Saturday Night Radio Drama - Bernard Farrell - Greta At The Gresham

 Greta at The Gresham

Boy meets girl in a brief encounter on an ancient island in an Irish lake, and they talk through the moonlit night of this and that and their two bespoken lives. They will meet again, they promise, at some future point. They will meet again, and by appointment, too. They will meet in the lobby of a Dublin hotel in six straightforward years, no more, no less, where they will compare their dealings and their disappointments in the unforeseen meantime.

With Dawn Bradfield as Greta and Bryan Murray as Jerry with a J, Bernard Farrell’s radio-play establishes the most poignant traditions of melodrama and romantic comedy – only to subvert their moonshine in the overcast conditions of ordinary life.

I haven't had much time to listen to new radio drama, this is another one I'm posting unheard - well, I'm listening as I post it.  Hope it's good. 

Cultured Despisers Got No Kulcha - Hate Mail

IT'S KIND OF FUNNY that I'm accused of holding up Stanley Hauerwas as an idol when he certainly would never want anyone to do that.  

I could have written that in the book I quoted from, not far into it, he made a huge whopper of a mistake, one typical of his and my generation of educationally credentialed people and which is probably most typical of the materialist-atheist devotees of scientism, such as yourself.

Christians, our theologians told us, are in the rather embarrassing position of having a faith rooted in ancient parochial, Near Eastern writings, which present life of an ancient, parochial, Near Eastern Jew named Jesus.  Modern Christians stare at the life, death and resurrection of Jesus across what the German philosopher Lessing called the "ugly wide ditch" of history.  Copernicus, despite the church's efforts to silence him, finally convinced us that the sun did not go around the earth, and everything changed.  The Copernican Revolution was the first, we were led to believe, seismic shift for the church.  Everyone's world view had shifted to something called "the modern world view."  The poor old church, however, was stuck with the legacy of a "pre-scientific (i.e., pre-modern) world view."

This explains why, at least for a century, the church's theology has been predominantly apologetic.  The church did not want to duplicate the mistake we made with Copernicus.  

First, since Hauerwas is a Methodist who is a communicant at an Episcopal Church,  he's taking on a big mistake of the Catholic hierarchy and SOME continental Protestants taking on that embarrassment for English Protestantism.  Some of the Protestant opposition was biblical though Luther thought that Copernican cosmology was horse-feathers because it overturned the science establishment of his day.   Science is no more of a progressive force than anything else that relies on the old guard dying off, eventually.   It's ruthlessness just makes it seem that way. 

He mentioned Copernicus one more time in the book at the start of the passage I posted (with my own typos), I was tempted to point out that what he said, though it fits in rather exactly with the common-received-wisdom on the Copernican cosmology got it pretty much wrong as none other than the man he probably meant when he talked about "the church's effort to silence him," would have known.  Galileo, certainly among the most important scientific figures in the early modern era noted that not only had Copernicus been a cleric, himself, the patrons and supporters of his scientific work on the calendar and, as a result, the conclusion that the Earth revolved around the sun  were none other than bishops, cardinals and even popes, who Copernicus thanked in the preface to his work, in fact, noting that it was they who had encouraged him to publish when he seems to have been reluctant to do that and one of whom he dedicated his major work to.  Copernicus and his followers lectured on his sun-centered universe in Rome and at the Vatican, itself and was championed and encouraged by bishops and Popes.*  Galileo certainly had read the book in the original and, so, he did what virtually no modern, self-asserted champion of Copernicus or Galileo has ever done with Copernicus or Galileo or, for that matter, Darwin READ WHAT THEY WROTE!

If there is an actual modern habit of thought it is to read the secondary, tertiary and even more remote junk and to totally ignore the primary documents, something certainly as true of Scripture as it is modern science.  Most typically, they don't even read those, they watch a movie that lies about history or just pick up the lore that pervades popular media.

Actually, "the church" didn't oppose Copernicus, even the Catholic hierarchy didn't until Galileo insulted a particularly touchy and scientifically ignorant Pope (the last of the humanist Popes) in one of his books.  Galileo had been teaching Copernican cosmology for a while before that and had previously been friendly with the rich guy who became pope.  The foremost opponents of his cosmology were the university men, the scientific establishment of his time, some of whom were clerics but many weren't.  They were the ones who Galileo bitterly complained to the very religious Johannes Kepler wouldn't even look in his telescope, the ones who in modern a-historical fiction and several often reproduced paintings (never trust a later artist to get it right, trust 20th century dramatists even less) are replaced with cardinals and bishops, a number of whom even championed Galileo within the Vatican while his long trial was being conducted.  

Also, it should be mentioned that not a single cosmologist or astronomer today is a Copernican.  Anyone who championed his model of the universe, or that of Galileo, for that fact, would be considered a wacky nut-ball because, of course, our sun isn't the center of much of anything, isn't static and revolves and moves through the universe as much as any of the things that can be said to move around it,  and the physics of today could as happily say that the sun revolves around the Earth as to say the Earth revolves around the sun as Arthur Stanley Eddington amusingly noted in one of his more popular lectures  more than ninety years ago**.   Odd how many of those who love to think they're up and with it haven't caught up to that.

While I get what Hauerwas was getting at, what he said was not only not true, it was very inaccurate in the typical modern manner which holds no falsehood is to go unsaid when you can use it to slam religion.  I still am finding enormous amounts of what he has said to be extremely useful and extremely interesting.  No one gets it all right but I find that theologians are usually better at getting more of it right than their "cultured despisers." They're more careful and, sometimes, seem to really believe it is a sin to bear false witness.  

I am not, by the way, a humanist because I reject that human beings are the measure of all things.  It is the limits of our mere humanity we are stuck with, humanism misidentifies that misfortune with the definition of reality which surpasses it.  It seems to me it exacerbates every parochialism attributed to ancient Near-Eastern religion with an even more radically presumptuous position deifying an often very particularly defined human point of view.    Modernism like scholasticism and all other previously dominant isms are things we should get over, not something we should rest on as so many lazy modern academics and those they credential insist on.  

* Twenty-five years after his university career, he had finished his great work, at least in his own mind, but hesitated a long time, whether to publish it or to imitate the Pythagoreans, who transmitted the mysteries of their philosophy only orally to their own disciples for fear of exposing them to the contempt of the multitude. His friends who had become interested in the new theory prevailed on him to write at least an abstract for them, manuscript copies of which have been discovered in Vienna (1873) and Stockholm (1878). In this commentary Copernicus stated his theory in the form of seven axioms, reserving the mathematical part for the Principal work. This was in 1531, or twelve years before his death. From this on the doctrine of the heliocentric system began to spread. In 1533 Albert Widmanstadt lectured before Pope Clement VII on the Copernican solar system. His reward consisted in a Greek codex which is preserved in the State library of Munich. Three years later Copernicus was urged by Cardinal Schonberg, then Archbishop of Capua, in a letter, dated at Rome, 1 November, 1536, to publish his discovery, or at least to have a copy made at the cardinal's expense. But all the urging of friends was in vain, until a younger man was providentially sent to his side.

It was George Joachim Rheticus who quitted his chair of mathematics in Wittenberg in order to spend two years at the feet of the new master (1539-41). Hardly ten weeks after his arrival in Frauenburg he sent a "First Narration" of the new solar system to his scientific friend Schöner in Nuremberg, in the form of a letter of sixty-six pages, which was soon after printed in Danzig (1540) and Basle (1541). Rheticus next obtained for publication the manuscript of a preliminary chapter of the great work on plane and spherical trigonometry. Finally Copernicus, feeling the weight of his sixty-eight years, yielded, as he writes to Paul III, to the entreaties of Cardinal Schonberg, of Bishop Giese of Culm, and of other learned men to surrender his manuscripts for publication. Bishop Giese charged Rheticus, as the ablest disciple of the great master, with the task of editing the work. The intention of the latter was to take the manuscript to Wittenberg and have it published at the university but owing to the hostility prevailing there against the Copernican system, only the chapter on trigonometry was printed (1542). The two copies of the "First Narration" and of the treatise on trigonometry, which Rheticus presented to his friend Dr. Gasser, then practising medicine in Feldkirch, may be seen in the Vatican Library (Palat. IV, 585) Rheticus then turned to Schöner in Nuremberg, who, together with Osiander, accepted the charge and engaged the printing-house of Petreius in the same city. In the meanwhile Rheticus tried to resume his chair in Wittenberg, but on account of his Copernican views had to resign (1542) and turned to Leipzig (1543). He was thus prevented from giving his personal attention to the edition, nor was the author himself able to superintend it. Copernicus became paralyzed on the right side and weakened in memory and mind many days before his death. The first copy of the "Six Books on the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbits" was handed to him the very day he died. Fortunately for him, he could not see what Osiander had done. This reformer, knowing the attitude of Luther and Melanchthon against the heliocentric system, introduced the word "Hypothesis" on the title page, and without adding his own name, replaced the preface of Copernicus by another strongly contrasting in spirit with that of Copernicus. The preface of Osiander warns the reader not to expect anything certain from astronomy, nor to accept its hypothesis as true, ne stultior ab hac disciplinâ discedat, quam accesserit. The dedication to Pope Paul III was, however, retained, and the text of the work remained intact, as was ascertained later when access was had to the original manuscript, now in the family library of the Counts Nostitz in Prague.

**  If the kind of controversy which so often springs up between modernism and traditionalism in religion were applied to more commonplace affairs of life we might see some strange results. Would it be altogether unfair to imagine something liked the following series of letters in our correspondence columns? It arises, let us say, from a passage in an obituary notice which mentions that the deceased had loved to watch the sunsets from his peaceful country home. A. writes deploring that in this progressive age few of the younger generation ever notice a sunset; perhaps this is due to the pernicious influence of the teaching of Copernicus who maintains that the sun is really stationary. This rouses B* to reply that nowadays every reasonable person accepts Copernicus’s doctrine. C is positive that he has many times seen the sun set, and Copernicus must be wrong. D calls for a restatement of belief, so that we may know just how much modern science has left of the sunset, and appreciated the remnant without disloyalty to truth. E (perhaps significantly my own initial) in a misguided effort for peace points out that on the most modern scientific theory there is no absolute distinction between the heavens revolving around the earth and the earth revolving under the heavens; both parties are (relatively) right. F regards this as a most dangerous sophistry, which insinuates that there is no essential difference between truth and untruth. G thinks that we ought now to admit frankly that the revolution of the heavens is a myth; nevertheless such myths have still a practical teaching for us in the present day. H produces an obscure passage in the Almagest, which he interprets as showing that the philosophy of the ancients was not really opposed to the Copernican view. And so it goes on. And the simple reader feels himself in an age of disquiet, insecurity and dissension, all because it is forgotten that what the deceased man looked out for each evening was an experience and not a creed.

Of course, what those who endlessly go over the imagined wrongs they believe the Church did to Copernicus or the grotesquely exaggerated ones claimed as having been done to the, admittedly, wronged Galileo really looked out for wasn't the truth, it was just another experience of hatin' on religion and reaffirming their inness with the in-crowd who does such stuff more reliably than they can recite the 7's times table. 

 

There Are Rights and Then There Are "Rights" - Hate Mail

ONE OF THE MOST helpful things I've ever done here was to transcribe and go through a speech which Walter Brueggemann gave in which he contrasted the values of the Jewish prophetic tradition with the values of modern liberal democracy, though he didn't call it that, he identified it as a triad of might, wisdom, and wealth, which can certainly serve things other than republics or even liberal democracies and which he explicitly identifies with the ideology of modernism based in science which is in service to those things.  We are urged in the snobbish abstractions of modern academics to forget that science was wisdom founded in and has never been separable from the enhancement of might and wealth even when those serve the powerful, the elite and the wealthy as they did when figures such as Bacon and Descartes invented modernism through inventing modern science.  And other forms of academic erudition have, as well.

Brueggemann contrasts that with a Jewish prophetic triad of steadfast love, justice, and righteousness which he remarkably demonstrated in eight ways was in opposition to and in contrast to the "triad of control."  Since his starting point was the Prophet Jeremiah condemning the royal-religious establishment of his day and since the same triad has served many kings, despots, dictators, aristocratic and oligarchic regimes since then, the "triad of control" is not specific to modern liberal democracies but that it can so comfortably find support from it is a significant indication that its endpoint is not going to be egalitarian or long remain genuinely democratic.

The fifth day of that series I transcribed this passage from his lecture which gets to the heart of why I reject liberal democracy as being in any way adequate, I don't know how Brueggemann would transcribe it or how he originally wrote it but it's the ideas in it I want to go into.  I also don't know how he would feel about my use of his points.

The triad of fidelity first focuses on the body whereas the triad of control focuses characteristically on abstractions of power and possession. The couplet of justice and righteousness are concerned with the ways in which the resources of the community are mobilized for the bodily reality of persons and the healthy reality of the body politic. The materiality of the biblical tradition has to do with the quotidian dimension of the vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor and the wherewithal for their dignity and well-being. Thus the indictment in the ancient city, they have grown fat and sleek, they know no limit in deeds of wickedness, they do not judge with justice the cause of the poor, they do not defend the right of the needy. And the same poet says if you truly amend your ways, if you truly act with justice, if you do not oppress the immigrant, the orphan and the widow or shed innocent blood and if you do not go after other gods, then . . . (W.B.'s hand gesture indicating continuation)

What aroused objections in what I posted the other day was my supposed diminution of the importance of "rights," as those are idolatrously propitiated today.  That as included in my rejection of unfettered "liberty," rejecting both the "liberalism" (really libertarianism) which either demands or permits a definition of rights which will allow their unequal distribution and, so, unequal exercise.  I really don't think you can anymore separate the reality of rights from how they are exercised BY PEOPLE  anymore than you can from the natural beings, People, animals, etc. which hold those rights as an inherent aspect of their being.  I think the creation of "rights" that courts and even legislatures assign to man-made entities that don't possess rights, corporations, "institutions" even political and judicial offices is to be expected when courts separate rights from natural beings and make them into abstractions.

Notice the right that is the only mention of "rights" in this passage "they do not defend the right of the needy."  In the context of the passage which focuses on "the materiality of the biblical tradition" "the quotidian dimensions of the vulnerable,"  certainly those include most of all a right to clean and sufficient air, water, food, shelter, clothing, dignity for the most vulnerable and forgotten - not least of which because they are the least economically profitable - People.  

In all of the "rights" enumerated in the Constitution, even those listed in the Declaration of Independence, it should be mind-boggling that NONE OF THESE MOST IMPORTANT RIGHTS a human being can have are mentioned, a right to clean water and food in a decent sufficiency, a right to clothing and shelter adequate for the maintenance of a decent standard of living, the right to healthcare.  We are even noticing, at least for half of the population, that there isn't even the most basic right of bodily ownership and autonomy as the "justices" of the Supreme Court negate the right of Women to determine the state of their own bodies, even allowing states under Republican-fascist control to give rapists and other men more control over the bodies of Women than they allow Women to exercise over their own bodies.

I would bet that to just about anyone who reads this, proposing the rights to those material needs on the same level of abstract "rights" to "free press-speech" "freedom of religious belief" even the most dangerous of all those popularly expounded "right to bear arms" will seem very strange and even incomprehensible.  Pointing out that that gap in our Constitution is an enormous chasm between important rights of all of us on an equal basis and those as imagined by the rich and powerful based on their own interests, and so are the ones they addressed and which later rich and powerful people maintained as of supreme importance will seem rather dangerous.  I am regularly told when I say things like that that I really shouldn't say them. Freedom of speech is a very sometimes thing.

It should astound us that the framers of the United States Constitution, living in their society with such an abundance of poverty, of  hard-scrabble farms, frequent failures of crops, frequent illness due to bad water, bad healthcare (though some of that may be due to the science of medicine at the time being quite likely to kill a patient who may have recovered on their own) and other absolute necessities of life just had those kinds of rights slip their lofty minds.   That the framers were all aristocrats from the higher and highest economic class of the time certainly accounts for their priorities and what they entirely ignored in listing of "rights" and those "liberties" they put in their documents instead.  Jefferson's one word mention of a right to "life" is the closest thing to that in the founding documents of what likes to think of itself as the premier "new order of the ages" the start of modern liberal democracy but what is required to maintain even a miserable life, water, food, housing, clothing, as a right to these citizens of their "new order" goes unmentioned .

And in the succeeding periods, those lacks in the specific wording of our supreme law, the Constitution, has hardly mattered much and when it was made to matter was attacked on the very basis of that framing of liberal democracy.  As the right of mega-corporate media to lie with impunity is defended exhaustively, food assistance, clean water and air, healthcare, etc. are successfully thwarted and, when a few steps forward are taken, successfully driven back, not least of which with lies in the freest press in our history.  

That they also neglected the right to the truth, instead of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" is something that could be expanded on at length.  Which I have.  The Federalist Papers and other documents prove the founders, themselves, were quite experienced and manipulative managers of speech and press to mold public opinion to their own ends, not least of which with appeals made to the worst in us as well as some of our more abstractly idealistic aspirations, in that they often had very little desire for the truth to interfere with that.  They were, after all, mostly lawyers and politicians.  Compared to that Walter Brueggemann and Jeremiah are better than gold and sweeter than honey from the honeycomb. They are like a breath of fresh air and clear, cold water in a parching drought such as the one the world is suffering through, which the Supreme Court through its reading of the Constitution is furthering.

Jeremiah sees the bodily needs of the vulnerable that require a different ordering of the body politic. Righteousness is weighing in for the well-being of the community.  The poetic tradition always cares about food, clothing and housing. The materiality of this triad refuses the requirements of ideas, concepts, theories and ideologies that draw energy away from reality of those who stand in front of us. The flight to abstraction is an endless seduction for those in control so that social reality can be reduced to a program or a budget that depends always on a euphemism to hide the bodily reality next door.  

The items in the Bill of Rights that gets the most attention, the "rights" to "speech" of "religion" of "press" are all focused on abstractions that have certainly not gotten us to anything like a common wealth or close to equality.  They have been used, more often than not, to oppose, hinder and delay of the real rights to clean water and even clean air (you will never be able to separate the depravity of the Roberts-Alito Court from these issues), food (as a right for those who need it, not a marketing opportunity for corporations who sell it with government subsidies) housing, clothing, medical care - my friend whose biopsy is being put off under a very expensive insurance plan under the ACA was told he might have to wait another six months to find out if he has cancer - . . . I could go on.

That we don't even begin to notice the most vital of rights for the destitute, the poor, the working poor, the middle class etc. in the framing of liberal democracy is, itself, an indictment of liberal democracy for whatever virtues are claimed for it.  I think those absolute failures of liberal democracy are both intentional and, since we've become accustomed to the habits of speech and thought about it, endemic to our thought, fixed in our habits.  And they are powerful no matter how dangerous the results are.  

Anyone who believes the United States Constitution and, really, much of any of the framing of liberal democracy as it is is sustainable is deluded.  We have to come down out of the clouds of idealistic abstraction to face the everyday material needs of life in order to have areal and important considerations of rights under a democratic government, we aren't anywhere near having that because the abstractions are what counts to those who count money.  We are distracted and deluded and conventional education is a part of that as much as anything, the dainty, scrupulously maintained habits of thought and speech surrounding these issues are the flying buttresses that hold up otherwise unsupportable walls.

The seduction of the university not unlike the government and the church and the corporation is to traffic in abstraction.  And the challenge of the university is to bring the energy back to that quotidian reality so that resources and passion may be mobilized differently .

Why I Dumped On Deism - Hate Mail

 "DEISM" WAS added to that list with agnosticism and atheism because I recently found a 2000 lecture about engineering given by Neil Armstrong I remembered hearing on the radio and admiring at the time.  I still like a lot of what he said in it but it led me to read more about him online and, of course, the topic of his religion figured into that.  He is one of the few people I could name who has professed his religious orientation was "deism."   I've always been skeptical about "deism" as anything from the new-atheist fad of the 00's when I regularly asked the atheists to point out to any actual deists who they claimed existed.   Deism in relation to  egalitarian democracy or morality may not be as actively undermining as materialistic, atheistic scientism which inevitably ends up hostile to it and denying their existence,  but it contains absolutely nothing more than MAS to positively motivate towards those.   I think Armstrong got too impressed with the achievements of science, mathematics and technology and he mistook them for the ultimate oracle of everything, as so many do.  Even those who may profess a belief in God.  

I'm sure there are dozens, hundreds and thousands of more than just worthwhile Protestant theologians who I should read and listen to,  Stanley Hauerwas is one whose subtle and radically challenging intersection of religion and politics is one I'm looking more at right now.   Though I said intersection, really, as I indicated, I am beginning to think that there can be no separation because every political issue is fraught with and saturated with moral considerations and problems.  I'm sure there will be many others I wish I had time for, as well. 

You Can Never Say Enough When You Start To Talk About The Jewish Monotheistic Tradition

THE EVER EXCELLENT RMJ has posted the excerpt that I used yesterday with many essential expansions, some of which, I confess, were included in the book I cribbed from but which I left out because I'm antsy about violating fair use.  Whatever "fair use" is. 

Here is a link to it. 

Instead of the often mocked intellectual inadequacies of theology, I find that there is never enough time or space to include all of what could and has been said about it.  Theology isn't an inadequate relic of the past, it is too hard for the facile, media stupefied and stupefying modern habits of thought I live in to deal with.  Always leaving to others to include more than you can.   It's an invitation, as the excerpt noted, one which is hard to accept.

And Now For Something Likely To Infuriate - Hate Mail

I AM NOT A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT, I am an egalitarian democrat.  The key differences in the two positions, as I define them, are in the modifying adjectives.  Liberal democracy may well stress "liberty" which is sloppily identified as "rights" but it has no real interest in what those rights result in as a common possession except as a legalistic abstraction. In its most dangerous form, the form that holds dominance in the United States in 2022, "rights" as defined by Republican-fascism are seen as limitless for those who have the resources to not be limited - the Supreme Court making money = speech, is a perfect example of that.

Egalitarian democracy holds that all People have equal rights and the right to exercise those but within a network of equally held rights which must, necessarily, define the limits of the rights held and the exercise of those rights.  Rights cannot be seen as abstract disembodied entities that can be dealt with on a theoretical basis but have to always be considered in the context of the People who have equal rights, really there is no such a thing as a "right" that is separable from the living being who possesses them as an inherent endowment.  The rights of any one person or group of People in reality instead of the irreality of abstraction are necessarily held in tension with and bounded by the rights of others and the necessity of the common good and the sustainable viability of their environment.  

Liberal democracy denies that reality or, really, ignores it and the consequences are that "rights" become a parody of something that is supposed to be a good in the world into something which is not infrequently extremely dangerous.  "Rights" to pollute, to use guns and possess them irresponsibly, "rights" to cheat and swindle People on the basis of conman tricks legalized by courts and corrupted legislatures on the pretense that those swindled have exercised a "right of contract" or some such other gangster-lawyer-judge-"justice" created meta-con job. "Rights" of husbands to tyrannize over wives, "rights" of white supremacists to oppress, terrorize and murder People of Color, "rights" of slavers to their "property" things which have loomed large over and still basically deform and distort America's liberal democracy are all examples of "rights" in the definition of liberal democracy but which could never stand under the holdings of egalitarian democracy. There is no such a thing as a right which is not sustained on a reciprocal basis, if you do unto others as you would have them do unto you, inequality, destitution, poverty, racial, ethnic, gender and sexual inequality would not be practiced.  

Abstracting "rights" from their only real manifestation as equal endowments as our law and Constitution and legal profession does is extremely dangerous.  It is only one of a number of such sloppy and dangerous word games that are the basis of modernism as it has been other similarly inadequate and, as they ripen and rot, dangerous ideological framings.  

To confuse things, as things are often confused by using labels and words, I am a liberal if you are talking about the traditional, American use of the word which is grounded in the moral obligation to liberally provide material, spiritual and cultural sustenance for the least among us and even the just not as well off or unfortunate.  And if you also include mutual respect and, yes, the "l" word, love. I am in no way a "liberal" as the word is commonly used in post-enlightenment, scientistic European and academic use which stresses "rights" as I've defined them having often malignant legal, political and cultural potency under "liberal democracy."  The habit of the physical sciences of abstracting particles and chemicals in order to come up with some general facts about them being extended far outside of science to apply them to far more complex entities is not only supremely nonsensical, it is extremely dangerous.

Those who are more comfortable with the formulation of liberal democracy because it seems more comfortably secular in an anti-religious or merely culturally "post-religious" cultural setting are fooling themselves if they believe it can result in a reliably good world because it is almost certainly guaranteed to devolve into the most wretched of inequality and, in time, despotism of the kind our liberal democracy is devolving into under the United States Constitution, a long and long failed experiment in 18th century conceptions of liberal democracy.  I think the choice we face is either to ride that into fascism or we will basically alter it and give it up for egalitarian democracy.

-------------------------

I was thinking about a passage from a book by Stanley Hauerwas and William Williomon, Resident Aliens which is worth thinking about both in context with the above and in the context of this week in August.

Christianity is more than a matter of a new understanding.  Christianity is an invitation to be part of an alien people who make a difference because they see something that cannot otherwise be seen without Christ.  Right living is more the challenge than right thinking.  The challenge is of a new people who have aligned themselves with the seismic shift that has occurred in the world since Christ.

Although our assertion is based, as was [Karl] Barth's, on a theological assessment of the world,  it is also based, as was Barth's on a particular experience.  For Barth, and for us, Nazi Germany was the supreme test for modern theology.  There we experienced the "modern world,"  which we had so labored to understand and to become credible to, as the world, not only of the Copernican world view, computers, and the dynamo, but also of the Nazis.  

I will break in here to note that despite the popular distortion of Nazism into some kind of entity alien to the ideological framing of modernism, it, like 20th century fascism was not only self-consciously modern ("National Socialism is nothing but applied biology") it was seen as progressive by many a modernist and many liberals, in the 18th century, modern usage of the word.

Barth was horrified that his church lacked the theological resources to stand against Hitler.  It was the theological liberals, those who had spent their theological careers translating the faith into terms that could be understood by modern people and used in the creation of modern civilization, who were unable to say no.  Some, like Emanuel Hirsh, even said yes to Hitler. (For a troubling account of Hirsh, see Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler [New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1985]. What was so troubling about Ericksen's account is his demonstration that Tillich and Hirsh were not only close friends, but also that their theology was essentially the same.  They differed only on what political implications came from their theology.)

Liberal theology had spent decades reassuring us that we did not have to take the Jewishness of Jesus seriously.  The particulars of this faith, the limiting, historically contingent, narrative specifics of the faith, such as the Jewishness of Jesus or his messianic eschatology, were impediments for the credibility of modern people and could therefore be removed so that we could get down to the real substance of Christianity.  Jesus was not really a Jew, he was the pinnacle of the brightest and best in humanity, the teacher of noble ideals, civilization's very best.  It was a short step from the liberal Christ-the-highest-in-humanity to the Nazi Superman.

It's not only liberal Christianity(which must be pointed out is often to be distinguished from the Christianity of traditional liberals) that demands that denial of the radical egalitarianism at the center of the Mosaic Law, 18th century modernism and secularism also demand it. If Nazism had not defined itself biologically under the doctrine of natural selection, it may have not been genocidal* but it would have joined in secular modernism in demanding of Jews and Christians the same rejection of the heart of the Jewish religion as so many modern Jews have accommodated themselves to in order to fit in.  Christians have, of course, gone far farther than that, to the extent that Marjorie Taylor Greene can spout "Christianity" which is a thoroughly racist, inegalitarian, consumerist-modern- cargo-cult - paganism without the radical expression of the Mosaic law of Jesus.  Modern American "Christianity" is, by and large, a modernistic, materialistic paganism which is certainly not confined to Protestantism but which, with billionaire and millionaire loot, is a Catholic heresy waging war against Pope Francis and the Gospel.   The terms "conservative" and "liberal" can no more be used without extensive modification than "Christian" can.

I would be dishonest if I said that I think any viable, sustainable egalitarian-democratic liberalism that could withstand something like Nazism is possible without a real belief in The real God.  I have become convinced that agnosticism, atheism and "deism" are bound to decay into what will corrode, erode and eventually collapse egalitarian democracy.  There is a reason that the First Commandment is the one it is and that the Second and Third ones follow on from it.  I am endlessly amazed at how well thought out much of the Scripture is as a logical presentation of things.  I believe many religious traditions believe in The real God and their moral holdings will TEND TO confirm that.  Of course no one is more responsible for carrying it out than the Abrahamic religions have often failed to do.

Barth's commentary on Romans countered with the insistence that passages like Romans 9-11 must set the tone for Christian thought.  There he noted how the liberals had asserted certain humanistic assumptions about human nature and the world that did not need a living god to make them credible.  "God is not 'man' said in a loud voice," was Barth's caustic remark to liberals.  

It might have all been explained away by asserting that Hitler as a maniac and the German people were infected with some sort of mass hysteria.  Then we North American Christians could say that, although the compromised German church failed, at least ours did not.  Unfortunately, the ethical results of our inadequate theology had global implications.

On August 6, 1945, the fist atomic bomb was dropped on a Japanese city.  Turning to a group of sailors with him on the battle cruiser Augusta,  President Truman said, "This is the greatest thing in history." Truman, once described as "an outstanding Baptist layman,"  was supported by the majority of American Christians, who expressed few misgivings about the bomb.  The bomb, however, was the sign of our moral incapacitation, an open admission that we had lost the will and the resources to resist vast evil.

The American church had come a long way to stand beside Harry Truman in 1945.  Just a few years earlier, in 1937, when Franco's forces bombed the Spanish town of Guernica, killing many civilians, the civilized world was shocked.  That same year, when the Japanese bombed the city of Nanking, the world felt it was now dealing with particularly insidious forces which had little intention of obeying historical prohibitions against killing civilians.  President Roosevelt issued an urgent appeal to all governments, at the beginning of World War II, saying "The bombing of helpless and unprotected civilians is a strategy which has aroused the horror of all mankind.  I recall with pride that the United States consistently has taken the lead in urging that this inhuman practice be prohibited."

Yet only several years later, in 1942, Churchill spoke of "beating the life out of Germany" through routine bombing of German cities (after the bombing of London by the Germans).  What had begun as the acts of ruthless Fascist dictators had become the accepted practice of democratic nations.  Few Christians probably even remember that there was a time when the church was the voice of condemnation for such wantonly immoral acts (George Hunsinger, "Where the Battle Rages:  Confessing Christ in America Today,"  Dialog, vol 26, no 4, pp. 264-74).  

The fact is that science and technology (as if those are separable) has a way of creating things that change everything, leaving moral considerations on a leaking life-raft, though we're all on that life-raft as a result.  I think the perhaps necessary clerical detail of leaving out questions of morality when doing science and technology, as well as financial accounting of money, etc. has real consequences when those practices of instrumental reasoning have real power and potency, creating a very real monster that can get us all killed.  The law does the same thing when it turns things such as "rights under (human made) law" into things divorced from the People whose lives are the only real embodiment of any rights and considers them in a pantomime of scientific reasoning.  As the present day Supreme Court of the United States proves, that legalistic pantomime has the ability to even break away from its scientific model and to deny the reality of even very good and desperately important science such as the science of human caused climate change.  The bomb, that "greatest thing in history" was only ever at the service of humans exercising political and legal power, the bomb of secularism is probably the stronger and more destructive force it will serve. 

*  I will insert this update because it occurred to me that a good model of that might be Stalinism before Stalin became paranoid in the typical way and turned against and started murdering even Marxist Jews.  Though, perhaps, what that shows is that eventually every gangster government will turn to the typical forms of murder of the expected groups.  You don't need a biological excuse for that.