempts us ever to turn away from the divine, the necessities of life have a way of calling us back to our duty. We may want to indulge in our self-pity, but we find that we must eat and tend to crying and hungry and needy children. Mechanically perhaps, we do this duty. But even in a kind of rote and unfeeling performance, we can find ordinary duty pointing us to what is our earthly glimpse of the extraordinary. In these moments, we see what could be if only our restless hearts and minds possessed the calmness of spirit and the confidence in our faith that would allow us to listen and to so observe. Yet, for Woodlief, a home once sprinkled in pixie dust and bejeweled by the beauty of a little daughter became saturated in the bawdy boisterousness of four busy boys! The contrasts are, at once, cutting, compelling, and comical.

Woodliefâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s earthly (and sometimes earthy) powers of observation come to him like the sirens of God. Woodlief uses a particularly engaging and delightful mechanism for describing his clumsy and reluctant journey back to his dropped cross: He takes us on a virtual tour of his home. Every roomâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;like 77

THE CITY

every part of our souls—has a purpose that is rooted partly in this world and partly in the divine. Thus we are treated to chapters with titles like ‚Every Day a Baptism: the bathroom.‛ Woodlief accentuates the difference between divine purpose and the earthly mechanisms that drive us to it. In emphasizing our humility, Woodlief reveals his particular challenge—a challenge common to all those blessed with great powers of reason and observation. Man cannot make the mistake of imagining that such gifts are merited or earned.

While it is true that they can be developed, that is only our duty to the Giver of these gifts. If we do not also search for the divine purpose in these gifts, we will likely find ourselves humbled by them.

Observation and reason are capable of nourishing us and pointing us toward truth that transcends the mere and sometimes ugly facts of life. But if we ignore these mere and sometimes ugly facts, or forget the limits of our powers, we will discover that these great gifts are just as prone to defecation and rutting. We are not gods. And when we forget that, we are little better than beasts.

Woodlief’s boys—in their innocence and in their sinfulness—have a way of bringing him to good, as in balanced, humor which is the necessary condition for absorbing both the tragedy and the beauty of life that forms its essential truth. This is not to say that these boys never put him in an ill humor—they are, after all, boys! But even ill humor forms part of what constitutes a healthy sense of humor. This amounts to a kind of wisdom in knowing that ‚this, too, shall pass.‛ The highs and the lows of life all pass. The enduring question which must ever be in our hearts is: ‚What abides?‛ As long as we are in this world, Woodlief learns, the answer to that question will remain complicated. Love will abide; but we have to nurture it. Truth will abide; but we must humble ourselves enough to be satisfied in the ongoing and never-ending search for it. Beauty will abide; but it is sometimes disguised in the base or the banal. Wisdom will abide; but it will not sit comfortably alone in our cranium. Wisdom, like Heaven, will beckon to us through our hearts. Both require great faith and great work if we hope ever to find them—but the effort and the God whose gift to us was this cross, abides.

Julie Ponzi is an Adjunct Fellow of the As hbrook Center for Public Affairs and the Claremont Institute. She is a regular contributor to Ashbrook ’s blog, No Left Turns.

78

S P R I N G 2011

Paul Cella Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterre volutionary, by Richard Reinsch. ISI Books, 2010.

W

hat does a scarred and haunted hero of the Cold War, whose great story is adorned with such mid20th century antiquities as the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, the pumpkin papers, and The New Masses, have to teach us about our crisis today? More than one might think; and it is a solid merit of Richard Reinschâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s short study Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary (ISI Books) to suggest the many ways in which Chambers still speaks to us with relevance and even urgency.

Despite the ruin and discredit of that system against which his story is told, his teaching endures.

That Chambers was a hero can no longer be doubted. Only a handful of brassbound Leftists remain who deny the guilt of his chief adversary Alger Hiss; and every year, it seems, brings new revelations about how deeply penetrated the infrastructure of mid-century liberalism was by the treachery of the Communist enterprise. We can now add I.F. Stone and Howard Zinn to the ever-growing deanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s list of disgraced leftists, whose sympathy for Soviet Communism enjoined them to active disloyalty.

More than any other writer, Chambers has left us with a record of the searing despair that worked to contaminate the minds of men in the exhausted West: how out of that despair emerged an extraordinary strength of character in the service of evil. No first-time reader of his autobiography Witness can come away from the book un79

THE CITY

changed by the power of his narrative, its spiritual content not less than its political content.

Chambers was the greatest of the ex-Communists; and his literary life was a redemption song. Out of that black despair, he became a militant for the cause of godless materialism, moved by the force of implacable History; out of love, he came to the Cross, and became a witness against the Power that had formerly enthralled him. Many felt the momentary exhilaration of tasting the inebriant of Revolution, then recoiled on account of some instinctual prudence; few fell so deeply under its spell as Chambers; and almost no one returned from that depth, repudiated its blackness, stood so courageously light, and then went on to write so profoundly and with such beauty in witness of what he had learned. He served as a witness against the approaching Dark Age augured by the terrible marching discipline of those who proclaimed Man as the measure of all things. ‚And discipline is not only, to this great secular faith, what discipline is to an army. It is also what piety is to a church. To a Communist, a deliberate breach of discipline is an act of blasphemy.‛

R

einsch’s book is a thoughtful probe of Chambers’ thought and work. In five searching chapters he attempts to convey the character of Chambers’ witness, what it meant for American conservatives in the context of the struggle against Communism, and what it means for us today.

Reinsch begins by pointing sharply to the ‚indifference or hostility‛ with which even some conservatives hold Chambers. This is a bold point to begin with. It carries the ring of a challenge. The implication can only be that such indifference or hostility is blameworthy.

And indeed, what Reinsch calls the ‚official version‛ of the fall of Communism diminishes the spiritual aspect of that victory, which was precisely the aspect that most concerned Chambers.

The official version’s incipient materialism renders Chambers’ act of witness and self-sacrifice largely one of antiquated interest. The man who saw the Cold War as a contest between two great faiths— Communism or Freedom, God or Man—is now singularly reduced to an informant.

The spiritual content of this business, which is where Chambers’ courage really shines, is evacuated. Everything becomes a matter of 80

S P R I N G 2011

economics. Marxian historical determinism sneaks in the back door.

It is convenient for such a line of argument to treat Communism’s fall as an inevitable working out of history. ‚The Cold War is over,‛ Reinsch summarizes, ‚and impersonal materialist forces earned us the victory.‛ Thus sanitized, his teaching quietly shuffled aside, Chambers becomes a somewhat pitiful creature, sitting there before the HUAC, paranoid and humbled; when all he had to do, really, was wait around and see that Capitalism would triumph. Here we have in hand Reinsch’s most interesting contribution in this book. He has given us a Chambers who is truly relevant.

Reinsch does not beat the reader over the head with this argument, which is to his credit; but there is a definite push or emphasis that the careful reader will discern. Reinsch’s Chambers is above all a prophet of how, even in apparent victory, the West may fail in its true struggle by emulating Communism on every point. Yes, Communism fell, but the victors never stood by their victory and proclaimed these doctrines ruined and discarded. The poor fools embraced half of them.

I

n the official version, the historical inevitability of Communism’s fall is repurposed and magnified. The agency of men like Chambers—the men who put their lives on the line in the war of the two faiths—is radically diminished. The sheer materialist success of Capitalism is exaggerated. Communism could not have triumphed; the very laws of the universe insured its downfall.

Reinsch poses the pregnant question: Might not this narrative of inevitability be a pretty self-serving account of things? Are there not good and even pressing reasons to revisit Chambers’ argument that the West was becoming more Communist every day? Was not ‚the West’s weakness in the face of international Communist aggression ... the consequence of its affinity to the philosophical suppositions guiding the Communist juggernaut‛? The book also impels the reader to recall that resistance to Communism was not inspired by any abstract statement on future prosperity, according to some proposition of economic science, but grew out of the living image of God in man, revolting against what was wicked and inhuman.

In Reinsch’s interpretation of Chambers, the precise character of Communism, on a philosophical level, is narrowed into a brilliant phrase: ‚salvation by technique.‛ Technique is a human artifice, but 81

THE CITY

under the searing reductionism of a purely materialist view, technique rapidly crowds out everything that is human, above all the human labor behind all achievement.

The importance of productive human labor in Chambers’ mature thought is very high indeed. Behind the power of that searching mind was an insight as old as Saint Benedict: that to labor is to pray.

In this context the reader ought to recall that Benedict was, historically speaking, a towering genius of human economy. His system provided the means of wealth preservation by which a whole world would be secured and passed on through a Dark Age. St. Benedict’s Rule was a remarkable achievement in humane economics. If the restless modern world with its rigidly materialistic science of economics cannot comprehend these facts, so much the worse for the modern world.

The economy of prayer and contemplation and hard work: it was this system that produced the full flower of the Latin West in the mediaeval cathedrals and the verse of Dante and the philosophy of Aquinas. The Benedictine Rule is a discipline, a pattern of work and rest suitable to the integral man. The Communist’s technique may well inspire discipline and sacrifice; but its reductionism leaves man a pitiful creature, divorced from his spiritual nature and vainly working to emulate the precision and predictability of a machine.

Chambers’ profound worry was that all this brute materialism and reductionism would conquer by means of the Communist enterprise.

He was wrong in that baleful judgment. But he was not wrong in fearing that the resistance to Communist would corrupt the West by forcing it to absorb and embrace much of Communist doctrine (thus, his famous antipathy for Ayn Rand and his strong critique of Austrian economics). As Reinsch puts it, ‚Self-interest becomes despotic when it is no longer governed by the higher and nobler obligations of love, sacrifice, and the numerous loyalties that exist in a humane society.‛ A wholly materialist opposition to Communism would erect its own version of the ‚vast, impersonal force and order, a system without sacrificial love or mercy, the person realized in a state of masterful sovereignty over self and others not similarly clever or acquisitive.‛ In this light, Chambers’ essay on St. Benedict in Clare Boothe Luce’s excellent collection Saints for Now (still available through Ignatius Press) stands as the most concise statement of his teaching. In it, 82

S P R I N G 2011

Chambers speaks of ‚three great alienations of the spirit ... *which+ can be seen at their work of dissolution among ourselves, and are perhaps among the little noticed reasons why men turn to Communism.‛ He identifies these as ‚the alienation of the spirit of man from traditional authority; his alienation from the idea of traditional order; and a crippling alienation that he feels at the point where civilization has deprived him of the joy of simple productive labor.‛ There is much to learn from that essay, and all of Chambers’ writings. Here is a man who, despite his earthy participation in the 20th century, still instructs us (if we let him) in the 21st. We whose sudden privation is in many ways a result of our abstraction of wealth from human things, we who profess salvation by technique, can profit much by Chambers’ instruction.

The older image of prosperity derived not from technique, not from man’s rationalism encompassing all, but from man’s creative and disciplined work with his mind and hands in concert. That older image where labor is also prayer is the very image that Whittaker Chambers set before the 20th century Western World as it appeared ready to succumb to Communism; and it is an image that this great man still holds before us today.

Reinsch’s book is a fine study that will challenge and inform. But I am sure that he will not begrudge me saying that we should all also go to the source and take our instruction from this hero, patriot and teacher of mankind.

Paul Cella is the editor of the blog What’s Wrong With the World. His writing has appeared in The New Atlantis, The American Conservative , Touchstone, The Dallas Morning News and other publications. He lives wi th his family in Georgia.

83

THE CITY

Andrew Walker Defending Constantine : The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom , by Peter J. Leithart , Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2010.

I

n my junior year of college, I was infused with historical enlightenment: One man, Emperor Constantine, had destroyed Christianity. Thus, I entered briefly into the evangelical Left, convinced that Constantine’s establishment Christianity signaled the funeral dirge of authentic Christianity. In order to be a genuinely authentic and historically Christian, I was convinced, I had to adopt an amalgam of anti-imperial and Anabaptist sentiment.

What I failed to recognize was that the interpretation I had been given was little more than an eloquent, Christianized postulate of Howard Zinn. I had become an unwitting convert to a version of Christianity that shared more in common with Noam Chomsky than John Calvin. Thankfully, Peter Leithart’s latest tome puts this interpretation to rest.

In what proves to be one of the most provocative titles of 2010, Leithart’s Defending Constantine is a trenchant and judicious rebuttal of the Constantinian thesis and, by default, an obstruction against the prevailing wind of Yoderian methodology and social ethics. Constantinianism, a mainstay of Yoder, Greg Boyd, and an increasingly hostile evangelical Left, is defined as the ‚wedding of power and piety‛ due to Constantine’s imperial mandates and resulting in the Church assuming a dominant role in society and the Christianization of the empire. According to this view, R.R. Reno states, ‚Christian truth becomes innocuous and weightless.‛ 84

S P R I N G 2011

In opposition to this caricature, Leithart places Constantine in his own context, removing the anachronistic expectations projected upon him today. The result is a sweeping portrayal of a man adorned by the trappings of imperial politics, yet decisively pragmatic in his understanding of Christianity and its benefits for Empire. Leithart does not stop there. To the resounding skepticism of his opponents, he purports to uphold Constantine as a model of Christian political practice due to the sweeping legal reforms he enacted and the resulting benefits evident during and after his reign.

Constantine’s aforementioned pragmatism, however, need not mean abandonment of sincerity. His understanding of Christianity was one of cultic proportion, meaning that harnessing the blessing of the Triune God was a qualitative good for the body politic. Seen this way, Constantine’s vested interest in protecting the orthodoxy of the Church was not political maneuvering, but theologically motivated effort with extenuating imperial benefits. Gone is the notion of Constantine as ecclesial and doctrinal ombudsman, and here to stay is a Constantine expressing an altruistic concern for imperial life according to Christian dogma.

Indeed, during his reign, drastic measures were taken to reverse the barbarism of gladiatorial games and strengthen the rights of women and to introduce legislation that upheld the importance of marriage and ensured the rights of the weak. In all of these measures, however, Leithart insists there remains scant evidence of a ‚deliberate program of Christianization‛ of Roman law. As Leithart posits, Rome’s ethos became Christian by effect, rather than intent.

Defending Constantine is an exercise in biography, but it is primarily a theological biography, and not entirely of Constantine either, but of the manner in which Rome’s theological shift signaled a development in the rise of civility. In Leithart’s estimation, Constantine, contrary to popular argument, did not coercively force Christianity upon the Roman Empire; rather, through a series of reforms and the cultural prevalence of Christianity, prevailing pagan dogmas lost influence in the face of a growing Christian polity.

Moreover, and perhaps more persuasively, Constantine provided an opening through which to bring civility into one of Western Civilization’s founding empires. Through Constantine, according to Leithart, Rome was ‚de-sacrificed.‛ As he states, ‚Rome was baptized into a world without animal sacrifice and officially recognized 85

THE CITY

the true sacrificial city, the one community that does offer a foretaste of the final kingdom." Here, Leithart’s thesis becomes a modest apologia for Christendom and its effects. By ending the empire’s sacrificial practices in an attempt to pacify the gods, ‚he *Constantine+ began to end Rome as he knew it, for he initiated the end of Rome’s sacrificial lifeblood and established that Rome’s life now depended on its adherence to another civic center, the church.‛

I

n Leithart’s view, John Howard Yoder bears the burden of chief culprit for popularizing Constantinianism, and, as a result, becomes Leithart’s foremost interlocutor. At issue is Yoder’s theological and historical method, which Leithart finds devastatingly insufficient. In misreading the fourth century, Yoder builds upon a false foundation from which he scourges the entirety of Christian history. Unraveling Yoder’s missives, Leithart contends that unanimous positions relating to a whole range of issues, especially Christian participation in war, are inconclusive. Thus, as far as invectives go, Leithart finds Yoder’s historical claims ‚sometimes questionable, sometimes oversimplified to the point of being misleading, sometimes one-sided, sometimes simply wrong.‛ For his part, Leithart’s book is impeccably researched, erudite, and theologically deep, with an excellent synthesis of Constantinian scholarship. The biography of Constantine contained therein is exhaustive along with a detailed foray into Roman history. Yet, the book is not designed to cast Constantine into an infallible myth.

Weighing the historical claims, Leithart depicts Constantine as imperfect—even at times hasty and malicious—but nonetheless as noble and a ‚sincere if somewhat simple‛ Christian.

Interested readers will find particular intrigue in Leithart’s understanding of Constantine’s ominous ‚By this, Conquer‛ experience at the Milvian Bridge. As Leithart notes, this particular incident drives much of the controversy that remains today:

Over the centuries, this has been the "Constantinian question," and is still one aspect of the riddle of the fourth century: What, if anything, happened to Constantine on the night before the battle of Milvian Bridge? Did he become a half-committee polytheist?

Was he a syncretistic monothesit, trying to split his loyalties between the Christian God and Sol the god of the sun? Was he a 86

S P R I N G 2011

cynical politician ready to jump on whatever horse would carry him forward? Did he have any "subjective religious experience"?

In Leithart’s assembled evidence toward answering this question, we find not only a newly interpreted Constantine but a demythologized Constantine, one equipped for helping us rethink our postChristendom context. With caricatures swept away and Constantine’s own faith galvanized, hardened defenders of Yoder will surely wrestle with Leithart’s claims for years to come. Leithart also provides an accessible potrait of Constantine as a flawed, but capable leader coming to grips with a rising and dominant Christian class. As such, this important book is not only significant in advancing our historical understanding of Constantine, but it also serves as an excellent contribution in the developing field of political theology.

Andrew Walker is a recent graduate of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He currently works in public policy and will soon begin further graduate studies in p olitical science at The University of Louisville. He is also a regular contributor to MereOrth odoxy.

87

THE CITY

Louis Markos God as Author: A Biblical Approach to Narrative ,

by Gene C. Fant, Jr. Broadman & Holman, 2010 .

C

hristian academics who yearn to unite faith and reason in their lives, their classrooms, and their scholarship owe a great debt to C. S. Lewis—a debt to which scores of professors have attested. Still, there is one aspect of Lewis the academic that has not received the attention or the appreciation it deserves. In the midst of an overly-specialized, overly-compartmentalized academy, Lewis had the courage to be a generalist, to cross disciplines, and to reach out to the public at large.

Lewis’s decision both to forge interdisciplinary connections and to write in layman terms did not put him in well with his colleagues at Oxford. Even so close a friend as J. R. R. Tolkien was known to scold Lewis for writing popular books on theology when he was neither a clergyman nor carried a degree in theology.

Despite resistance from his colleagues, however, Lewis remained undaunted. In addition to writing scholarly but accessible works of literary theory and aesthetic history (many of which remain classics in their field), Lewis wrote—and more often than not excelled—in such diverse genres as apologetics and philosophy, science fiction and fantasy, children’s literature and poetry, Christian allegory and spiritual autobiography, and fictional letters and devotional meditations. And no matter the genre or the subject matter, he undergirded 88

S P R I N G 2011

all his work with a Christian worldview that was not only theologically orthodox but which paid homage to the sacred Christian narrative of Creation, Fall, Redemption and Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection.

The back cover of Gene Fant’s God as Author identifies the genre of the book as ‚RELIGION/Biblical Studies/Exegesis & Hermeneutics,‛ but it is just as much, if not more, a book of literary criticism and narrative theory. Although Fant holds an M.Div. in biblical languages from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, he is also a Professor of English at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee who holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance English literature from the University of Southern Mississippi. In his book, Fant not only draws on both his biblical knowledge and training as an English professor, but fuses the two into a single stream of analysis and insight. The one is not subordinated to the other; to the contrary, both are allowed to work synergistically to provide essential insights regarding God’s divine narrative and how the best human narratives reflect and embody that divine story. And what’s more, Fant does this in a language that nonspecialists can understand and wrestle with.

B

efore stating his full thesis, Fant spends two chapters preparing the ground. He reminds us that the division made in nearly all of our schools and universities (whether secular or Christian) between fact and fiction, science and story, truth and beauty, the rational and the aesthetic is an artificial one, and one that only dates back 300 years to the Enlightenment. We are story-telling animals, and we possess an essential, as opposed to cultural, yearning to find beauty and truth in the stories we tell.

In many cases the truth we seek is only accessible through the beauty. ‚Fiction is not ‘false,’‛ argues Fant, ‚fiction is imaginative.‛ In fact, it is precisely the imaginative nature of fiction (Fant prefers to substitute ‚story‛ or ‚narrative‛ for ‚fiction‛ to help avoid falling into the false dichotomy of fact/fiction) that provides it with its unique highway to truth. Stories are not anti-fact; rather, they are ‚arranged in a way to appeal to the imagination, to bypass the purely rational part of our minds, and to appeal to something deeper.‛ Fant further reminds us that biblical hermeneutics and literary theory are closely allied. The Bible itself demands to be read both literally and allegorically. In a long tradition that stretches from Paul to 89

THE CITY

Augustine to Dante, Christians have approached the Old Testament typologically—that is to say, they have discovered in Old Testament stories and characters (the near sacrifice of Isaac, the exodus from Egyptian bondage) not only a literal/historical level of meaning but a more symbolic level of meaning that points ahead to Christ and the New Testament (the crucifixion of the Son of God, Christian salvation from bondage to sin).

Secular critics who search for symbols and for second levels of meaning in literary works are engaged in an exercise that is profoundly biblical in scope and that reveals the strong debt that literary theorists owe (whether consciously or not) to biblical hermeneutics.

Likewise, interpreters of the scriptures who use literary techniques to open up biblical narratives are not thereby attacking biblical inspiration or inerrancy—though, admittedly, there are those who misuse literary techniques to mount their own personal, accountabilityevading attack on the authority of the Bible. They are merely employing analytical tools for what they were originally intended—to unpack and reveal the complexity of God’s plan as it has been worked out in human history.

Finally, Fant reminds us of something that should be obvious: that God is an author. He is not just the author (via the inspiration of the Holy Spirit) of the Bible, but of the whole human story from Adam to the Second Coming. Like a human author, God stands outside the space-time limitations of his creation and can therefore see the end of the story in its beginning. Further, he has the ability, like the human author of a novel, not only to ‚rearrange events, add new events, *and+ add new characters,‛ but to ‚step into the story to intervene in its action.‛ The reason for this is that man-as-author is a reflection of God-as-author, and not, as the modern academy would have us believe, vice versa.

Since the Enlightenment, the arts have come increasingly to be viewed merely as a form of self-expression. Yet, throughout much of the preceding millennia, the human author was linked more closely to the divine author. Creativity was not an end-in-itself but an imitation (mimesis in Greek) of higher, often metaphysical truths. The bards of the past ‚tapped into a divine source of insight‛; they were ‚conduits, not creators.‛ As such, they ‚held a kind of extended divine authority over their stories, an authority that the audience respected gravely.‛ 90

S P R I N G 2011

These three insights—story does not mean falsehood; the necessary connection of biblical hermeneutics and literary theory; man-asauthor is a mimesis of God-as-author—all serve as prologue to what is truly original about Fant’s book: his working out of what he terms the ‚Restoration Narrative.‛ Fant states this narrative in the form of a series of parallel triads that embody in miniature the full biblical (and human) story: ‚perfection, imperfection, and restoration; innocence, experience, and acceptance; peace, conflict, and resolution; and stability, instability, and restoration.‛ Fant shows that this universal story pattern runs through every level of our natural and human world, appearing in both the Book of the Law (the Bible, special revelation) and the Book of Nature (general revelation). With great ingenuity and insight, Fant even detects this pattern in plate tectonics, homeostasis, and musical harmony.

T

he point, however, at which his book takes on truly epic proportions is when Fant factors in the plot triangle that Gustav Freytag adapted from Aristotle’s Poetics. According to Freytag’s Pyramid, classic narrative structure involves exposition followed by rising action (the left slope of the pyramid) that leads up to a tension-filled climax (the apex of the pyramid) and then gives way to falling action (the right slope of the pyramid) and resolution (the dénouement, or ‚untying‛ of the narrative knot).

This structure lurks behind all ‚journeys of experience,‛ the subcategories of which include pilgrimages, quests, and exiles. In such journeys—often referred to as Coming of Age Experiences—an inexperienced, naïve hero leaves a state of innocence, certainty, and lack of tension and embarks on a path that leads ‚him toward a new understanding of the world around him.‛ This new understanding brings with it wisdom and experience, but it also brings tension and ‚throws the protagonist’s life out of balance.‛ In the end, some type of resolution is generally reached, but that resolution does not manifest itself as a simple return to innocence. To suffer one’s way through what narrative theorists call a rite of passage, to experience a spiritual or emotional or intellectual epiphany is, to borrow a phrase from Yeats, to be ‚changed, changed utterly.‛ Whether the story is that of Oedipus or Abraham, Gilgamesh or Job, Star Wars or Genesis, this basic plot pattern, or archetype, is the same.

And the basic human need to hear and be part of that story is also the 91

THE CITY

same. Fant effectively illustrates the essential and persistent nature of this need by making reference to two books whose Christian authors have struggled hard to convey the gospel to young postmoderns in search of a narrative by which to live their lives: Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz and John Eldredge’s Epic. Fant is generous in his praise of Miller and Eldredge and of their sincere and noble desire to reach the growing number of neo-pagans in our midst, but he also does not shy away from a central weakness in their books. Though both authors successfully discern the archetypal pattern, they too often speak as if the story were primarily our story. ‚The Restoration Narrative,‛ explains Fant, ‚is not our story, for if it were, it would be weak, indeed, and quickly become irrelevant. Instead, it is God’s timeless self-revelation, His reaching out across time and dimension to seek after the restoration of the broken relationship he has with His creation. He is the hermeneutical key; humanity is not.‛ Meta-narrative is inescapable and Fant’s analysis of the Restoration Narrative in works across time and culture reflects this fact. It shows us that there is ‚an underlying story or metaphor that cuts broadly across many stories, unifying them and centralizing their symbolic meaning under the auspices of a single Story and the accompanying metaphor of God as Author.‛ Academia, in its embrace of a radical egalitarianism that would collapse all genres, all distinctions, and all truth claims, has jettisoned the meta-narrative as a relic of medieval superstition and romantic wish-fulfillment. And yet, Fant reminds us, the critics of meta-narrative have not disproved its existence; they have merely acted as if it did not exist. (I myself would link this to the Academy’s refusal to acknowledge any evidence of intelligent design in nature, preferring rather to assert that all that exist are natural, material forces and mechanical, impersonal processes.)

The great storytellers, and we, their audience, know better in our hearts. Eldredge is fond of quoting that moment in The Lord of the Rings when Sam asks Frodo what kind of story they’ve fallen into; for Eldredge knows, as does Fant, that that is a question we all must ask: that we are all hardwired to ask.

Fant’s working out of the Restoration Narrative marks the central and crowning achievement of his book, and he does have some difficulty sustaining interest in the second half. Still, he manages to keep his reader reading by sprinkling his closing chapters with some fine 92

S P R I N G 2011

close analyses of classic narratives from a number of different genres and traditions and by offering sage advice to Christian writers.

T

he book, however, has one persistently irksome flaw: its incessant use of that ugliest and most offensive of modern jargon words, ‚humankind.‛ My gut instincts as a writer tell me that the fault for this lies not with Fant, but with his editor or publisher.

The repeated use of ‚humankind‛ as a neutered euphemism for ‚mankind‛ has marred many a book, but it is particularly destructive here. Fant fights boldly and well for the truth of the meta-narrative against egalitarian-minded critics who would collapse all stories into the same textual stew ... and then undermines his own struggle by allowing his prose to be neutered and anaesthetized by the same egalitarian worldview.

Fant is clearly an essentialist, and yet he allows his book to participate in a kind of linguistic censorship whose true roots lie not in some kind of vague Christian charity towards female readers who might feel ‚excluded‛ by the words ‚man‛ and ‚mankind,‛ but in the non-negotiable Marxist-feminist dogma that asserts that gender distinctions (and, indeed, all distinctions) are not essential, Godgiven traits but products of material, social-economic-political forces over which we have no control.

Consider this sample sentence on the primal imbalance caused by the Fall: ‚This imbalance has echoed throughout the universe, creating a demand for restoration, in nature, between persons, and, most importantly, between God and humankind.‛ Had God as Author been published fifteen years ago, the sentence would have been written thus: ‚This imbalance has echoed throughout the universe, creating a demand for restoration between man and nature, man and man, and, most importantly, God and man.‛ Sadly, the substitution of ‚persons‛ and ‚humankind‛ for ‚man‛ (made not for linguistic but political reasons) does more than merely ‚uglify‛ the sentence. ‚Man‛ allows us to see that there is a direct parallel between the collective experience of fallen mankind and the isolated experience of each individual man. The would-be dynamic and dramatic image of a man who also embodies the struggles of mankind is turned to genderneutral, anti-humanistic mush by the substitution of ‚persons‛ and ‚humankind.‛ As a result, the story, the drama, and the heroism 93

THE CITY

grow hazy and dim. Unfortunately, there are some two dozen more instances of such neutering in God as Author.

Fantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s publisher is Broadman & Holman, a fine evangelical press with a reputation for defending orthodox Christianity (I myself had the privilege, in 2003, of publishing a book with B&H on C. S. Lewis), and yet, along with many other fine evangelical presses, B&H has allowed many of its finest books to be ventriloquized by an agenda whose origin is strongly opposed to the very orthodoxy they defend.

In this, there is a lesson, too. We ought to be mindful that it will do us no good to save our stories if, along the way, we abandon the only language that can properly express them.

Louis Markos (www.Loumarkos.com), Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist Univers ity, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities . His two newest books are Apologetics for the 21st Century (Crossway) and Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis (Biblica).

94

S P R I N G 2011

Hunter Baker

I

n the wake of the 2010 election, politicians, political consultants, lobbyists, reporters, media analysts, and academics across the land are reviewing election results. They are trying to decipher the message sent by the American electorate. The Republicans won their largest victory in the House of Representatives in many decades and dominated state government elections, too. While it is true they didn’t reach the heights hoped for in the Senate, they need only remember that a year or so ago common wisdom dictated that it would be a bad year for the GOP in the upper chamber. They were defending lots of seats, while the Democrats had the momentum. 2012 actually sets up significantly better for the Republicans in the Senate.

Why did the tectonic shift happen? Why this sudden tsunami of support to a party that had become somewhat hapless? We could as easily ask why the Democrats took over the Congress in 2006?

The answer, I think, has to do with a particular kind of American conservativism. Not neo-conservativism. Not John McCain-style ‚National Greatness‛ conservatism. No, the answer goes back to the nascent conservative movement growing up with William F. Buckley in the 1960’s. Here it is: Don’t immanentize the eschaton.

I know. Some of you just sprayed coffee across the table at the sheer impenetrability of it. Though the phrase comes from the equally mysterious writings of Eric Voegelin, students in Buckley’s Young Americans for Freedom wore the expression as a slogan on buttons!

Fortunately, the meaning is simple. Don’t try to bring heaven to earth. It is an anti-utopian statement. It means that we cannot achieve 95

THE CITY

the same things as are hoped for in the after-life because we are limited by our own fallen nature and by the means available to us.

Thus, in 2006 the American public sent a message to the Republicans and to the Bush administration. Their message was that we didn’t sign on for a seemingly permanent occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and that it may be time to recognize limits in how much an outsider nation can change a culture through military supervision.

Now, again, in 2010 we have an electorate quite sagely refusing to believe that a huge, new entitlement plan designed to deliver health care to all will actually reduce our expenditures. Instead, they fear that the administration has tried to make its dreams come true at a time when the most sober pragmatism is needed. We narrowly avoided the wreck of our entire financial system, which was caused in part because we refused to accept some of the stingy old horse sense about the importance of down payments and good credit scores. Americans fear that we are living in a house of cards. They want to shore up the foundation rather than adding ten more stories to a wobbly structure.

Our president was elected on rhetoric of hope and change, but he learned Tuesday that voters insist those things must ever be moderated by prudence and wisdom.

I

n a recent ‚Review‛ section containing a variety of lifestyle content, the Wall Street Journal chose to give front page real estate to a short essay by Erica Jong, the author and pioneer of a certain feminist sexual frankness. The piece in question was an attack on attachment parenting (which has features such as babies sleeping in the bed with mother and father) and environmentalism (of the type which would urge the use of cloth diapers). Jong’s critique is broad and encompasses more than advertised. For example, at one point she expresses her frustration with Gisele Bundchen’s declaration that all women should breastfeed.

Of course Jong is upset. She is from a generation that eagerly embraced things like bottle-feeding and formula so as to gain a degree of freedom from the immediate needs of the infant. The important thing, from the ideological perspective, was that a child should never stand in the way of the aspirations of the mother.

96

S P R I N G 2011

Her attitude is summed up nicely here:

Women feel not only that they must be ever-present for their children but also that they must breast-feed, make their own baby food, and eschew disposable diapers. It’s a prison for mothers, and it represents as much of a backlash against women’s freedom as the right-to-life movement (italics mine).

Jong repeats the tired old libel that the real reason for the existence of the right-to-life movement is that some people want to keep women down, keep them penned up in a kitchen or chained to a vacuum cleaner. It could never be that such people have some greater concern for, I don’t know, the right of an unborn child not to be arbitrarily killed. Nah. The type of feminism on display is one which believes completely in doing what comes naturally when it comes to sex, but not with regard to reproduction or the nurture of children. To the extent that people such as Angelina Jolie or Gisele Bundchen (both singled out for criticism by Jong) represent a backlash against such callous attitudes, I say rage on.

R

ecently, I was in a book discussion with some friends and colleagues. The topic was Martin Luther’s Bondage of the Will. As you may be able to discern from the title, there is much in the book about free will (or the lack, thereof) and God’s sovereignty.

Now, I tend not to take a side in the controversy and prefer instead to embrace the mystery. But after listening to some pretty heavy Calvinistic discourse, I ventured forth that Paul’s speech to the Athenians doesn’t make a lot of sense to me if free will really has nothing to do with it. Why, if the free will is essentially irrelevant, does Paul tell the men of Athens what God is like and then confirm his case by noting that God furnished evidence by raising Jesus from the dead?

What happened next is the reason for this post. One of the men in the room listened to what I had to say and then remarked that he never really had liked ‚evidential apologetics.‛ I responded that evidence appears to be pretty important if you look at the passage I’d cited. He again insisted that he didn’t care much for ‚evidential apologetics‛ and we left it at that. My guess would be that he didn’t care 97

THE CITY

much for an argument that someone should follow Christ because of evidence because the logic runs against a hard election interpretation of scripture.

The disdain for evidential apologetics bothered me because I think it shows a lack of appreciation for the uniqueness of the Christian faith. Muslims, for example, follow without any kind of evidence.

Their faith is based on assertion. So, too, are other faiths which rely on the assurance of some person, now long dead, that a revelation has been given which must be followed. To the extent that Christians express a lack of interest in ‚evidential apologetics‛ it seems to me that they are engaging their faith much as the Muslims do theirs.

As he addressed the men of Athens, Paul thought it important not merely to describe the attributes of God, but also to point to an event in real space and time as evidence that he was not just another bloviator claiming to know the truth. Evidence is at the core of Christianity. Reason and revelation are not the same thing, but they stand closer together in the Christian faith than in any other.

I

t was a pleasure to read Jeremy Lott’s most recent biography, William F. Buckley, a biography for Thomas Nelson’s Christian Encounters series. Lott brings attention to some underappreciated territory in studying how the late Bill Buckley was more or less a prophet, and detailing how Buckley’s faith influenced his life and his politics.

The book is full of fascinating anecdotes. Only nine pages in, the reader is treated to the following quote by John F. Kennedy in response to a Harvard speaker who crowed that the school had never graduated either an Alger Hiss or a McCarthy. JFK roared, ‚How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with the name of a traitor!‛ Whatever happened to the Kennedys?

The book is a quick read and is absolutely packed with interesting information about WFB. I say that as a person who has been reading Buckley and reading about him for many years. Lott’s book (titled William F. Buckley) gets past the half dozen or so anecdotes we’ve all heard and shares lots of great stuff about Buckley as a thinker and controversialist.

98

S P R I N G 2011

Lott compares Buckley’s charges made in God and Man at Yale with the recent experiences of a Yale student. Perhaps unsurprisingly, but humorously, the recent student utterly vindicates young Buckley’s concerns about his alma mater.

We also get a great moment in which Buckley protested Kruschev’s visit to America by renting a hall and giving a rousing speech. He told the crowd not to despair because of the moral resources Americans had that the Soviets didn’t and added that the Soviet leader, ‚is not aware that the gates of hell shall not prevail against us ... In the end we will bury him.‛ And we learn that WFB could well have become the senator for New York instead of his brother, Jim, who served one term. After Robert Kennedy was shot, Buckley decided to stand down in favor of Jim. What might that chamber have been like with the most eloquent and cutting Buckley on the floor?

The book is highly satisfying and extremely well done. I am impressed that an evangelical publishing company has offered the best biography since WFB’s death. Of course, we all await the authorized volume someday to come from Sam Tanenhaus, who was so successful in his treatment of Whittaker Chambers’ life.

I

rene Rosenberg recently passed away. She was a longtime member of the University of Houston Law Center and a lion-hearted liberal. Irene and her husband Yale were two of the brightest lights at the law school.

While I disagreed with the two of them about many things in law and politics, I learned a great deal from them. Both Orthodox Jews, they were intellectual powerhouses with probing, critical minds capable of wonderful acts of analysis. When Yale died several years ago, I wrote her to express my appreciation for him. She wrote back with great warmth and affection. I still have that letter, and it fills me with happiness to look at it and to think that it meant something to her that I wrote after his death.

Irene was emotionally transparent and very blunt. I can remember her asking a girl if a particular piercing was painful. The girl was taken aback. I was nearby and was greatly amused.

99

THE CITY

At one point, Irene figured out that I was a pretty religious person, like she and Yale were—except Christian. She once told me she felt sorry that my faith lacked the detailed ritual and observance of her Orthodox Judaism. The remark wasn’t meant offensively, nor did I take it that way. When Yale taught Jewish law, I took the course enthusiastically. He confided that conservative Christians tended to be his best students in the class because of their interest in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Irene was sensitive to students, but she argued hard for her views. I had the chance to talk to her about them on many occasions offering my conservative challenges. At one point, she confided that she sometimes thought all political and legal discourse might be a screen for what’s really in our guts.

If her intuition was true, I can say this much: Her guts were made of solid gold. She was an orthodox Jewish humanist in the best sense of those words.

A

s I read the paper and ate my lunch at an Italian restaurant near campus recently, I became aware of a conversation occurring a few tables away directly in front of me. The participants were two middle-aged parents and their young adult son who was probably a college student.

Though I was focused on my paper, their talk was not a quiet one and I could hear much of it. It seemed apparent the parents were trying to urge their son to be conscientious about attending class, to keep up with the readings, to get a reasonable night’s sleep on a regular basis ... things like that. They were very earnest. There was little doubt of their care for their child’s future and their desire that he not squander his chance in the rare time of life called the college years.

They didn’t appear to be getting very far with him. Rather than respond directly to their points, he brought up semi-irrelevant tangents and employed some silly defenses. For example, I think he claimed an attempt to go to bed early one night actually ruined his sleep patterns or something of the sort.

As I left, they continued their discussion—the parents pressing with their advice for the good of their nearly mature child-man. The 100

S P R I N G 2011

son trying to run out the clock on the lunch, not realizing the value of his parents’ advice.

I still remember the night my father decided I needed a talk like the one I’d just witnessed. It happened when I was a sophomore in college. Thank God for preparing my heart to listen. And thanks to him for a father who risked the usually invincible ignorance of his son to tell me what I needed to hear.

M

y students and I just reached the part of the semester in political theory where we cover Luther’s On Secular Authority. In that book, he brilliantly addresses the Sermon on the Mount, insisting that Christians must observe it.

But how, you might say? If we constantly turn the cheek, evil men will prey upon the whole earth. Not so—it is for this reason that God has ordained the state, says Luther. I am especially taken with this passage:

[T]he kingdom of the world is nothing else than the servant of God’s wrath upon the wicked, and is a real precursor of hell and everlasting death. It should not be merciful, but strict, severe, and wrathful in the fulfillment of its work and duty. Its tool is not a wreath of roses or a flower of love, but a naked sword; and a sword is a symbol of wrath, severity, and punishment.

As I read it, I can’t help but recall Dirty Harry wondering aloud before a notorious criminal whether he’d fired six times or only five.

Or perhaps better yet, I think of Wyatt Earp in the film Tombstone provided with a marshall’s badge and declaring, ‚Tell ‘em I’m coming, and hell’s coming with me!‛ Why do we like these films? Perhaps it is because we recognize there is something wrong with a state that ignores its primary function—the restraint and punishment of those who do evil.

I

recently moved to Jackson, Tennessee for my job with Union University. Prior to living here, my son attended public school in a suburb of Houston. His school was perfectly diverse, a rainbow of colors and ethnicities. Now, he and my daughter both attend a 101

THE CITY

public school in Jackson. He is in third grade. She is in kindergarten.

It is also very diverse.

In the evenings at dinner, we always ask the children to tell us about their day. Two days ago, something struck me about the way they talk about the kids at school. They never mention race. Grace has talked about a couple of little girls ‚who we have to help learn English,‛ but neither she nor her brother ever talk about ‚black‛ kids or ‚hispanics‛ or anything of the sort. If pressed for a description of a child, they will sometimes say something like, ‚She has dark skin and black hair,‛ or ‚He has light skin and blonde hair,‛ but they never convey any sense of ‚us‛ or ‚them‛ in their description.

It makes me wonder if we were to stop talking about it all the time in politics and in the academy, would we finally enter the post-racial period we’ve been hoping for?

Y

ou know, I’m looking at the two most recent transfers of power in Communist countries—from Fidel to his brother Raul Castro and from Kim Jong Il to his young son—and I’m wondering how I missed the part in the Communist Manifesto where the leaders of the revolution leave their offices to their family members.

The state doesn’t wither much, does it?

Y

ou may have read author Anne Rice’s emphatic rejection of Christianity. She laid out her template of left-wing values which are more important to her than being part of the church which rejects these things (anti-science, anti-Democrat, antigay, anti-life, wait, did she say anti-life?) and declared her allegiance to Jesus alone.

What fascinates me about the way she has done this is how Catholic she is in her rejection of the Catholic Church. If Anne Rice were a Protestant of almost any kind, she would surely flee to a denominational group or congregation which embraces Jesus while more closely approximating her values. There is no doubt it would be possible to do so. There are liberal Baptists, liberal Lutherans, liberal Methodists, etc.

102

S P R I N G 2011

But Rice doesn’t avail herself of that opportunity. And I think I know why. Anne Rice movingly wrote of her Catholic childhood and of her dramatic return to the church. At no point did she apparently consider returning to faith as a Protestant. She clearly believes that the Catholic Church is the only true manifestation of the Christian church. And thus, when she rejects it, there is no other church for her to join. She is affirming the church at the same time she loudly and publicly is slamming the door and running away.

R

uth signed me up to be the surprise family reader at my daughter Grace’s kindergarten class on a recent Friday. I showed up the end of lunch. It’s strange how, when a parent shows up in class, children seem so in awe, as if a celebrity had walked into the room from off the red carpet.

We walked to her class from the lunchroom with our hands behind our backs to prevent us from interfering with one another. Upon reaching the classroom, the kids sat down on a rug and Grace’s teacher briefly introduced me. I read The Little Red Caboose (who always came last, but saved the day) and Robert the Rose Horse (about a horse who prevents a bank robbery with a giant sneeze). As I read, I kept catching Grace’s eye and felt my heart leap as I saw her bursting with pride and satisfaction to have her daddy holding forth in front of her class. Each time, I struggled to master myself so as to avoid choking up with a surge of emotion to see my child so pleased with me. Somehow, I got through it.

Later that day when I got home from work, I asked Grace if she was happy I came to her class. Did Daddy do a good job reading?

Did her friends have a good time? She astutely avoided all these queries, answering directly what I was trying to discover from her in a roundabout way: ‚Daddy, I love you.‛

Hunter Baker is Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Pol itical Science at Union Univers ity. He is the author of The End of Se cularism (Crossway Books) .

You can read more at his website, endofsecularism.com.

103

S P R I N G 2011

John Knox In each volume of T HE C I T Y , we reprint a passage or remarks from great leaders of the faith. Here is an excerpt f rom a sermon on Isaiah Chapter 26, given by John Knox (c. 1510 -1572), the great Scottish Reformer, concerning the dominion and authority of kings.

O

Lord our God, other lords besides thee have had dominion over us; but by thee only will we make mention of thy name. They are dead, they shall not live; they are deceased, they shall not rise; therefore hast thou visited and destroyed them, and made all their memory to perish. Thou hast increased the nation, O Lord, thou hast increased the nation, thou art glorified; thou hast removed it far unto the ends of the earth. Lord, in trouble have they visited thee, they poured out a prayer when thy chastening was upon them.â&#x20AC;&#x203A; These are the chief points of which, by the grace of God, we intend more largely at this present to speak; First, The prophet saith, â&#x20AC;&#x161;O Lord our God, other lords besides thee have ruled us.â&#x20AC;&#x203A; This, no doubt, is the beginning of the dolorous complaint, in which he complains of the unjust tyranny that the poor afflicted Israelites sustained during the time of their captivity. True it is, that the prophet was gathered to his fathers in peace, before this came upon the people: for a hundred years after his decease the people were not led away captive; yet he, foreseeing the assurance of the calamity, did before-hand indite and dictate unto them the complaint, which afterward they should make. But at the first sight it appears, that the complaint has but small weight; for what new thing was it, that other lords than God in his own person ruled them, seeing that such had been their government from the beginning? For who knows not, that Moses, Aaron, and Joshua, the judges, Samuel, David, and other godly rulers, were men, and not God; and so other lords than God ruled them in their greatest prosperity.

For the better understanding of this complaint, and of the mind of the prophet, we must, first, observe from whence all authority flows; and, secondly, to what end powers are appointed by God: which two points being discussed, we shall better understand, what lords and 105

THE CITY

what authority rule beside God, and who they are in whom God and his merciful presence rules.

T

he first is resolved to us by the words of the apostle, saying, ‚There is no power but of God.‛ David brings in the eternal God speaking to judges and rulers, saying, ‚I have said, ye are gods, and sons of the Most High.‛ And Solomon, in the person of God, affirmeth the same, saying, ‚By me kings reign, and princes discern the things that are just.‛ From which place it is evident, that it is neither birth, influence of stars, election of people, force of arms, nor finally, whatsoever can be comprehended under the power of nature, that makes the distinction betwixt the superior power and the inferior, or that establishes the royal throne of kings; but it is the only and perfect ordinance of God, who willeth his terror, power, and majesty, partly to shine in the thrones of kings, and in the faces of judges, and that for the profit and comfort of man. So that whosoever would study to deface the order of government that God has established, and allowed by his holy word, and bring in such a confusion, that no difference should be betwixt the upper powers and the subjects, does nothing but avert and turn upside down the very throne of God, which he wills to be fixed here upon earth; as in the end and cause of this ordinance more plainly shall appear: which is the second point we have to observe, for the better understanding of the prophet’s words and mind.

The end and cause then, why God imprints in the weak and feeble flesh of man this image of his own power and majesty, is not to puff up flesh in opinion of itself; neither yet that the heart of him, that is exalted above others, should be lifted up by presumption and pride, and so despise others; but that he should consider he is appointed lieutenant to One, whose eyes continually watch upon him, to see and examine how he behaves himself in his office. St. Paul, in few words, declares the end wherefore the sword is committed to the powers, saying, ‚It is to the punishment of the wicked doers, and unto the praise of such as do well.‛ Of which words it is evident, that the sword of God is not committed to the hand of man, to use as it pleases him, but only to punish vice and maintain virtue, that men may live in such society as is acceptable before God. And this is the true and only cause why God has appointed powers in this earth.

106

S P R I N G 2011

For such is the furious rage of man’s corrupt nature, that, unless severe punishment were appointed and put in execution upon malefactors, better it were that man should live among brutes and wild beasts than among men< I would that such as are placed in authority should consider, whether they reign and rule by God, so that God rules them; or if they rule without, besides, and against God, of whom our prophet hero complains.

If any desire to take trial of this point, it is not hard; for Moses, in the election of judges, and of a king, describes not only what persons shall be chosen to that honour, but also gives to him that is elected and chosen, the rule by which he shall try himself, whether God reign in him or not, saying, ‚When he shall sit upon the throne of his kingdom, he shall write to himself an exemplar of this law, in a book by the priests and Levites; it shall be with him, and he shall lead therein, all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, and to keep all the words of his law, and these statutes, that he may do them; that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left.‛ The same is repeated to Joshua, in his inauguration to the government of the people, by God himself, saying, ‚Let not the book of this law depart from thy mouth, but meditate in it day and night, that thou mayest keep it, and do according to all that which is written in it. For then shall thy way be prosperous, and thou shall do prudently.‛ The first thing then that God requires of him, who is called to the honour of a king, is, ‚The knowledge of his will revealed in his word.‛ The second is, ‚An upright and willing mind,‛ to put in execution such things as God commands in his law, without declining to the right, or to the left hand.

Kings then have not an absolute power, to do in their government what pleases them, but their power is limited by God’s word; so that if they strike where God has not commanded, they are but murderers; and if they spare where God has commanded to strike, they and their throne are criminal and guilty of the wickedness which abounds upon the face of the earth, for lack of punishment.

O that kings and princes would consider what account shall be craved of them, as well of their ignorance and misknowledge of God’s will, as for the neglecting of their office! In the person of the whole people the prophet complains unto God, that the Babylonians (whom he calls, ‚other lords besides God,‛ both because of their ig107

THE CITY

norance of God, and by reason of their cruelty and inhumanity,) had long ruled over them in great rigour, without pity or compassion upon the ancient men, and famous matrons: for they, being mortal enemies to the people of God, sought by all means to aggravate their yoke, yea, utterly to exterminate the memory of them, and of their religion, from the face of the earth.

A

fter the first part of this dolorous complaint, the prophet declares the protestation of the people, saying, ‚Nevertheless in thee shall we remember thy name,‛ (others read it, But we will remember thee only, and thy name;) but in the Hebrew there is no conjunction copulative in that sentence. The mind of the prophet is plain, namely, that notwithstanding the long sustained affliction, the people of God declined not to a false and vain religion, but remembered God, who sometime appeared to them in his merciful presence; which although they saw not then, yet they would still remember his name—that is, they would call to mind the doctrine and promise, which formerly they heard, although in their prosperity they did not sufficiently glorify God, who so mercifully ruled in the midst of them.

The temptation, no doubt, of the Israelites was great in those days; they were carried captives from the land of Canaan, which was to them the gage and pledge of God’s favour towards them: for it was the inheritance that God promised to Abraham, and to his seed for ever. The league and covenant of God’s protection appeared to have been broken—they lamentably complain that they saw not their accustomed signs of God’s merciful presence. The true prophets were few, and the abominations used in Babylon were exceedingly many: and so it might have appeared to them, that in vain it was that they were called the posterity of Abraham, or that ever they had received the law, or form of right religion from God. That we may the better feel it in ourselves, the temptation, I say, was even such, as if God should utterly destroy all order and policy that this day is within his church—that the true preaching of the word should be suppressed— the right use of sacraments abolished—idolatry and papistical abomination erected up again; and therewith, that our bodies should be taken prisoners by Turks, or other manifest enemies of God, and of all godliness. Such, I say, was their temptation; how notable then is this their confession that in bondage they make, namely, That they 108

S P R I N G 2011

will remember God only; although he has appeared to turn his face from them, they will remember his name, and will call to mind the deliverance promised!

Hereof have we to consider: what is our duty, if God bring us to the like extremity, as for our offences and unthankfulness justly he may.

This confession is not the fair flattering words of hypocrites, lying and bathing in their pleasures; but it is the mighty operation of the Spirit of God, who leaves not his own destitute of some comfort, in their most desperate calamities. This then is our duty, not only to confess our God in time of peace and quietness, but he chiefly craves, that we avow him in the midst of his and our enemies; and this is not in us to do, but it behoves that the Spirit of God work in us, above all power of nature; and thus we ought earnestly to meditate before the battle rise more vehement, which appears not to be far off. But now must we somewhat more deeply consider these judgments of God. This people dealt with thus, as we have heard, were the only people upon the face of the earth to whom God was rightly known; among them only were his laws, statutes, ordinances, and sacrifices, used and put in practice; they only invocated his name; and to them alone had he promised his protection and assistance. What then should be the cause, that he should give them over unto this great reproach; and bring them into such extremity that his own name, in them, should be blasphemed? The prophet Ezekiel, who saw this horrible destruction, forespoken by Isaiah, put into just execution, gives an answer in these words, ‚I gave unto them laws that were good, in the which whosoever should walk, should live in them; but they would not walk in my ways, but rebelled against me; and therefore, I have given unto them laws that are not good, and judgments, in the which they shall not live.‛ The writers of the books of Kings and Chronicles declare this in more plain words, saying, ‚The Lord sent unto them his prophets, rising early, desiring of them to return unto the Lord, and to amend their wicked ways, for he would have spared his people, and his tabernacle; but they mocked his servants, and would not return unto the Lord their God to walk in his ways.‛Yea, Judah itself kept not the precepts of the Lord God, but walked in the manners and ordinances of Israel; that is, of such as then had declined to idolatry from the days of Jeroboam; and therefore, the Lord God abhorred the whole seed of Israel, that is, the whole body of the people; he punished them, and gave them into the 109

THE CITY

hands of those that spoiled them, and so he cast them out from his presence.

Hereof it is evident, that their disobedience unto God, and unto the voices of his prophets, was the cause of their destruction. Now have we to take heed how we should use the good laws of God; that is, his will revealed unto us in his word; and that order of justice, which by him, for the comfort of man, is established amongst men. There is no doubt but that obedience is the most acceptable sacrifice unto God, and that which above all things he requires; so that when he manifests himself by his word, men should follow according to their vocation and commandment. Now so it is, that God, by that great Pastor our Lord Jesus, now manifestly in his word calls us from all impiety, as well of body as of mind, to holiness of life, and to his spiritual service; and for this purpose he has erected the throne of his mercy among us, the true preaching of his word, together with the right administration of his sacraments: but what our obedience is, let every man examine his own conscience, and consider what statutes and laws we would have to be given unto us.

W

ouldst thou—O Scotland!—have a king to reign over thee in justice, equity, and mercy? Subject thou thyself to the Lord thy God, obey his commandments, and magnify thou the word that calleth unto thee, ‚This is the way, walk in it;‛ and if thou wilt not, flatter not thyself; the same justice remains this day in God to punish thee, Scotland, and thee Edinburgh especially, which before punished the land of Judah, and the city of Jerusalem.

Every realm or nation, saith the prophet Jeremiah, that likewise offendeth, shall be likewise punished. But if thou shalt see impiety placed in the seat of justice above thee, so that in the throne of God, as Solomon complains, reigns nothing but fraud and violence, accuse thine own ingratitude and rebellion against God; for that is the only cause why God takes away ‚the strong man and the man of war, the judge and the prophet, the prudent and the aged, the captain and the honourable, the counsellor and the cunning artificer; and I will appoint, saith the Lord, children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them. Children are extortioners of my people, and women have rule over them.‛ If these calamities, I say, apprehend us, so that we see nothing but the oppression of good men, and of all godliness, and that wicked men without God reign above us; let us accuse and con110

S P R I N G 2011

demn ourselves, as the only cause of our own miseries. For if we had heard the voice of the Lord our God, and given upright obedience unto the same, God would have multiplied our peace, and would have rewarded our obedience before the eyes of the world. But now let us hear what the prophet saith further: ‚The dead shall not live,‛ saith he, ‚neither shall the tyrants, nor the dead arise, because thou hast visited and scattered them, and destroyed all their memory.‛ < Immediately after, he saith, ‚Thou hast increased thy nation, O Lord, thou hast increased thy nation. They have visited thee, and have poured forth a prayer before thee.‛ Who, I say, would not think, that these are things not only spoken without good order and purpose, but also manifestly repugning one to another? For to live, and not to live, to be so destroyed that no memorial remains, and to be so increased that the coasts of the earth shall be replenished, seems to import plain contradiction. For removing of this doubt, and for better understanding the prophet’s mind, we must observe, that the prophet had to do with divers sorts of men < there rested only the tribe of Judah at Jerusalem, where the form of true religion was observed, the law taught, and the ordinances of God outwardly kept. But yet there were in that body, I mean, in the body of the visible church, a great number that were hypocrites, also not a few that were licentious livers; some that turned their back to God, that is, had forsaken all true religion; and some that lived a most abominable life, as Ezekiel saith in his vision; and yet there were some godly, as a few wheat-corns, oppressed and hid among the multitude of chaff: now, according to this diversity, the prophet keeps divers purposes, and yet in most perfect order.

And first, after the first part of the complaint of the afflicted as we have heard, in vehemency of spirit he bursts forth against all the proud enemies of God’s people, against all such as trouble them, and against all such as mock and forsake God, and saith, ‚The dead shall not live, the proud giants shall not rise; thou hast scattered them, and destroyed their memorial.‛ In which words he contends against the present temptation and dolorous state of God’s people, and against the insolent pride of such as oppressed them; as if the prophet should say, O ye troublers of God’s people! howsoever it appears to you in this your bloody rage, that God regards not your cruelty, nor considers what violence you do to his poor afflicted, yet shall you he visited, yea, your carcases shall fall and lie as stinking carrion upon the 111

THE CITY

face of the earth, you shall fall without hope of life, or of a blessed resurrection; yea, howsoever you gather your substance, and augment your families, you shall be so scattered, that you shall leave no memorial of you to the posterities to come, but that which shall be execrable and odious.

H

ereof the tyrants have their admonition, and the afflicted church inestimable comfort: the tyrants that oppress, shall receive the same end which they did who have passed before; that is, they shall die and fall with shame, without hope of resurrection, as is aforesaid. Not that they shall not arise to their own confusion and just condemnation; but that they shall not recover power, to trouble the servants of God; neither yet shall the wicked arise, as David saith, in the counsel of the just.

Now the wicked have their councils, their thrones, and finally handle all things that are upon the face of the earth; but the poor servants of God are reputed unworthy of menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s presence, envied and mocked; yea, they are more vile before these proud tyrants, than is the very dirt and mire which is trodden under foot. But in that glorious resurrection, this state shall be changed; for then shall such as now, by their abominable living and cruelty, destroy the earth, and molest Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s children, see Him whom they have pierced; they shall see the glory of such as now they persecute, to their terror and everlasting confusion. The remembrance hereof ought to make us patient in the days of affliction, and so to comfort us, that when we see tyrants in their blind rage tread under foot the saints of God, we despair not utterly, as if there were neither wisdom, justice, nor power above in the heavens, to repress such tyrants, and to redress the dolours of the unjustly afflicted.

No, brethren, let us be assured that the right hand of the Lord will change the state of things that are most desperate. In our God there is wisdom and power, in a moment to change the joy and mirth of our enemies into everlasting mourning, and our sorrows into joy and gladness that shall have no end.

We encourage you to visit T H E C I T Y online at C I V I TAT E . O R G .

112