Presentation
Presbyterian Peacemaking Dinner
Denver, Colorado
May 25, 2003
Robert F. Smylie

Peacemaking: The Believers’ Calling, adopted in 1980, and the foundation of the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program, calls the church and its members to be faithful to the Biblical vision of peace. In affirming that peacemaking is the calling of believers, it makes three assertions: we are faithful to Jesus Christ when we are engaged as peacemakers; we are obedient to Christ when we are nurturing Christians as peacemakers as individuals and in community; and we are bearing witness to Christ when we nourish the moral life of the nation for the sake of peace in the world. At this time in history when there are wars and rumors of war, we are sorely tested to examine our responsibilities as peacemakers, the role of our religious community in nurturing discipleship, and the moral issues to which we should be bearing witness.

As Peacemaking: The Believers’ Calling reminds us, our response is to be grounded in our faith, not our fears, strong as those may be in light of the crimes committed on September 11, 2001, and as manipulated as those fears may be in the public arena. Herbert Butterfield, British historian-philosopher, has pointed out that the “dominion of fear” has been one of the most devastating forces in history, because it causes individuals and nations to act with irrationality.

When first invited to make this presentation, the theme suggested was: Living Faithfully in a Global Arena. On reflection, I wondered whether the theme skewed the issue. The term “arena” carries with it the sense of involvement in a combat zone, whether gladiatorial, sport or war. Part of our political mind-set indeed fosters adversarial, win-lose, living. I want us instead to think about how to live faithfully in a global neighborhood. Shifting the terms is not meant to suggest that neighborhoods do not have conflict, but the goals sought are different. Desiring to ground this presentation in a commitment to the United Nations, let me call to mind the goals set forth by “we the peoples” in the Preamble to the UN Charter:

to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war … to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights … to establish conditions for the international rule of law … and to promote social progress and better standards of life …

These goals are as relevant today as when first formulated — perhaps even more so. The Preamble goes on to suggest that to achieve these ends, we are to “…live together in peace with one another as good neighbors.” A global neighborhood! One must ask, therefore, as was asked of Jesus: “Who are my neighbors?”

As I further reflected, particularly in light of the events of the past two years and the directions of our foreign and military policies and practices, and the rhetoric that has, I believe, overwhelmed us, it seemed that living faithfully depends on having sound theology. I reviewed voices of history that I have encountered through several decades of thinking about the influence of heresy on our foreign policy. I want to share some of this with you today.

At the outset a few generalizations! There is a constant interaction between religion and world affairs. Almost every world problem or conflict situation has religious, ethical and moral dynamics and dimensions.

In addition, religious thought — whether in the form of theological presuppositions, or worldviews — has played throughout history a critical role in shaping the policies of nations and states. This holds true for United States foreign policy. The connection may be played out on three levels — first, the trappings of civil religion often substituted for authentic faith; second, the unconscious, ingrained value patterns that are not fully articulated; and third, the deliberate usage of doctrine, religious symbols or institutions, for the policy ends of the state.

Now heresy, by definition, is the deviation or perversion of orthodox doctrine or teaching. On the positive side I would submit as a Christian that our theology — properly understood — should be instructive regarding our country’s policies and practice. Heresies by contrast are not a sound basis for foreign policy. It is a standard assumption of the social sciences, however, that a premise need not be right for it to become operative, that is, to become the basis for decision-making and action. In foreign policy terms this may inspire adventurism and/or spell disaster.

Let us look briefly at the theological understandings that should give us guidance — that should be yardsticks by which things are measured.

Our Christian-Protestant-Reformed tradition is dominated by two central themes that are embodied in our confessions, our church constitution, and are interwoven in the policy statements of our General Assemblies. These are, first, the nature of God as expressed in God’s sovereignty and love; and the revelation of that love in the redeeming, reconciling ministry of Jesus Christ.

That God is Love and that God is Lord are our most common Christian expressions. Each of these concepts has its implications for our life.

The first concept provides the basis for a conception of a human family. The binding ingredient of a family is (or should be) love — always reconciling, renewing, revaluing human life. I believe love can be the basis of world community.

The second concept — that God is sovereign Lord — is political in nature. It means, as is stated in our church Constitution, that no area of life — personal, social, political or economic — is beyond God’s rule, judgment or redemption. It means that other powers are relative. It means that it is idolatrous to give ultimate allegiance to any political, social, or economic system. Let me be clear, idolatry is not a heresy — it is a direct denial of and challenge to God’s sovereignty. The doctrine of God’s sovereignty has provided, through the evolution of our political systems, for the ideas of both the limited state and of freedom of conscience that are so deeply imbedded in our political tradition. These seem so much at risk in contemporary life. We are witnessing the weakening of our political checks and balances, intrusions on our civil liberties, and intimidations on public discussion.

The second theme — the compassionate, redeeming, reconciling ministry of Christ — is reflected in the Biblical calls to discipleship, namely: to be ambassadors of reconciliation (II Corinthians 5:16-21); to minister to those in need (Matthew 25:31-46); to be advocates for the oppressed (Luke 4:18-19); to be stewards of the earth (Genesis 1:26-31); and the ever present call to be peacemakers. All combine to affirm that faithfulness means working for a peace that can be characterized by justice, freedom and compassionate order. [Peacemaking: The Believers’ Calling] These are also described in our Book of Order as the responsibilities of faithful members of the church. [G-5.0102]

How much of our daily conscience thinking is regularly influenced by our faith-based responsibilities, as over against the pressures and emotions of religious nationalism? Witness the call to war during the post 9/11 service in the National Cathedral, despite the beginning and ending of that service with the admonition to return no one evil for evil. Or think of the national civil religion observance of Memorial Day.

Would it be presumptuous to suggest either that we have forgotten the essentials of our faith in our fear, or that we have become preoccupied more with justifying war than building a just peace?

I would like to examine a half dozen heretical constructs: Manicheanism, gnosticism, antinomianism, millennialism, messianism and Machiavellianism. The purpose of this exercise is to help us recognize in theological terms the forces that may be shaping our national policies, now, as well as historically. I want to present these in the form of propositions. In logic a proposition is a matter to be presented and analyzed in the quest for understanding. It also provides a presenter, “plausible deniability.”

First: Manicheanism is long-standing tradition that offers a dualistic worldview, reflecting a struggle between the polarities of light and darkness, goodness and evil, right and wrong. As a religious movement it emerged as a rival of Christianity. It had a complicated mythology. Mani, the founder, drew elements from Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Gnosticism and Zoroastrianism. Only the student of the esoteric would care about the details. Nevertheless, manichean thought is much with us today — in both secular and Christian forms.

Modern Manicheanism simplifies and politicizes our conceptual framework. The world is turned into “good guys and bad guys,” the forces of good and evil. Inevitably, we identify ourselves with the good, our opponents with evil. The Manichean approach creates the arena for combating the enemy in absolute terms, calling, if not for total destruction, at least, for total surrender. Since the tragic crimes committed 9/11/01, other countries have been warned by the United States: you are either for us or against us. Domestically it has been argued that internal dissent implies support for or identification with the enemy; witness the renewed process of blacklisting.

Once, our fear of “communism” and our relationship with the Soviet Union were conceived in these terms. The Soviet Union was dubbed “ the evil empire,” driving a costly nuclear arms race that threatened all humanity. Most recently the national enmity has been transformed into a cosmic struggle, a war to “end evil, ” with a more tangible embodiment in an “axis of evil,” an open-ended grouping of countries whose leaders or policies the United States does not like. And terrorism is to be destroyed, though its definition remains imprecise because the right to use violence is still to be reserved.

One consequence of Manichean thinking is that we are tempted to play God. When we let ourselves believe that some group is so evil, and by definition irredeemable — so outside the pale of God’s salvation — that it can and must be destroyed, we have the formula for a crusade, or a holy war. We arrogate to ourselves the right to make ultimate decisions about salvation. We must destroy in order to save! While the use of the term “crusade” has been muted since its original post 9/11 usage, much of the language, as Larry Rasmussen has argued, remains “crusade” language, i.e. absolutes and ultimatums.

We assume that our enemies are God’s enemies. The Hebrew Scripture’s concept of the enemy should be instructive. Israel assumed before the Exile that its enemies were God’s enemies, until God did the unthinkable. God used Israel’s enemies to punish Israel. We forget, as Israel did, the message of the prophets that we are all God’s enemies when we fail to do justice, love mercy, and walk with humility. We forget that when we dehumanize the enemy we risk dehumanizing ourselves. Our hi-tech warfare allows us to destroy without human contact. Civilian casualties are “collateral damage,” a term that in effect is one of de-humanization! Accidents happen!

Diplomatically, by now, we should have learned how difficult it is to seek better relations with those we have branded as evil. The current axis includes North Korea, Syria, and Cuba. Having decades ago branded North Korea and Cuba as implacable evil enemies the United States, as the greater power, has found itself impotent to take the first step to reach out in efforts at reconciliation.

George Kennan made a point about enemies when he wrote in his 1957 book, American Diplomacy:

“... it is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.”

And Herbert Butterfield has suggested that countries preoccupied with security driven by fear in time become threats to the security of other countries.

Second: Millennialism is often a by-product of Manichean thinking. Theologically it almost always leads to consideration of the doctrine of the last things, or eschatology. How will the battle end? In our Christian tradition this has often been expressed through millennialism, and in anticipation of Armageddon. For decades, the possibility of a nuclear holocaust has propelled our thinking in this direction. Until the atomic era, the battle of Armageddon was a vision of a mythical, futuristic end — often forecast, never realized. Today a nuclear Armageddon is realizable. Even with current anticipated reductions, remaining nuclear arsenals provide overkill, and “mini-nukes” are on the drawing boards. One form of “millennial” thinking has it that the second coming of Christ will be preceded by the battle of Armageddon. The battle will be the ultimate struggle between good and evil. This view has been popularized and politicized in recent decades, fanned by the preaching of some fundamentalists and the writings of some sensationalists. It is found currently in the best-selling twelve volume “Left Behind” series on Armageddon. According to some readings, the Middle East will be the battleground. The establishment of the State of Israel is perceived as a sign of the imminent coming. This may be one reason US policy is more supportive of the survival of Israel than it is of justice for the Palestinians.

But we now have difficulties! Two candidates for the beast, the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein, are no longer with us. What is next? Fear and misunderstanding of Islam, as well as of the Arab world, keep alive language that came into play a decade ago, thanks to Samuel Huntington of Harvard. The next world struggle will be a “clash of civilizations.” While originally broad in scope, the options seem to have narrowed to a conflict between the “Christian” west, and the Islamic-Arab world.

For true believers, anticipation of the battle of Armageddon, embodying the fulfillment of God’s promises, removes any basic understanding of human responsibility or accountability either to end the nuclear arms race, or to improve relations with those perceived as enemies, or to seek even deeper cultural and religious understanding.

Third: Gnosticism, a much more complex worldview, closely related to Manicheanism, poses a number of challenges, but is harder for us to understand and interpret. One formulation is very clear. In Gnosticism, the world — matter, life — is not redeemable. It is inherently evil, and the evil is absolute. It is not created by God. Therefore God’s sovereignty over it is denied and thus God can offer no salvation. Salvation therefore can only come from human activity/knowledge.

Gnosticism has given rise to several familiar points of view, despite its contradictions.

First, there is the supposition that knowledge can lead us out of perdition. This under girds the contemporary expectation that scientific pursuits will yield a technological solution that can provide us perfect safety and security in an evil world. Witness the endless pursuit of weapons development, both defensive and offensive, including the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), and its latest incarnation, the Missile Defense Initiative, and the development of mini-nukes designed to free us from the fear and reticence of using maxi-nukes.

Second, there is the belief that one person or some group of persons can discover and appropriate the absolute and total truth. Jonathan Schell suggests, “only a generation that believed itself to be in possession of final, absolute truth could ever conclude it had reason to put an end to human life.” Since Vietnam we have followed the logic that we can and must destroy in order to save, with the certainty that we know what salvation is all about.

Third, there is an assumption of ”innocence.” People can live in the midst of evil — even do evil — but never lose their innocence. 9/11 caused us to reexamine many things. But if the question “Why?” was asked at all, it was met with a dismissive condescension: only the envious or jealous would stoop to such dastardly deeds, which was both an assertion of our superiority and our innocence. Gary Wills has traced this deeply rooted tradition of “America the Innocent.” Walter A. McDougall, in his history: Promised Land, Crusader State, cites the effort of some to describe all of the “bad” things that America has done through its history (slavery, racism, decimation of the Native Americans, Hiroshima, support for dictatorial regimes, etc.) with a justifiable criticism that such an approach neglects the good that has also been part of our history. The issue is not the balance of history between good and evil, but the attitude of innocence that is maintained in light of the down side of our history. Somehow it seems that, despite the evidence, the nation has not known sin and cannot commit it. If public analysis does concede that the US may have done anything wrong in the past, it is usually cushioned by the rationale that we were seeking a greater, honorable good.

Fourth: Antinomianism — another ancient heresy — has also re-emerged with contemporary ramifications. Originally antinomianism also involved certain dualisms and the conflicts that characterized them, e.g. between Biblical concepts of law and grace, where law was associated with evil, grace with good. Those who identified themselves as good came in time to believe that they were above the law in dealing with evil. Tragically this arrogation can be co-opted or manipulated by both those who use terrorism to accomplish political goals, as well as those who argue that the response to terror is a use of violence not bound by the canons of international law or justice.

John Adams saw the risk when he wrote to Thomas Jefferson:

“Power always thinks it has great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws.”

Is it paradox, irony or hubris that a country can argue for the sanctity of the international rule of law, can claim to be its defenders and the judges in determining who violates it, and yet refuse to be bound by it? The US National Security Strategy Paper, promulgated last year, winds up with the argument that the US will not accept such things as the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and that our own law will protect us from such interference.

Fifth: Messianism is an expression of the concept of chosenness, the idea of being the chosen people, social messianism, has affected the foreign policies of many nations, including the United States. The Biblical struggle over the concept has to do with whether the chosen-ness of Israel, or later the Christian community, was for recognized merit or for some divine purpose, not necessarily dependent on the unique worth of the chosen.

The risky assumptions of societies or sects with a chosen-people tradition often include:

First, a concept that all people will be blessed in the fulfillment of the destiny of one particular people. The concept of “Manifest Destiny” is a standard feature in the teaching of American History. Its current vogue is that all will be blessed by the adoption of our systems of “democracy and market.”

And second, a sense that nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of that fulfillment. Stated United States military policy is to prevent any country or coalition of countries from ever being able to challenge our superior power.

The victims of this strain of theological exceptionalism are, of course, strewn throughout history.

Sixth: Machiavellianism is not normally listed with standard heresies or theological abuses, but I believe it might be among them. Perhaps it is because Machiavelli arrived late on the scene and because he was only a political-military advisor to the courts, not a cleric or theologian.

Machiavellianism emerged as a form of idolatry, an assumption that power is the primary reality, the source of greatness and meaning; wherefore, the existence and power of the state are paramount. Therefore, power is to be sought as an end. The end justifies the means. Might makes right. The implication is that justifiable ends require immoral means in order to achieve a greater good, which good then confers its own justification. The sovereignty of God is denied. The leader ‘s prerogatives do not rest on virtue but on the assertion of power. The “Prince” knows no law beyond his own will and power. The leader, in popular terms, cannot be a wimp.

For Machiavelli, a Roman Catholic, religion’s social value was as an instrument of the state. The forms of civil religion go hand in hand with state policy. Christian virtues of mercy, humility, forgiveness, and the like are cast aside. The resultant secularized religion has no spiritual corrective. For the Reformed tradition, the use of just[ifiable] war criteria has been one method the church has to monitor and critique the actions of the state, not primarily to justify them. While the tradition has been used by the state, and often misappropriated, to my knowledge, never before in modern history has it been used to make the case for preemptive war.

The late Senator William Fulbright warned of the arrogance of power: He spoke of a uniformity of history:

“[P]ower tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations — to make them richer and happier and wiser, to make them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take for itself omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God’s will.”

Note, I am not arguing that evil acts and actions have not and do not occur. I am not arguing that the United States and those who have power have no responsibility or accountability in responding. The questions are more, “How and under what conditions does response take place? With what restraint and accountability? What is the self-image that is portrayed to the world and to which the world responds? What are the civic values upon which actions are claimed to be based? How are these measured by the values that we derive from our Christian heritage?”

The discomfort with power in a democracy is real. Reinhold Niebuhr provides a spin-doctoring solution. “The idea that we have a right to rule because of our superior value is of a higher order that the amoral idea that we have a right to rule because of our power.” Therefore we obviously claim a higher level of virtue.

This gives no cause for discarding “morality.” Not at all. It is just that our understanding of morality, of justice and truth, needs to be grounded in a proper understanding of our faith and not in a heedless acting out of our heresies.

We should remember the admonition of Niebuhr:

“If we should perish ... the primary cause would be that the strength of a great nation was directed by eyes too blind to see. And the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature but by hatred and vainglory.”

To me, the authentic Christian tradition looks in comparison more inviting and more fruitful.

Herbert Butterfield has a chapter on “Human Nature and the Dominion of Fear.” [International Conflict in the Twentieth Century] He ends it with a reminder to Christians: “… when the world is in extremities the doctrine of love becomes the ultimate measure of our conduct.” In this he echoed the words of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, writing about the Sovereignty of God, in an address published in 1942 in his book: The Hope of a New World.

“The Kingdom of God is the Sovereignty of Love — since God is Love…if God is Love, then Love is the ultimate power of the universe, and every purpose or policy prompted by Love…will reach its fulfillment, whatever the sacrifices that may first be required of it, because it is allied with the supreme power. But the proclamation that God is Love is not only a source of consolation; it is also a principle of judgment; for every purpose or policy that is alien from love and is based on selfishness or acquisitiveness is bound to end in disaster, because it is resisting the supreme power …

“The Kingdom of God is the Sovereignty of Love and the subordination of power to Love is the principle of that Kingdom.”

This is our affirmation every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, our affirmation of faithfulness, and end with the words: “For thine is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever. Amen.”

Copyright May 25, 2003 Robert F. Smylie