Preface: These two lectures–one posted today (Monday, Feb. 27, 2017) and the other to be posted later this week–were delivered at Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas on Feb. 23 and 24 of this year (2017). I promised to post them here partly because some people were only able to hear one of the two lectures and they do constitute one lecture in two parts.

“Can a Bridge Be Built between the Christian Political Ethics of Reinhold Niebuhr and Stanley Hauerwas?”

The Currie-Strickland Distinguished Lectures in Christian Ethics

Howard Payne University 2017

Part One

Roger E. Olson

Common sense says only trained and expert engineers should try to build bridges; “Theologians: Hands Off!” goes without saying. We theologians and theological ethicists hardly know anything about bridges. Fortunately, however, the bridge I seek to build is one not even an engineer would attempt to build. Unfortunately, it might be impossible even for a theologian. Please bear with me as I explain.

A little later I will describe in a bit more detail the challenges faced by anyone who would attempt to unite or even find a shaky via media between the two greatest Christian theological ethicists of the past fifty to one hundred years: Reinhold Niebuhr and Stanley Hauerwas. For now I will only say that some who are very familiar with their works in political ethics, the subject of both men’s life’s endeavors, would consider such a task impossible and such a quest nothing less insane than that of fabled Don Quixote jousting at windmills. It would be difficult to name any two more different, some would say incommensurate ethical philosophies than those of Niebuhr and Hauerwas. Niebuhr would probably be spinning in his grave at the very thought and I don’t even want to picture how Hauerwas might react to the news that someone is trying to find some commensurability between his and Niebuhr’s political ethics.

And yet, I feel compelled to undertake this seemingly impossible task. Call it my “impossible dream,” but, like the mythical Quixote, I can’t help it. I simply must try. Here’s why. When I first encountered the ethical thought of Niebuhr during my doctoral studies under Christian ethicist James Sellers at Rice University I was simply awe struck—not only by Niebuhr’s words but also by his personality. Over the years since then I have devoured everything Niebuhr wrote and almost everything written about him. One of my most prized possessions, a holy relic, if you will, is my copy of Time magazine’s 25^th anniversary issue dated March 8, 1948 featuring a cover portrait of Niebuhr. According to the author of one of the most recent volumes about Niebuhr’s political ethic, Time’s publisher Henry Luce personally chose Niebuhr to grace that special issue’s cover. There can be very little doubt that Niebuhr was the most influential American Christian theologian and ethicist of the twentieth century. And he is highly regarded in Europe, something that cannot be said of very many American thinkers.

My first exposure to Niebuhr was his small but powerful book An Interpretation of Christian Ethics which was published in 1935—at the height of Niebuhr’s rise to fame and influence. I read it first in about 1978 and have read it many times since. Even though Niebuhr later repudiated some of what he wrote then, I believe it still represents the key ideas of his ethical system. Niebuhr changed his mind about many details during his career which spanned the decades of the 1920s through the 1960s, but he never changed his mind about the central ideas of what he called “prophetic religion” and its application to the political life of humanity.

In brief, whenever I read Niebuhr, even if I disagree with a particular stance he took vis-à-vis a particular issue, I find myself deeply moved to profound agreement with his basic impulses. Niebuhr was one of about five great Christian thinkers who, through their writings, liberated me from the cave of fundamentalist separatism and apocalyptic indifference. To me Niebuhr’s is a voice in Christian social ethics that is both prophetic and realistic, both challenging and comforting.

I am not alone. Almost every presidential candidate since the 1960s has mentioned Niebuhr when asked to name a great thinker who has influenced him or her. When the U.S. invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in the early days of this century many people asked “What would Niebuhr say?” Every year one or two books are published with titles like Why Niebuhr Now?—the specific title of the recent volume I mentioned earlier by John Patrick Duggins. Niebuhr seems to be the eternal “Come Back Kid” and, like the Energizer Bunny, his influence goes on and on, never running down or quitting. It is often said that Martin Luther King’s main inspiration was Mahatma Gandhi, but King himself pointed to Niebuhr as his main influence.

All that is simply to say that, together with a host of other Christian ethicists, both professional and non-professional, both scholarly and non-scholarly, I find in Niebuhr my modern muse, my modern guide, my modern conscience.

But, having sung Niebuhr’s praises, now I must explain why my current undertaking is understandably seemingly hopeless if not just downright insane. I also agree with Stanley Hauerwas! Now wait. If there are any persons hearing or reading this who are knowledgeable about both modern Christian ethics and psychopathology they might assume I’m a divided personality, a split personality. Or simply confused. Stanley Hauerwas, now in his retirement from Duke Divinity School, who also taught at the University of Notre Dame, has made much of his reputation at the expense of Niebuhr! But more about that in a minute. First, two brief sketches of Hauerwas the man and Niebuhr the man for those who may not know about them.

I never met Niebuhr who died when I was just out of high school. I wish I could have met  him. I have met and interviewed people who knew him including some of his students who tell me they called him, even to his face, “Reinie.” He was by all accounts a unique personality and teacher at Union Theological Seminary. I have met Hauerwas twice in person and corresponded with him a few times by e-mail. I have heard him speak several times. He is, by all accounts, “salty.” That is, he is a somewhat prickly person who also loves a good joke and laughs at himself. If Niebuhr was the quintessential 1950s buttoned-down but affable mainline seminary professor, Hauerwas is the quintessential Texas bricklayer-turned-university professor who breaks all categories and stereotypes. He says he cannot help it if he occasionally, even in a high academic setting, lets fly a profanity or two in the middle of discussing Thomas Aquinas or some other angelic doctor of the academy or church.

Time magazine did not grace any cover with Hauerwas’s portrait or photo, but it did in 2001 call him “America’s best theologian.” When asked to respond the then Duke professor said simply “’Best’ is not a theological category.”

My first exposure to Hauerwas’s own writing was the published version of his prestigious 2001 Gifford Lectures entitled With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology. Before quite finishing the book I literally threw it away. I think it may be the only book I have ever simply discarded, consigning it perhaps not to flames but to the trash bin. Put bluntly, it angered me. But it angered me enough to plant a seed in my mind that would not stop germinating and growing and bearing fruit. Eventually I returned to Hauerwas’s writings and have devoured as much as I have been able to. He is and has been an even more prolific writer than Niebuhr if that’s possible. Recently I asked him how many doctoral dissertations he has guided. His guesstimate is about seventy-five, beating the record among theologians held by the late Langdon Gilkey of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Today there is a whole tribe of Hauerwasians teaching Christian social and political ethics at places like Baylor University.

Among the retired Duke Divinity School professor’s other influential books are the even better known Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony and The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics. Last year, in 2016, he published a volume of essays under the title The Work of Theology. At age 76 he is still active in writing and speaking and especially promoting his version of Christian pacifism largely inspired by Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder.

So why did I angrily discard With the Grain of the Universe in 2002 after having read only about two third to three fourths of the book? As I said earlier, much of Hauerwas’s reputation has been built on his offering, sometimes stringently and with harsh criticism, an alternative vision of Christian social and political ethics to Niebuhr’s. Niebuhr is Hauerwas’s nemesis. Not the man Niebuhr, of course, against whom Hauerwas has no axe to grind, but Niebuhr’s so-called “Christian Realism” in ethics which Hauerwas considers a profound betrayal of authentic Christianity. In fact, what finally caused me to discard the book was that in it Hauerwas declares Niebuhr not a Christian. Only later did I calm down enough to realize, or at least hope, that Hauerwas did not mean my hero was unsaved. What he meant, I now take it, after reading the whole book and the ensuing conversations it provoked about Niebuhr, is that Niebuhr’s social and political ethic, but also his theological foundations, are not Christian.

So here is my dilemma and the challenge I face in these two lectures: Might it be possible to agree with both Niebuhr and Hauerwas—possibly, even probably against their wishes—and discover a via vedia, a middle way, that takes the best of both and leaves behind the worst of both? Or are these two grand and extremely influential systems of Christian social and political ethics truly and hopelessly incommensurate? If the latter is the case, then I probably need a therapist because I find myself in deep agreement with both of them—about certain key ideas in each.

My task, then, is a Hegelian one, to say nothing of a Herculean one. I don’t feel up to it, but, to the best of my knowledge, nobody else is even attempting it. It is simply assumed by everyone that it cannot be done, that Niebuhr’s and Hauerwas’s social and political ethics are so incommensurate as to exist on different planets or in different dimensions. No bridge can be built between them that will not crumble and collapse as soon as anyone attempts to cross it in either direction.

German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, of course, believed in the coincidence of opposites. For him, universal history is the process of syntheses arising out of theses and antitheses. He called the process Aufhebung—a German word without an English translation. Most translators use “sublation” to translate or interpret it. For Hegel it is the inevitable clash between two competing ideas resulting in their inevitable mutually corrective unification in a higher idea. While I do not agree with Hegel that this is the key to interpreting all of history and culture or that we should call the process “Absolute Spirit” coming to “Self-realization,” I do tend to think that some seemingly absolute contradictory ideas can find sublation, mutually corrective unification, if we put our minds to it.

I find much truth in both Niebuhr and Hauerwas and, against all good advice and caution, I forge ahead to explore whether it might be possible, without falling into utter contradiction, to create a synthesis of their systems of Christian social and political ethics.

So, on to Niebuhr’s key social and political ethical ideas and why Hauerwas considers them unchristian and I do not. I necessarily must be concise.

Put most bluntly and concisely, Niebuhr believed this world, by which he meant the social systems developed by humankind and the institutions that express and sustain them, is so fallen and corrupt, that responsible and effective Christian involvement in them, no matter how well-intentioned, will always require compromise of Jesus’s ethical perfectionism and reliance on non-Christian philosophies to establish even a modicum of justice. And he believed that it is essential for the good of humanity, especially the weak, the vulnerable, the oppressed, that at least some Christians take the risk of soiling their souls with compromise with non-Christian, imperfect, even sinful systems of political life and that, if they do so with eyes wide open and hearts full of repentance, God will forgive them. That’s it in a nutshell. Niebuhr’s approach to Christian social and political ethics has been labeled “Christian Realism.” That’s because Niebuhr intended to be realistic about human nature—especially as it plays out in complex social and political systems such as corporations, governments, and nation states.

The key point of conflict with Hauerwas, according to Hauerwas himself, is Niebuhr’s endorsement of so-called just war theory. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg; what lies beneath the surface in terms of Niebuhr’s whole view of human nature and political life is more important or at least must be taken into account in attempting to understand his defense of some wars. I say “some wars,” because, contrary to some of his critics, Niebuhr was not a warmonger or even a defender of righteous military crusades; he didn’t believe in any such thing. What he thought was that some wars, and some other conflicts involving violence, are sometimes regrettably necessary and forgivable because they are necessary.

So what lies beneath the surface of the “iceberg” of Niebuhr’s whole Christian social and political ethic? Let’s begin with his view of humanity. Let a few of his more pungent maxims express it: “There is no act of man that is not tainted with egoism” and “Love everyone; trust no one” and “There is no greater pathos in the history of humankind than the cruelty of righteous people.” I could go on. Hopefully you get the point. Niebuhr almost single-handedly resurrected the doctrines of original sin and total depravity within a modern, even neo-liberal Christian theological framework. He did not believe in inherited sin or a historical fall or that every person is evil and deserving of hell. To him, the story of the fall of humanity, of Adam and Eve, in Genesis 3 is myth—a narrative expression of a universal truth about humanity. Original sin, Niebuhr argued, is simply a fundamental fact of human nature and existence, but it has no beginning or source. It just is. And it takes many forms but the most basic ones are selfishness and pride.

Niebuhr was swimming against the stream of liberal Protestant theology that dominated American Christian social and political ethics from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. That dominant Protestant social and political ethic has been called “The Social Gospel.” Its most notable representative was Baptist minister and theologian Walter Rauschenbusch. Niebuhr complained that it was overly optimistic about human nature and overly optimistic about the “infinite perfectibility of man.” To many Social Gospelers the Kingdom of God, a utopian society organized by love, was just a generation away and could be brought about by love of enemies which included passive non-resistance to evil. After all, in his Sermon on the Mount Jesus said “Resist not the evil doer.”

Niebuhr thought he saw how the optimistic Social Gospel played into the hands of oppressors, the so-called Robber Barons, the captains of industry who mistreated their workers. And he thought he saw it weakening the ability of Great Britain and America to stand up against the rising tides of Fascism and Communism in Europe. For Niebuhr, Jesus’s love ethic, as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount and in other teachings, is an “impossible ideal”—something other worldly to strive for but never claim to reach. It serves as a prophetic critical principle especially for Christian effective involvement in shaping relatively just social and political systems, but it is impossible to achieve in human, historical systems. An individual, filled with the Spirit of God, might occasionally and for a while show perfect love to another person, but as soon as people organize their social life into complex systems, justice replaces love as the highest achievable ideal. But love is not thereby ignored or discarded—something many of Niebuhr’s critics somehow overlook. For him, Jesus’ love perfectionism always hovers over all our best achievements of justice calling them to greater and higher achievements.

But, for Niebuhr, no human social system will ever be organized according to love alone and to think so is to fall into delusion and eventual complacency. Love is transcendent; it is a gift and not an achievement. And human nature is too finite and fallen ever, before the coming of God’s kingdom, which only God can bring about, to establish a social order on the basis of love. “Justice,” Niebuhr often said, “is the closest approximation of love under the conditions of sin.” And sin is ever present and profoundly corrupting all power.

The second aspect of the submerged iceberg of Niebuhr’s social and political ethic is his assumption that social and political effectiveness is an essential good and goal of the Christian calling. Not every Christian is called to be involved directly in social transformation for the cause of justice, but some Christians are so called and it is important that the churches support them and join in their endeavors. For example, when Niebuhr pastored Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit in the 1920s he frequently invited labor union leaders to speak from his pulpit. That was at a time when labor unions were relatively new and highly controversial and necessary, at least according to Niebuhr, for ameliorating the unrestrained greed of the auto industries.

Niebuhr simply assumed that since Christians, both individuals and churches, acquired social and political power, they would be irresponsible to avoid using it for the cause of justice—even if that means compromising the perfect love that even Niebuhr believed Jesus taught and called for. Remember, for Niebuhr, the love that Jesus taught and called for is perfect love for the other—love that has no strings attached but it pure benevolence for others. Niebuhr agreed with the Social Gospelers and Anabaptists who argued that such love requires non-violence, even non-resistance. But he thought that would require withdrawal from effective involvement for justice for the poor, the vulnerable, the oppressed. Sure, he agreed, one could still follow the Salvation Army creed of “Soup, Soap, and Salvation,” that is charity, but when it has power and influence to steer the course of history and bend the arc of the universe toward justice, the church, as well as individual Christians, must get its hands dirty and make the best of the filthy tools of politics. To do otherwise is to abdicate responsible use of power for the sake of remaining pure—which is really not possible in this life anyway.

Now, admittedly, a stronger biblical case can be made for the first aspect of Niebuhr’s submerged iceberg of social and political thought—the finitude and fallenness of humanity. Psalm 14, quoted in part by Paul in Romans 3, supports it—as does human history itself. Even those of us who are not quite so cynical as to claim that there is no human act untainted by egoism can and perhaps must agree with Niebuhr that humanity is incapable of perfection. One of Niebuhr’s harshest critics was Friends (that is, Quaker) theologian Rachel Hadley King who, in her 1964 book The Omission of the Holy Spirit in the Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr claimed that the great ethics professor forgot about the elevating power of the Holy Spirit in human life. Niebuhr, however, would simply have swept aside her critique as irrelevant to social ethics. One of Niebuhr’s most influential early books was his 1932 classic Moral Man and Immoral Society in which he argued that, while individuals may act ethically, even if not perfectly, it is simply too much to expect collective systems such as institutions, corporations and nation states to act ethically—without extreme pressure. The Social Gospelers had called for the “salvation of institutions” as if corporations and nation states could act lovingly, without self-interest. For Niebuhr, the Holy Spirit is simply not relevant in social and political ethics except as a motivator and energizer—to drive Christians and churches to take the risks of effective involvement even when that means compromising with evil, advocating for the lesser of two or more evils.

I tell my students that it is impossible fully to understand any theologian or other thinker without understanding his or her social context. One cannot understand Niebuhr without understanding the social and political context of the 1930s. Niebuhr’s parents were German immigrants. Interestingly, to me, anyway, they came from the same German town my ancestors came from and settled in the same Illinois town where my ancestors settled—at about the same time. They belonged to the same denomination. I suspect they knew each other. Niebuhr traveled to Germany much and saw and heard with his own eyes and ears the Nazi and other fascist demonstrations. He knew what Hitler and other monsters had planned for Jews and other Untermenschen and for the whole of Europe—to make it Lebensraum (“living space”) for the German master race. He was convinced of the inherent evil and violence growing at the heart of Fascism and also of Communism in the Soviet Union. Back in the U.S. he worked overtime to convince mainline Protestant pastors and lay people, pacifists under the sway of the Social Gospel, to support America’s involvement together with France and Great Britain in stopping especially Fascism including Naziism. The mood of the country, however, was against Niebuhr in this; he was a voice crying in the wilderness. Much of his fame can be attributed to the fact that he turned out to be right—at least about Europe.

Niebuhr believed it was the duty of thoughtful, reflective, responsible, world-wise Christians to work effectively together with non-Christians for the cause of justice even if that meant confrontation, conflict and occasionally violence in response to violence. But he made no pretense that these were consistent with Jesus’s love ethic. So, he made Jesus’s love ethic as taught in the Sermon on the Mount a “counsel of perfection,” a critical principle impossible of real implementation in the rough and tumble of social and political life. And he made the Kingdom of God transcendent and eschatological, impossible of achievement by human effort.

The point of all this is simply that for Niebuhr Christian social and political ethics requires use of extra-biblical reason, of philosophy, of political maneuvering, even of conflict, confrontation and occasionally of violence. It requires doing things Jesus would not have done, although he could point to Jesus’s cleansing of the temple as a hint that even Jesus was not immune from violence when a law higher than man’s requires it because of the sinfulness of humanity.

My own reading of Niebuhr leads me to believe his critics are simply wrong when they claim that he was an “apologist for power,” a “warmonger,” and a person, perhaps a Christian, who wrongly thought Jesus’s teachings are irrelevant to ethics. That latter claim was made, for example, by Yoder in The Politics of Jesus and I think it deeply impressed Hauerwas who was very much influenced by Yoder. Both seemed to overlook or ignore all that Niebuhr said about the ethical relevance of an impossible ideal. For Niebuhr, perfect love, agape love, disinterested benevolence, absolute non-violence, are all relevant to Christian social and political ethics in every age and every place, but they are relevant as critical principles impossible of actual achievement. Their relevance lies in their always reminding us that, with regard to justice, we can do better. Love, for example, requires Christians to show mercy to enemies they must oppose and to forgive them rather than wreak vengeance on them. Love, for example, requires repentance when we must use violence, and eschews celebrations of war and any violence.

All that does not satisfy Hauerwas, to say the least. Following hard on the heels of Yoder, influenced by him, Hauerwas has accused Niebuhr and his followers, so-called “Christian Realists,” of brushing aside Jesus in Christian social and political ethics and compromising with evil to the point of dissolving Christian witness, if not denying Christ altogether.

Referring again to the illustration of an iceberg, I will say that the tip of the iceberg for Hauerwas is peace. What does that mean? In all of his writings Hauerwas argues forcefully that peaceful existence and peace-making lie at the very center, the core, the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He is not an Anabaptist, not a member of one of the so-called “Peace Churches” that also include Friends (i.e., Quakers) who are officially pacifist. Yoder, of course, was one. He belonged to a Mennonite church. Hauerwas brought Yoder to Notre Dame after Yoder ran into difficulties at his Mennonite college and seminary. There the two, Hauerwas the Methodist and Yoder the Anabaptist, worked together and Yoder’s influence is evident in especially Hauerwas’s later writings.

As I said, I consider Niebuhr a prophet. He prophecied, forthtold, the forgotten truth of human corruption and sin manifested in egoism. He prophecied, forthtold, the necessity of Christian risk-taking in effective involvement in shaping public policy even when that requires compromising with evil for the sake of a greater good—justice. I also consider Hauerwas a prophet. Let me explain by now doing what I did with Niebuhr earlier—briefly sketching a portrait of Hauerwas’s own particular and basic Christian social and political ethic.

For Hauerwas, Christian use of deadly force is always wrong and never necessary. That is not to say he wouldn’t do it if his grandchild were being attacked; nobody knows what he would do. In principle, however, he argues that Christians should never plan or prepare for violence against other Christians, especially, but even against other human beings. Following Jesus, Christians are called by God to take the risk of eschewing violence—including planning to use violence, arming for self-defense, studying war with an eye toward engaging in it, cooperating with the violence of human institutions including nation states. For Hauerwas, pacifism is basic to Christianity since Jesus. And for him, Christianity, or “Christendom,” fell into a sinful state when it adopted Constantine as its leader and followed him and his followers, later so-called Christian emperors, in using violence.

What lies below this pacifist tip of Hauerwas’s iceberg of Christian social and political ethics? As with Niebuhr, much lies below the surface. It’s essential to see it to understand Hauerwas the prophet.

First, Hauerwas assumes that the Christian church, the people of God, is called to radical faithfulness to the ethical message of Jesus even to the point of death. A Christian is a person who, together with the church, the people of God, lives as a potential martyr for the cause of peace. But the peace Hauerwas is talking about is not the uneasy, negotiated, unstable peace of international treaties and “guaranteed mutual destruction” if weapons of mass destruction are used. No, the peace Hauerwas is talking about is the peace of Christ that passes all ordinary human understanding and is possible only because of the Holy Spirit indwelling the church of Jesus Christ. For Hauerwas, faithfulness to the way of Jesus, as spelled out in the Sermon on the Mount, takes precedence over effectiveness in shaping public policy. If the church can shape public policy toward the shalom of God through witness and prophetic speech, fine. It should do that, but ultimately the church, even individual Christians, who are really never individuals as Christians, must let go of the reigns of worldly political power and trust God to use its witness as he wishes to bend the arc of the universe toward justice. Bending the arc of the universe toward justice using worldly coercion, especially violence, is never justified for the Christian.

Below the surface, then, Hauerwas’s iceberg is composed of a strong and steady commitment to radical Christianity defined as Christian discipleship together, as a church, following the way of the cross and not the paths of worldly power. Unlike Niebuhr, Hauerwas does not believe the fact that the church and individual Christians have worldly power justifies, let alone requires, compromised use of that power to bend the arc of the universe toward justice. Such is sin, pure and simple.

Second, an aspect of the iceberg below the surface of Hauerwas’s pacifism is strong belief that Christian social ethics is the church. And the church is intended by God to be an alternative social order within the world. Christians, the church, are called to be “resident aliens,” a colony of citizens of a foreign kingdom, living in enemy occupied territory. From his perspective, and this is why he called Niebuhr non-Christian in With the Grain of the Universe, so-called Christians who compromise with evil even for the sake of justice are collaborators with evil. Jesus called his followers out of all the evil systems of this world to form a radically alternative system, a way of life, not withdrawn from the world but inserted directly into it while living according to a different charter—the Sermon on the Mount.

Third, according to Hauerwas, the Christian form of social activism is simply being the church as Christ intended it to be. For him, Christian social activism toward social transformation is called witness—the witness of the church living as a “city on a hill,” a “light to the nations,” showing God’s love in action among God’s people including peacefulness and peace-making. And, according to Hauerwas, this means being prepared to suffer rejection and even violence simply for being radically different. From a human perspective, Jesus was killed because his radically alternative social order, which he embodied, taught and actually began to organize, was a threat to worldly power. It unmasked it and showed it in all its ugliness. So the church, by its radically alternative way of life, unmasks the violence of the world showing it in all its ugliness. One of Hauerwas’s favorite lines is that one job of the church is to tell the world what it is. What is the world? It is objectively disordered, a social order based on violence.

Let’s examine a specific example of what Hauerwas means by the church showing the world itself, revealing it to itself. According to Hauerwas in his 2011 book War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity the “glue” that holds America together as one people, one nation, is not civil religion, a Judeo-Christian ethic manifested in a democractic public form of life. It is rather war. War has become the American religion; we are now always at war somewhere and we celebrate war religiously and we criticize war’s critics as if they are heretics. Our saints and martyrs are soldiers and our high priests are generals. Our sacraments are missiles and our rituals are celebrations of wars past and present. According to Hauerwas, the church’s public ethic, its social and political ethic, ought to be prophetically witnessing by example, word and deed, to the world calling it to repentance and peace. That is the way of Jesus Christ with regard to social ethics.

Now the question presses in on me: Are not these two giants of Christian social and political ethics, these two prophets of modern Christian public theology, impossibly separate, incommensurable in their thinking such that there can be no bridge between them, no via media, no synthesis of Niebuhr the thesis and Hauerwas the antithesis? So it seems—at least on the surface.

I will work on building that seemingly impossible bridge more in my second lecture. Here, for now, I will only hint at what stones might be put in place from each to build it. To start with, I will explore what the two standing on opposites sides of the gulf have in common.

First, however, let me step back and aside a moment and say this about the subject. I do think it is nearly impossible, if not completely impossible, to build such a bridge, to achieve such a via media, to discover such a synthesis, so long as we treat Niebuhr and Hauerwas as individual personalities. They certainly were and are that (or those)! They were/are giant personalities with huge egos and I don’t mean that as judgment on them. The problem I am pointing to is that of allowing their personalities and careers to get in the way of seeing some common ground in their thinking about reality. When viewed as personalities and careers they seem to live on different planets or they look like Karl Barth’s “whale and elephant” which is how he described himself and Rudolf Bultmann—both God’s creatures but unable to meet.

What I propose, for my purpose of attempting to build the bridge between them, is to treat Niebuhr and Hauerwas not as personalities but as types or modern prototypes       of two seemingly radically different approaches to what H. Richard Niebuhr called “Christ and Culture” in his deeply flawed but classic work on that subject with that title. By “that subject” I mean the relationship between Christian being in the world (“Christsein”—Christian existence) and the world’s ways of being. It is usually supposed that Reinhold Niebuhr falls into the category of “Christ and culture in tension” whereas Hauerwas falls into the category of “Christ against culture.” Of course, this is the flaw in Niebuhr’s classic book; the five categories are too static; there are too many cracks within them and between them and they dynamically fluctuate depending on the culture in which Christians live and die.

Still, and nevertheless, there is some truth and value in the Christ and culture typology. Niebuhr does tend to lean toward the “Christ and culture in tension” model exemplified by, among others, Martin Luther and mainline Lutheranism with their “two kingdoms” theory. Hauerwas does tend to lean more toward the contrarian “Christ against culture” model exemplified by classical Anabaptism. But neither fits any category perfectly and there I see some opportunities for bringing them together—not as personalities or prophetic agendas but as representatives of general approaches to Christian social and political ethics.

To build such a bridge we have to begin with common ground. What do Niebuhr and Hauerwas share in common? On the surface, it would seem not much. But that’s if we allow their personal styles and agendas to get too much in the way.

First, both were and are committed Christians, whatever Hauerwas may have said about Niebuhr. Hauerwas claims in With the Grain of the Universe that Niebuhr’s theology was naturalistic, that he did not believe in anything supernatural including the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Well, that accusation was put to rest by Niebuhr’s former student and friend Gabriel Fackre in an excellent article responding to Hauerwas about Niebuhr published in First Things. I believe there can be no question of Niebuhr’s basic Christianity. He may not have held orthodox views on every doctrinal subject and he tended to shy away from formal doctrinal theology altogether. We might even say he was probably somewhat agnostic about metaphysics generally. His focus was on and interest was in ethics. But when it comes to believing in Jesus Christ as God incarnate and in the triune God and in salvation by grace through faith by means of Christ’s atoning death, I have no doubt that Niebuhr was Christian. And his personal life was entirely consistent with Christianity unless one pre-determines that justifying violence cannot be consistent with being Christian.

Nobody I know doubts or questions Hauerwas’s status as a Christian. So let’s move on to other common ground.

Both men share a profound distrust of power in the hands of human beings. Hauerwas believes no less strongly in human sin and depravity than Niebuhr did. That cannot be taken for granted; the ghost of Social Gospel optimism about human nature, human perfectibility through education and social engineering, is not gone. It still haunts the halls of much mainline Christian academia and even the pews and pulpits of many churches. Nobody questions Niebuhr’s pessimism about humanity apart from grace, but what about Hauerwas? I once heard him answer the question “What are we as human beings?” with a single syllable word that rhymes with “quit.” So there is significant common ground. And with it comes, of course, dependence on God’s grace for everything good that we can achieve. They might disagree about the reach of sanctification into the human heart and soul, but they agree about the extent of evil in the human heart and soul apart from grace.

Finally, for now, they agree about the need for Christian concern for and involvement with the world outside the church. They agree that Christians should not be primarily concerned about heaven and hell after this life but should be concerned also and perhaps even primarily about life here and now, about peace and justice in the world. Neither Niebuhr nor Hauerwas denied or denies heaven or hell, but I suspect the latter would agree with the former that “We should not want to know too much about the furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell.” Both represent prophetic religion, specifically prophetic Christianity. And, I believe, whatever Hauerwas may say, both cared and care about America and its potential to become a light unto the nations—not because it has a “manifest destiny” from God but because it is powerful and there is good in it.

So what might the dreamed of bridge look like? I will spell that out more specifically in the second lecture, but here I will just hint at it and sketch it out very lightly as with a pencil drawing yet to be made into a blueprint (if ever that can be done!).

I believe the only way to build such a bridge is to consider ourselves under three identities: first, citizens of God’s Kingdom to come, the city of God; second, citizens of the church here and now in the “already but not yet” of the Kingdom of God; third, citizens of the city of man, the human polis that provides a common system for human living in a pluralistic world. These are not equal identities; I do not believe even Niebuhr would say so. But I agree especially with Hauerwas that the first identity is the controlling one and the second has priority over the third. But I agree with Niebuhr that the third one cannot be shrugged off or treated as irrelevant to my Christian discipleship.

With Hauerwas I regard myself as first and foremost a citizen of God’s kingdom and, with him, that involves citizenship in the people of God, the church of Jesus Christ worldwide, the alternative social order that seeks passionately to live under the rule of its master the man of peace and love Jesus Christ. But with Niebuhr I also regard myself as a citizen of the United States of America and of all humanity, called by God to “make the best of it” together with all God’s people in a world of injustice. Justice for the oppressed within the structures of the fallen world is also my concern and God has placed some small degree of power, mainly through influence, in my hands. I believe he expects me to use that power, that influence, miniscule as it is, to promote the cause of justice and that includes protecting the weak, the vulnerable and the oppressed—even from social-political predators and even sometimes by supporting force.

Now, Hauerwasians will predict that my bridge is going to be built with the stones of Niebuhr’s social and political ethic and that it will never reach the Hauerwas side of the divide. But please give me the benefit of the doubt as I add to what I already said that I do not believe compromise with evil is ever good or righteous and that the Christian’s social ethic is to help make the church the powerful witness for peace that Jesus called for in his Sermon on the Mount.

I may not be successful in building my dreamed of bridge, but I will try and I ask for your patience and understanding as I go about it. It may be a project only begun here, today, in this place, but one has to begin somewhere even with a seemingly impossible but necessary dream.

Tomorrow, in my second lecture in this series, I will talk about several Christian social and political ethicists of the past who are my guides and helpers in attempting to build the dreamed of bridge between Niebuhr and Hauerwas. Tonight, in this first lecture, I will only mention one with apologies to his numerous fans who may disagree vehemently with me that he stands “in the gap,” so to speak, between Niebuhr and Hauerwas. His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Because most of you already know something about him, I will be extremely brief.

There is no doubt that Bonhoeffer was a Christian pacifist who saw the Christian’s main citizenship as in the Kingdom of God and secondary citizenship in the church. With Hauerwas, but long before him, Bonhoeffer sought to influence the social order through the church, helping construct Germany’s Confessing Church movement in the 1930s. Bonhoeffer was a man of peace who took Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount with utmost seriousness even writing an entire commentary on it titled Nachfolge (Discipleship). In America its title is The Cost of Discipleship.

In his unfinished book Ethics, however, the German theologian introduced the distinction between the “ultimate” and the “penultimate.” I believe this all-important distinction is influenced by Niebuhr with whom Bonhoeffer studied and taught at Union Theological Seminary. The “ultimate” in Christian social and political ethics is what Jesus would do. The “penultimate” is what we sometimes must do that Jesus would not do because of our predicament of having worldly power and influence in a world of oppression and tyranny.

In the end, of course, Bonhoeffer the pacifist joined the German army in order to participate in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and bring an end to Germany’s “final solution” against the Jews and other “Untermenschen.” Those twenty-first century pacifists who claim he did not participate in a conspiracy of violence are simply wrong; his own words as well-remembered by his friend Eberhard Bethge reveal that he did with great reluctance and an agonistic attitude. Bonhoeffer never rescinded his pacifism or discarded his ultimate loyalty to the Kingdom of God and the church of Jesus Christ, but he sacrificed them on the altar of necessity, opting for the penultimate over the ultimate and trusting God to understand and forgive.

Might Bonhoeffer’s life, death and teaching about the distinction between the ultimate and the penultimate help bridge the divide between Niebuhr and Hauerwas? I think so, but there are others who also help build the bridge and I will talk more about them in tomorrow’s lecture—“part two” of this series. I hope you will attend if possible and, if that’s impossible, read it on my blog later.

The Kingdom of God as Critical Principle for Christian Social Ethics: The Church

The Maston Lectures (Lecture 1)

East Texas Baptist University

April 13, 2016

Roger E. Olson

“That action is right which fits the shape of the Kingdom to come.” John Howard Yoder

Jesus said to his disciples “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.” (John 6:33) Partly because of this somewhat enigmatic imperative, Christian theologians and ethicists have for centuries regarded the kingdom of God as the heart of Christian ethics. What are Christians to do besides repent and believe in Jesus Christ? What is the “good life,” according to Jesus himself? Seek God’s kingdom.

The imperative has given rise to many questions. First, and perhaps most important: What is “the kingdom of God?” Second, and perhaps equally important: “What does “seek” mean with regard to the kingdom of God? Most biblical scholars and theologians assume that “his righteousness,” that is, “God’s righteousness,” refers to the kingdom of God; it is an example of Hebrew parallelism. God’s righteousness, some would say “justice,” will come with God’s kingdom.

So, according to Jesus, we, his people, his followers, are to be seeking God’s kingdom—whatever that means. Our ethical task is to seek and, presumably find, God’s kingdom in and with which God’s righteousness, justice, will appear. That is our “first” task—our ethical imperative above all others, crucial to being disciples of Jesus.

But wait. If this is so important, why didn’t Jesus somewhere clearly and unequivocally define “the kingdom of God” for us? Of course, some think he did. But where? He uttered many parables about it, but nowhere in the New Testament is a clear, unequivocal definition of “kingdom of God” recorded in the way we think we need. This has given rise to numerous theological theories and Christian ethical interpretations of “kingdom of God.” Which one is right? All, or at least most, seem to have some validity; they can point to biblical passages and say “There! That’s what ‘kingdom of God’ means. It’s says so right there.”

In spite of apparent “pervasive interpretive pluralism,” however, a rough consensus seems to have emerged in the past century. By “consensus” I do not mean “unanimous agreement;” that would be too much to expect—given our human frailty when it comes to interpreting Scripture. At the beginning of every theology course I tell my students that, unfortunately, Scripture is not as clear as we wish it were—about many things. This is why we have theologians; it keeps us working. But I do not mean that Scripture is obscure, opaque, oblique, impenetrable, esoteric or so diverse as to be useless. What Jesus meant by “kingdom of God” may be debatable, but for the most part, except around the edges, it is clear.

A century ago Baptist theologian Walter Rauschenbusch published his classic exposition of the kingdom of God entitled A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). Around the same time, completely unknown to Rauschenbusch, so far as anyone knows, anyway, in Bad Boll, Germany, Lutheran Pietist minister, revivalist, faith-healer, exorcist, premillennialist, pacifist, socialist, universalist Christoph Blumhardt was expounding a similar vision of the kingdom of God. Their common breakthrough, as it were, in explaining and proclaiming the kingdom of God, was the kingdom of God as new social order organized according to love. For Rauschenbusch, it would come about through Christian activism in transforming the social order. For Blumhardt, it would come about through God’s supernatural intervention in world history to establish Jesus’ long-awaited messianic reign, but it would be a new social order manifesting love.

Both Rauschenbusch and Blumhardt were, in separate ways and differently, influenced by the great German liberal theologian Albrecht Ritschl who fifty years earlier had defined the kingdom of God as “society organized according to love.” However, Rauschenbusch and Blumhardt radically departed from Ritschl for whom the kingdom of God was identified with Prussian culture at its best. For Rauschenbusch and Blumhardt, the kingdom of God is eschatological and not to be identified with any human nation-state, although both, in their own ways, were prone to allow their cultures to infect their visions of God’s kingdom.

For a century, now, Christian theologians and ethicists have largely agreed that Jesus’s vision of the kingdom of God was of a new social order he inaugurated. It had old covenant roots in God’s ideal plan for Israel and was prophesied by Isaiah and other Hebrew prophets, but Jesus established it in himself and among his disciples. The Sermon on the Mount is its “charter.” Love is its driving motive and ethical impulse. Justice for all is its concrete evidence. It is an “upside down” kingdom in which, unlike any humanly-established social order, the meek and the weak, the least advantaged, those at the bottom of the social pyramid, are first and most important—in the sense of being cared for by everyone.

The greatest American theological ethicist, Reinhold Niebuhr, was reluctant to use “kingdom of God” as the heart of Christian social ethics because of the pacifism and inherent optimism of the Social Gospel Movement represented by Rauschenbusch and many others of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, even he could not deny that “kingdom of God” is central to Jesus’s ethical vision and that it would be, if ever experienced, a new and vital social order where love and justice reign. He simply wanted to emphasize that the kingdom of God is unachievable by human efforts of social transformation; it is gift, not achievement. I’m not at all sure Rauschenbusch would have disagreed had he lived long enough to debate Niebuhr. I think he would have added that we are to do our best to approximate the kingdom of God which, he admitted, is “always but coming.”

In 1972 Mennonite theologian and social ethicist John Howard Yoder published his own contribution to the consensus about the kingdom of God entitled The Politics of Jesus. He revised it, taking criticisms into account, in 1994. It was a critique especially of Niebuhr’s rejection of the Sermon on the Mount as a relevant and possible foundation for Christian social ethics. It was also, implicitly, at least, a critique of Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel insofar as that relied on political ideology, socialism, and social action, direct involvement in secular politics, to seek and establish the kingdom of God. According to Yoder, the kingdom of God proclaimed and inaugurated by Jesus, is a new social order marked especially by nonviolence and “revolutionary subordination” of people to each other—for the common good.

In 1991 Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas published The Peaceable Kingdom—building on and developing further Yoder’s vision of the kingdom of God as a nonviolent community of reconciled and reconciling people among whom God is “busy.”

Here I’ve only mentioned a few of the most notable voices of this century-long rough consensus about the kingdom of God according to Jesus. The consensus is not perfectly harmonious; there are strong notes of dissonance in the choir. But there is also harmony around certain crucial themes.

First, the kingdom of God was inaugurated by Jesus even if it was foreshadowed by prophets, judges and kings under the old covenant. Second, Jesus was and is the embodiment of the kingdom of God. Third, the kingdom of God is a gift with a task; God gives it and his people are to seek it. Fourth, “seeking the kingdom” involves action, not passivity; it is a gift to be received through active participation and involvement. Fifth, the kingdom of God is ultimately eschatological; its fullness is yet to come in the eschatological consummation; it is hope. Sixth, the kingdom of God is “already but not yet”; it exists now “between the times” of its inauguration and its fulfillment. Seventh, the kingdom of God is a new, divine social order. Eighth, this new divine social order is radically counter-cultural; it is alternative to all human-created social orders. Ninth, the kingdom of God is somehow related to the church; the church is intended by Jesus to be the anticipatory, proleptic social realization of God’s eschatological, messianic order. Tenth, the kingdom of God is, in the inimitable words of Donald Kraybill, “upside down;” a social order organized reversely to all solely human-created social orders.

Now, of course, there are Christian social ethicists who disagree with one, two or three, perhaps more, of those ten points, but most of the current discussion about the kingdom of God among Christian scholars surrounds the precise meanings of these points.

Questions remain and are hotly debated. For example, in his recent book The Kingdom Conspiracy (2014) evangelical New Testament scholar-turned-theologian Scot McKnight argues that the kingdom of God now, within history, is inseparable from the local church. The local church, he argues, is the kingdom of God inaugurated by Jesus. Of course, he does not mean any particular local church; he means the network of local bodies of Christ that, together, make up the universal body of Christ, the church in the world. His point is that “kingdom work” is not every “good work” Christians engage in. Rather, “kingdom work” is always work, mission, carried out within the context of the church. That thesis has sparked a new controversy even among those of us who embrace the ten-point consensus outlined before.

Another debate among consensus theologians has to do with “realism”—what is the difference between “kingdom ethics” now, the anticipation, prolepsis, of the future messianic kingdom after Jesus returns, and what will be the case then? In other words, does “seeking the kingdom” now require nonviolence or does the “not yetness” of the kingdom, surrounded by horrific injustices such as genocide, permit kingdom people to fight for justice? Liberation theologians especially often argue that, until Christ returns and the kingdom is made perfect, seeking God’s kingdom and his righteousness sometimes involves participation in force, even violence. Yoder, Hauerwas and their followers condemn such as compromise at best, denial of Jesus as lord and king at worst.

Such debates will always and forever continue because, unfortunately, Jesus himself and the New Testament writers, did not settle every question about the kingdom of God. However, it seems to me, the emergence of the ten point consensus I outlined above is a significant achievement of the last century in Christian thought.

What are the contexts in which “seeking the kingdom of God” is most crucial, at least for Christian social ethics? Well, two should be most obvious: the church and the state. Without in the least denying that individuals can and should seek the kingdom of God, I will dare to assert that the greatest challenges and opportunities for seeking and receiving the kingdom of God as gift, as well as what I will call “tasking” the kingdom of God, appear in the contexts of church and polis—state. By “tasking” the kingdom of God I mean doing what can be done with God’s help to anticipate the eschatological fullness and perfection of God’s kingdom and bring forth as much as possible in this world before then the kingdom of God inaugurated by Jesus.

Let me explain with an analogy. Sanctification, becoming holy, is both gift and task according to Paul in Philippians 2:12-13: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling for God is at work in you to will and to do for his good pleasure.” The English word “work” appears twice there. In one case it is our work; it the other it is God’s work. However, Paul wrote in Greek and these two “works” translate two different Greek words. One means “carry to completion” and then other means “to enable.” Swiss theologian Emil Brunner often referred to sanctification as Gabe und Aufgabe—gift and task. Sanctification is God’s work in us; God gives all that is needed to continue on toward perfection. Gift. Sanctification is also our work; we are to make full use of God’s gift by never giving up but using God’s empowering presence to become holy. It is a synergistic process with God’s gift as primary and our task as secondary but necessary. God will not make us holy without our cooperation.

So the kingdom of God now, within world history, between the times, in the “not yet” condition, is both gift and task. Nowhere does Scripture command us to “build the kingdom of God”—a favorite but theologically mistaken imperative of preachers to congregations. Building the kingdom of God is God’s task; ours is to seek and receive it. But seeking and receiving it involves cooperation with God through the means God has provided including especially prayer—“Thy kingdom come”—but also work—“work…for the night is coming” (John 9:4).

Assuming with the scholarly consensus that the kingdom of God is a new social order inaugurated by Jesus, what tasks are we to engage in in the contexts of church and state? In this talk I will focus on church; in the second I will focus on state.

Before becoming fine grained about the kingdom of God and the church, I will set forth some general assumptions that form my guiding principles for Christian ethics in relation to the church.

First, while agreeing with McKnight and others that the church is a crucial aspect of the kingdom of God now, within history, between the times, I do not agree that the visible, institutional, local church, or any denomination, or even the universal, invisible body of Christ made up of all God’s faithful people, is the kingdom of God exclusively and entirely. What I am rejecting is identity between kingdom of God and church. The kingdom of God is bigger, wider than that—unless one simply defines “church” as wherever God’s righteous will is being done. Jesus’ “disciples prayer”—the one taught to the disciples that we call “the Lord’s prayer”—includes the petition “Thy kingdom come, they will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Surely this points to the fact that Jesus regarded the presence of the kingdom as wherever God’s will is being done on earth as in heaven. Surely we must make a distinction between the kingdom of God abroad, outside the organized church, and the kingdom of God within, inside and among Jesus’s followers, the church. Jesus said to the disciples “The kingdom of God is among you.” (Luke 17:21) And yet he said in the same context that the kingdom of God is not “here or there,” meaning wherever “men” say it is. How to put it all together? The only way to make sense of the relationship between the kingdom of God and the church is to say this: The church, visible, institutional but also universal and invisible, is meant by Jesus to be the anticipatory embodiment of the kingdom of God that will become perfect, complete, in his messianic reign when he returns.

Second, if that is true, then the church here and now, between the times, ought first and foremost to become itself as witness to the world by example of God’s willed new social order. The first task of the church is to be the church. To be the church is to anticipate in present, concrete social order the social order of the future when Christ will reign on earth.

Third, we are given pictures of that future messianic social order in Scripture. Isaiah 65, which most “study Bibles” treat as referring to the “new heaven and new earth,” can only be a description of an earthly messianic reign of love and justice. It includes the description that a man who dies at one hundred years of age will be considered to have died young. Clearly, then, that and parallel passages in the prophets—about a future messianic reign on earth—are pointing forward to a what Jürgen Moltmann calls a “historical millennium” before the new heaven and new earth. Among other things, according to Isaiah 65, that will be a social order within time, of perfect sufficiency in which people will sit under their own olive trees and not toil and labor for another. In other words, a social order of enough for everyone to live a humanly fulfilled life without need.

Fourth, the new, divine social order of the kingdom of God, which the church ought to prefigure by anticipation, is one in which the “least” are “first” and no one is privileged by status over others—an “upside down kingdom” without systems of caste or status except that everyone looks out for and helps lift up, empower, the weak. The only privileged class is the weak, the disadvantaged. Matthew 20:24-28 and cognate passages prove this; there and in them Jesus clearly privileges among his disciples the weakest, the least in terms of worldly status.

Fifth, the kingdom of God, which the church ought to anticipate concretely in terms of its form of life, its customs and habits, its ethos, is “not of this world.” (John 18:36) What did Jesus mean? “World,” in this context and most others in the New Testament, referred not to the physical world of nature but to the social systems created by humanity—especially the all-pervasive “domination system” identified by theologian Walter Wink in which a few powerful individuals and groups, oligarchies, rule over others by determining their lives, keeping them from experiencing complete, fulfilled human existence. The kingdom of God is not like that, nor should the church mirror it. The church should be, like the kingdom of God between the times, “in but not of the world.” In other words, surrounded by the fallen domination systems ruled by powers and principalities but not reflecting them in its form of life.

Sixth, if the church is going to be the anticipatory presence of the messianic kingdom of God inaugurated by Jesus to be consummated at his coming, the church must be always countercultural in terms of its posture, its stance in relation to everything truly “worldly”—all that stands in contrast to and contradiction of God’s upside down kingdom. In other words, it ought to eschew cultural accommodation, respectability in the eyes of the world, complacency and comfort, and ought to practice a prophetic lifestyle that shows the world itself—what it is: fallen and corrupt and out of synchronicity with God’s will for righteousness. Stanley Hauerwas has famously declared that a major task of the church is to tell the world what it, the world, is. It is out of order—broken. Insofar as the church is also broken it cannot fulfill its mission to the world. The church, in order to be the church, the historical anticipatory presence of the kingdom of God, must be healed of its brokenness. Of course, because the perfection of God’s kingdom is not yet, there will always be brokenness, but that is not the same as being “broken.” The church is broken when it is culturally accommodated, complacent and comfortable, in harmony with the world, reflecting the world’s brokenness.

Seventh and finally, ethically, I, as a disciple of Christ, seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and we, the church, the historical anticipatory presence of the future kingdom of God, cannot be comfortable with anything that will not be present then and there—when and where the Messiah rules and reigns. In other words, if we cannot picture something as part of God’s righteous social order in Jesus’s messianic kingdom when he returns, then we cannot, must not, embrace it complacently and refuse or even neglect to protest it among ourselves and even in our polis, our city, state and nation.

These are my seven guiding ethical presuppositions and principles for Christian social ethics as applied to the church, the body of Christ.

Now, to application, to meddling.

Sadly, to a very great extent, the American church, American churches of all denominations, are greatly immersed in cultural accommodation. Some years ago American sociologist of religion Dean Hoge, author of Division in the Protestant House, a critique of American Christianity, wrote that “For the typical Protestant church member [middle class commitments to family, career, and standard of living] are so strong that church commitment is largely instrumental to them and contingent on whether the church appears to serve them. As a result, many local churches tend to become instruments for achieving middle class interests, whether or not these interests can be defended in New Testament terms.” This was simply concrete confirmation of something Karl Barth wrote decades earlier in Church Dogmatics: “When the gospel is offered to man, and he stretches out his hand to receive it and takes it into his hand, an acute danger arise which is greater than the danger that he may not understand it and angrily reject it. The danger is that he may accept it peacefully and at once make himself its lord and possessor, thus rendering it innocuous, making that which chooses him something which he himself has chosen, which therefore comes to stand as such alongside all the other things that he can also choose, and therefore control. … Wherever the gospel is proclaimed…it is exposed at once to the danger of respectability.”

For the church to be ethically sound in terms of the kingdom of God, if it is to be what it is called to be, the prolepsis of that future kingdom, the anticipatory presence in the world of the messianic reign of Jesus, it must shake off and resist, abandon and renounce, cultural accommodation for the sake of respectability. For many churches, perhaps the majority, this will require a new consciousness, a new ethos of being alternative to the social reality surrounding them. Hauerwas and William Willimon have labeled this new consciousness “the Christian colony” within the world. They mean that the American church, like Jesus and his disciples, like the Christian churches of the Roman Empire, like the Anabaptists of the Holy Roman Empire, like the Confessing Church of Germany in the 1930s, must begin to see itself as countercultural no matter what the culture around it is like. To paraphrase from Theodore Geisel, “Dr. Seuss,” the church’s job in every culture is not to “fit in but to stand out.”

Our particular cultural context is America and especially Texas. Many Christians in our cultural context have come to think that, at some time and still in some ways, our culture is already Christianized which is as much as to say it is the realization of God’s kingdom on earth. Many “culture warrior” Christians, of course, target particular threats to that Christ and culture synthesis—abortion, homosexuality, pornography and the teaching of evolution in schools. The great irony is that in many churches populated by them, capital punishment, divorce, lascivious entertainment, gambling and Social Darwinism are accepted as normal if not actually good.

If our American churches are to be what they are called to be, anticipations of the kingdom of God, they must examine themselves in terms of their whole posture toward culture. Embracing a secular social and political ideology is also a form of cultural accommodation. To a very large extent secular-minded, godless political powers have co-opted both conservative and liberal churches for their causes. The churches have too willingly, perhaps unknowingly, sacrificed their prophetic kingdom-centered consciousness and social order for participation in secular power politics gaining thereby a self-righteous self-image and respectability with some portion of the culture.

None of that is to say that churches ought never to speak prophetically to power; it is only to say that our first ethical task is to be witnesses to the world around us by being the church—the alternative social order Jesus inaugurated that he will install in the world when he returns.

To that end, here is what American churches must do.

First, we must eschew power-over and every shred of caste preference, privilege based on human advantages, and become churches of the poor. By “poor” I mean disadvantaged, weak, powerless, marginalized, unseen and unnoticed, passed over and ignored, downtrodden, despised, rejected and neglected. By “poor” I mean what Jesus meant by “meek” and “children” and “the least.”

A few years ago I was asked to guest preach at Waco’s “Church under the Bridge,” a church founded by Mission Waco’s Jimmy Dorrell for those in Waco who are not welcome in the rich and powerful churches, most of which have moved far out into the suburbs to get away from the homeless, the mentally ill, the hungry and wretched. It was chaotic. I preached to a motley crowd of society’s outcasts as eighteen wheelers rumbled overhead on I-35 and as cars of all kinds drove by on downtown streets, many of them honking their horns to disrupt our worship. While I preached a mentally challenged man stood between me and the congregation playing his “air guitar” and dancing around. A few blocks away churches populated mainly by the rich and powerful sat in comfortable pews singing hymns, their parking lots packed with Lexuses and BMWs.

On another occasion I took a class to Waco’s “Gospel Café” operated by Waco’s Crossties Ecumenical Church—congregation about fifteen members. The café and church exist in an old house located in the middle of the most crime-ridden neighborhood in all of Texas. Three days every week the members of the church and visiting guests from other churches serve hot meals to all comers—mostly homeless people, elderly people living on fixed incomes of less than a thousand dollars a month, and children without fathers. We sat among them and listened to them as they and we ate our casserole lunches together. Then we met with the pastor who told us about the “dignity of the poor” and how they are routinely harassed by the police just because they are poor. The church is noted in the community for holding the police accountable to treat the poor with dignity.

My own church in Temple, Texas opens its doors one week every month to feed and house homeless families in transition—mostly African-American and Hispanic. Members volunteer to cook for them and sleep overnight in the church with them, engaging their children in play and having conversations with them.

I ask myself “Where would Jesus go to church if he came to central Texas?” To put it another way, which churches are really being the presence of the upside-down kingdom Jesus inaugurated and that will be the social order of the whole world when Jesus returns?

Some years ago my family and I were members of a suburban Baptist church in Minnesota. When we joined the church, a state representative, member of the legislature, candidate for governor of the state, was a member together with his wife. It was obvious by the car they drove that they were extremely affluent. I noticed that many members of the congregation kowtowed to the power couple and became agitated and very upset when they left the church. I don’t know why they left. I asked some fellow church members why they were so disturbed and they said things like “What will become of our church without them here?” Their presence in the congregation had become a sign of status, of respectability.

“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” must at least mean becoming churches of the poor—as defined above. That does not necessarily mean worshiping under interstate overpasses, but it surely does mean eschewing privilege based on social status in the eyes of the fallen world and putting at our center of interest the lowly, the meek and neglected people whoever they may be in our particular neighborhood or town.

Second, American churches that want to obey Jesus’s command to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness must take a stand against unnecessary violence. When I think of the inauguration of God’s kingdom on earth with the appearing of the divine man who brought and taught peace, and when I think of the future perfection of God’s kingdom with the parousia of the same divine man who will enforce peace, I cannot reconcile myself as his follower to violence. Our world, even our culture, is saturated with violence, so saturated that we easily become inured to it and jaded by it. Churches of Jesus Christ, however, ought to be peace-loving and peace-making communities governed by a preferential option for peace. At the very least we ought to celebrate those among us who feel called to pacifism and conscientious objection to bearing arms in war.

Early Christians, between the primitive church of the New Testament and the rise of Constantine, highly valued peace and discouraged members from bearing arms. That was one reason for their persecution by the Roman Empire; for the most part, with some exceptions, bishops disciplined Christian men who joined the Roman legions and especially those who killed people. We know from church father John Chrysostom, the patriarch of Constantinople, for example, that Christian soldiers who killed in conflict were required to engage in lengthy penance before being readmitted to the table of communion.

The sad, realistic fact is that ours is such a broken world that using deadly force against those who rape and murder, the Nazis, ISIS and the Lord’s Resistance Army, to name three examples, is sometimes necessary. The movie “Machine Gun Preacher” provoked difficult emotions and thoughts in many of us who cannot picture Jesus shooting anyone, even the monsters of the LRA who kidnap children and force them to murder their parents. And yet, when confronted with the opportunity to do it, to rescue thousands of women and children from a madman and his murderous paramilitary thugs, who wouldn’t, even if it required using deadly force? Who wouldn’t use deadly force to stop a rapist from raping and possibly killing one’s wife or daughter?

I respect pacifists, but I know I’m not one. How do I know that? Because I know I would use deadly force to protect my granddaughter or grandson from a would-be rapist or murderer. On the other hand, I also believe it would be a sin. And, yet on the other hand, again, I believe God understands our frailty and the condition of our world and the need to protect the helpless innocents.

I do not think Christ expects his followers in this time between the times to eschew all violence; sometimes violence is a necessary evil and, when it is, God forgives. But that concession to Christian realism, to use the label attached to Christian ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr’s approach to Christian social ethics, does not give Christians license to celebrate violence as something beautiful and good. It does not belong in God’s kingdom and therefore cannot be celebrated, let alone encouraged.

A few years ago I attended the then largest church in my home state in the Upper Midwest. My best friend was on the church’s staff. It was the Sunday before Independence Day, July 4^th, and, like many conservative evangelical churches, it devoted the entire Sunday morning worship service to a spectacular “God and country” celebration replete with uniformed flag and gun-bearing color guards of most of the branches of the U.S. military. A U.S. Senator prayed for our men and women in uniform, in harm’s way, and a band played the “hymns” of the various military branches as the color guards marched down the aisles of the packed sanctuary. The pastor invited members and visitors who had served in the various branches of the military to stand. I was not surprised, but I was dismayed, that there was no mention of conscientious objectors, nor were they invited to stand to be applauded.

Around the same time I happened to visit a Mennonite church on a Sunday evening. The entire service was led by a group representing the Mennonite Central Committee talking about peace-making efforts around the world including young men and women standing in the way of Israeli tanks in Palestine driving to destroy Palestinian families’ homes. One young woman of the Committee was run over by an Israeli tank and she was celebrated as a martyr. Then the group talked about ways in which Mennonite teenage boys, young men, should handle the requirement to register for the selective service.

Two churches poles apart on the issue of violence. My own youth pastor, when I was a teenager, had been a conscientious objector during the Korean conflict. He performed alternative service in the name of the Lamb who was sacrificed rather than fighting back against his killers. That same church, a few years later, fired another youth pastor who promoted pacifism—for promoting pacifism among the church’s young people.

It is highly unlikely that Christian churches will ever agree about violence, but surely we could at least agree that it is at best a necessary evil and not something to celebrate. Our model should be Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was a pacifist in the name of Jesus until he was offered the opportunity to participate in a plot to kill Hitler. According to him, as told to his student and friend, Eberhard Bethge, the duty of a peace-loving Christian who sees a madman driving a car into a crowd is not merely to go behind it picking up the wounded and dying, but to do all he can to get the driver out from behind the wheel. And yet, according to Bethge, Bonhoeffer never believed he was participating in a righteous cause, a crusade, because it involved conspiracy to commit murder even of one of history’s worst mass murderers.

I was saddened by the wild celebrations that took place all around our country, even by many Christians, the day our military killed Osama bin Laden and members of his family including his fourteen year old son. Relief that a madman is dead is one thing; celebration of bloody killing of anyone is something else.

The kingdom of God, as revealed by the prophets and inaugurated by Jesus must be our Christian critical principle, first and foremost for our churches and second for our cities, states and country. A critical principle is an ethical litmus test used to determine whether an action is right or wrong, good or bad. If we cannot imagine war and assassinations and even justified killing in the coming messianic kingdom of God, then we cannot be comfortable with it now or celebrate it now. And our churches ought to be communities of peace and peace-making, not launching pads for revolution or “salvation by military conquest”—the title of a book I saw in a Christian church bookstore in Houston some years ago. The book was the pastor’s commentary on the biblical book of Joshua and showed on its cover a photo of a fighter jet.

Third, and finally, given the limited time allotted to this lecture, American churches that want to obey Jesus’s command to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness must resist accommodation to the culture of individualistic consumerism and obsession with entertainment and develop true community within and among themselves. All too easily, without careful study of culture and conscious resistance to its deleterious allurements, churches fall into becoming mere mirrors of the culture around them. Our culture is obsessed with what my colleague Jim Roberts of Baylor’s School of Business calls, in the title of one of his books, “shiny objects.” Advertising is ubiquitous and manipulative; it lures us into its web of deceit to think that life will be fulfilled if we buy this designer brand of car or clothes. Shopping malls are our culture’s equivalents of Greek and Roman pagan temples. Every time I walk by a certain store that belongs to a chain of stores selling clothes to teens and young adults using half naked models I cannot help but think of the pagan temples of Corinth and other cities in the ancient world.

Television, movies and sports events have become our culture’s equivalents of the Roman circuses and gladiator contests in the arenas and coliseums of the ancient world.

Our culture worships designer clothes, expensive cars and the latest technologies for entertainment. These are our cultures gods.

Let’s use the critical principle of the messianic kingdom of God inaugurated by Jesus to be brought about on earth when Jesus returns as our litmus test for these things. The issue is not having clothes; the issue is spending much more than necessary just to have clothes that will impress people. The issue is not driving cars; the issue is spending many thousands of dollars just to have a car that will impress people. The issue is not television, movies or sports events, per se; the issue is how much time is devoted to them, what is being portrayed by them, and how controlling they become of our lives.

A few years ago I visited a church on Super Bowl Sunday. The pastor and deacons had brought a large screen television into the sanctuary and provided snacks because the pre-game festivities were to begin before the usual conclusion of the Sunday morning worship service. The whole community had been notified via advertising, which I missed because I arrived in the city late the night before, that those who attended worship that Sunday at that church could worship for thirty minutes and then stay seated, eat snacks in the sanctuary and watch the Super Bowl. The best of both worlds in one place and time. I left before the television was turned on.

In less extreme and obvious ways, unfortunately, we American Christians have largely succumbed in our churches, to the gods of our culture. We have adjusted to accommodate them. We have absorbed their worship often uncritically, even unconsciously because we do not use the kingdom of God as a critical principle in examining our culture and our churches’ behaviors. We often insist on uncritical adherence to traditional doctrines while uncritically absorbing the ways of the world, the culture, around us.

Christian visitors to our country, mostly students from Latin America, Africa and Asia, tell me they are shocked by American culture and American Christian churches’ accommodations to it. Two aspects of that accommodation especially stand out—individualism and entertainment. We call our sanctuaries “auditoriums,” our chancels “platforms” and often our services of worship are more performances than God-centered participations by the gathered priestly believers. The people gather for one hour on Sunday and go their separate ways, never really knowing each other, devoid of real community.

What does community necessarily entail? Three things at least: availability, accountability, and vulnerability. The earliest Christians shared their possessions with each other; ate together, were accountable not only to God but to each other, and confessed their sins one to another. I believe the alternative social order Jesus inaugurated within the world was marked by availability, accountability and vulnerability. The kingdom of God on earth will be a communal social order without “private property” in the sense of sole possession of things not available to those who need them. The church is called by the kingdom of God now to imitate the ideals of that early, primitive Christian community founded by the risen Lord and of that future shalom of God in the messianic reign of Jesus on earth where everything needed will be available to everyone.

We need a new reformation of American Christianity in terms of our churches becoming more conformed to the ethos of the kingdom of God, the new social order established by Jesus and hoped for with confident expectation. That must become the critical ethical principle for reforming American churches. And it must begin with greater critical examination of the many ways in which we have simply absorbed and accommodated to the ethos of our culture. All this must begin with greater consciousness of being kingdom citizens in enemy-occupied territory, the Christian colony in a fundamentally pagan culture. That will be the subject of my second talk.

Denomination of the Week: Beachy Amish

Hollywood and television routinely portray all Amish people as alike. They ride in black horse-drawn buggies and don’t own motor vehicle; the men wear beards and funny hats; the women wear plain dresses down to their ankles and with long sleeves; they all farm or make furniture; they live without electricity. Many people’s images of the Amish come from movies like “Witness” starring Harrison Ford as a big city detective who takes refuge with an Amish family and falls in love with their daughter (1985). And then there are the numerous Christian Amish romance novels packing the shelves of Christian bookstores. And then there are the television documentary shows about the Amish practice of “Rumspringa” which always focus on the Amish adolescents and early adults “partying.”

But not all Amish are alike. In fact, there is at least one denomination of Amish that uses electricity, drives motor vehicles, and owns cameras and computers (but not televisions or radios). They don’t fit the Hollywood-television-fiction stereotype of “the Amish.” They are called “Beachy Amish Mennonites.”

A few years ago I was driving on a country highway not far from where I live and happened to pass a modern-looking church whose sign said “Faith Mennonite Fellowship.” There aren’t a lot of Mennonites or other Anabaptists around here, so I looked the church up on the internet when I got home. I discovered it is a congregation of “Beachys”—Beachy Amish (who also sometimes call themselves Mennonites).

I made contact with an elder (by e-mail!) and eventually took one of my classes to the church on a field trip. Inside and outside it looks just like any smallish Baptist or other church. The elder and his wife sat and talked with us in the back of the sanctuary for an hour. They answered all our questions—emphasizing their similarities with but differences from “Old Order” Amish and Mennonites. We discovered this particular church, one of only a handful in the state, was founded as a mission to this region from Beachy Amish churches in Ohio.

Two years later I invited two elders of that Beachy congregation to my class—to talk about the Radical Reformation today. They arrived in plain dress—denim jeans and open collar shirts—and spoke plainly. They admitted that they never went to seminary and so were a bit nervous talking to a seminary church history/historical theology class. But after a few minutes everyone relaxed and they came across as not that different from country Baptists.

Beachy Amish history began around 1927 when an Old Order Amish bishop named Moses M. Beachy began separating himself and his followers from other Old Order Amish in Pennsylvania and Ohio. They are considered the most “progressive” of the Amish groups because of their acceptance of electricity, motor vehicles, computers, missionary work, etc. They are not as “separated” from the rest of society as other Amish, but neither are they modern Mennonites. Like all Mennonites and Amish they are pacifists and eschew holding government jobs that might entangle them in even remote association with violence. Like other Old Order Mennonites and Amish they emphasize “simple living.” For them, however, that does not mean avoiding everything of the modern industrial revolution; it means not participating in “conspicuous consumption” as promoted by advertising. The cars they drive are relatively inexpensive. The women wear no jewelry or makeup. On the other hand, they might live next door to you and own a small business in town.

The Beachy Amish describe their theology as “evangelical” and I found that to be true in my/our conversations with them. When visiting their church with my class I perused their hymnbook. I knew most of the hymns from childhood. (I often describe the Pentecostal church I grew up in as “urban Amish.” In the 1950s we frowned on television, strictly avoided movie theaters, and emphasized simple living.) They baptize repentant sinners, including their own youths, at around age sixteen—by pouring. They have “bishops” but their congregations are autonomous. The “denomination” is really just a network of congregations with no central headquarters, college or seminary. They practice foot washing as an ordinance alongside baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

All Amish groups can be traced back, as to their historical-theological roots, to the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century and more specifically to the “Swiss Brethren” who, in 1525, began “re-baptizing” each other in Zurich. (The word “Anabaptist” simply means “re-baptizer.) The Swiss Brethren were reformer Ulrich Zwingli’s followers who thought he and other “magisterial reformers” were allowing civil governments to determine too much the course of the Reformation. They wanted to restore the primitive New Testament church; in their eyes and to their minds Luther, Zwingli and other mainline reformers were not sufficiently cleansing the churches of Catholic elements. They were persecuted, even killed, by both Catholics and Protestants. Many survived by hiding and moving around. The word “Mennonite” comes from the name of Menno Simons, a leading sixteenth century Dutch Anabaptist theologian and church leader. It was he, especially, who turned the Anabaptists toward pacifism.

The Amish branch of Anabaptists began with Swiss Anabaptist leader Jakob Amman who, in 1693, founded a new branch of the Swiss Brethren emphasizing separation from budding modernity and strict church discipline (“shunning”) of “brethren” who sinned without public repentance (to the elders, to the congregation). Many Amish fled European persecution to the “New World” where they tended to settle in Pennsylvania because of the Quaker/Friends there. Although their historical-theological roots are different, the Friends and Amish share pacifism and religious liberty (before that became the norm in either Europe or much of America).

Denomination of the Week: Brethren in Christ Church

Quiz question: In what small Anabaptist denomination was President Dwight Eisenhower raised? Answer: the Brethren in Christ Church.

Although I will deviate from this sometimes, I prefer here to highlight as “denominations of the week” groups with which I have had some “close encounter.” Earlier this year (2015) I was invited to speak at Messiah College. The event, held on that campus, was the annual Study Conference hosted by the Sider Institute and attended mostly by members, pastors and leaders of the Brethren in Christ Church which sponsors Messiah College. The Sider Institute is located there. Its whole name is The Sider Institute for Anabaptist, Pietist and Wesleyan Studies. Its director, who invited me to speak about the future of denominations, is Devin Manzullo-Thomas.

I have known of the Brethren in Christ Church for many years, but this was my first “close encounter” with it. Over the years I have had colleagues—especially at Bethel College in Minnesota (now Bethel University)—who previously taught or served as administrators at Messiah College. It was mainly through them that I came to know about the Brethren in Christ Church (henceforth here “BIC-C”).

The BIC-C is unique in bringing together in one denomination equally three historical-theological “streams”: Pietism, Anabaptism, and Wesleyanism. That means the denomination’s historical stance with regard to election-predestination and free will is distinctly Arminian. The BIC-C is a “peace church” like Mennonites and others in the Anabaptist tradition. Their historical stance with regard to deadly violence and war is pacifism. They are Wesleyan in emphasizing sanctification and holy living—separated from worldliness. They are Pietist in believing in the necessity of conversion (repentance and faith as personal decision) for authentic Christian existence and in emphasizing a life of “conversional piety”—“having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” While they do not eschew orthodoxy, “orthopathy” and “orthopraxy” are equally, if not more, important.

The BIC-C has about twenty thousand members in the U.S. and more in Canada which has its own, separate organization. The Church has numerous “overseas missionary” endeavors and cooperates with the Mennonite Central Committee on many projects. In fact, I was informed, the BIC-C always has a member on the MCC’s board of directors.

The BIC-C practices “trine immersion” as its mode of believer baptism. Believers, those who knowingly confess Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord and who have experienced conversion, are baptized three times by immersion—once in the name of the Father, again in the name of the Son, and third time in the name of the Holy Spirit. However, most, if not all, BIC churches will accept other believer baptisms as valid for membership.

The denomination is headquartered in Grantham, Pennsylvania near its historic center—the Susquehanna River Valley. The BIC-C’s spiritual ancestors were Mennonites in and around that area who were inspired by the spiritual awakening led by Philip Otterbein and Martin Boehm in the 1760s. These Mennonites (and others) adopted trine immersion and were called “River Brethren.” The BIC-C descends from a group of River Brethren who formed a denomination or network in 1863 and legally incorporated in 1904.

The BIC-C is a member denomination of the National Association of Evangelicals. Messiah College is perhaps its best-known related organization. Its polity is semi-episcopal with congregational and presbyterian elements (so eclectic). It has leaders called bishops who serve as overeers over regions of congregations. The national director is a kind of coordinator for the bishops and the congregations they lead.

Now to my personal impressions. I not only spoke at the Study Conference but also listened to BIC-C pastors and leaders who spoke. One panel discussion about the denomination included an African-American pastor, a woman leader, and three (?) Caucasion male leaders. (Point: the BIC-C strives to be diverse. It ordains women to the gospel ministry and strives to be multi-ethnic and multicultural.) I picked up on notes of concern by denominational leaders and some pastors attending the Study Conference that the denomination may be straying from its historical-theological roots into a kind of “generic evangelicalism.” (I hear this everywhere I go—from leaders of evangelical denominations and churches.) Apparently some BIC churches are not adhering to perceived historical-theological distinctives. For example, a few BIC churches have held “God and Country” worship services near July 4 with military overtones. Military recruiters were allowed to recruit on Messiah’s campus. “Americanism” is the underlying concern. Not so much patriotism, but nationalism and involvement with the military and war are the concerns. Also, I discerned, Reformed theology has begun to creep into the denomination—as everywhere especially among evangelicals. BIC-C leaders are unsure about how best to respond to some of these gradual changes in its ethos around the edges.

I celebrate the BIC-C. I’m not a pacifist, but I do admire pacifism. We need pacifist voices in American Christianity. (Even Reinhold Niebuhr said as much!) I admire simple living and separation from worldliness. I admire devout spirituality that emphasizes transformation of “the inner man” (Pietism) and, of course, Arminianism. The BIC-C brings all these notes together in one “trio,” so to speak.

Back to Dwight Eisenhower. Well, apparently his childhood among the Brethren in Christ didn’t quite “stick” in terms of pacifism—obviously. One can hope and even believe, however, that his integrity as politician and president was partly due to that influence early in his life.

This week I was visiting Messiah College in Pennsylvania and speaking at its annual Sider Institute conference. The Sider Institute is devoted to the study of Pietism and Anabaptism–two of three “ingredients” in the Brethren in Christ denomination with which Messiah College is affiliated. I spoke to the conference attendees about “In Defense of Denominations” and “How Denominations Can Survive (If They Should).” I also met with various groups of Messiah students, faculty and administrators as well as with small discussion groups of conference attendees.

I always enjoy these kinds of events where I get to know fellow Christians who are a bit different from my own Pentecostal and Baptist background. I have known of Messiah College for many years and have some “old friends” on the faculty there–known to me from my days as editor of Christian Scholar’s Review. And one of my former students is on the faculty of the college. With others I found various “small world” connections–friends in common. Also my former “boss,” provost, from a college where I used to teach was at the conference and it was good to renew our acquaintance.

Like almost every denomination, the Brethren in Christ (long ago known as “River Brethren”) struggle to hold onto their distinctive identity in a time of “genericizing evangelicalism.” They are evangelicals, in my book, even though a few of them expressed some degree of consternation over that label (because of its popular connotations created by the media).

As Anabaptists, the BIC has much in common with Mennonites and pacifism is one stream of their heritage. As Wesleyan-Arminians, Holiness Christians, BIC has much in common with denominations such as the Nazarenes and Free Methodists. As Pietists they have much in common with groups such as the Evangelical Covenant Church and the Moravian Church.

So far as I know, the BIC is one of only two or three denominations that has those three streams of Christian tradition equally affirmed and balanced from their heritage and expressed in their core values.

My two talks will be published in the Brethren in Christ historical journal, so I can’t post them here. However, over the next few weeks I will post essays here expressing some of the ideas in those two talks–which I wrote especially for this conference. The “gist” of the first address is that while “denominationalism” is not ideal it does not necessarily represent “brokenness” in the body of Christ. Everything depends on how a denomination behaves with regard to others. The “gist” of the second address is that in order for denominations to survive in this “postdenominational” era they must know who they are, their “reason for being,” and make that consistent with and helpful to the progress of the kingdom of God. And they must be flexible enough to adapt to new contexts and cultural situations without sheer accommodation to fads and fashions.

Twice during Q&A times–after and between my conference addresses–people very kindly challenged my claim that “following Jesus” is not enough to make one a Christian. I understand that concern, but I stand by my claim. “Following Jesus” is important to authentic Christian living, but it’s not enough–unless it includes believing in Jesus as God incarnate, the second person of the Trinity become flesh and dying to reconcile us to God and rising from the dead in the power of the Holy Spirit. My point is simply that there is a cognitive side to being authentically Christian. I am frankly dismayed when I see people being baptized into the Body of Christ (or confirmed) without any clear confession of belief about Jesus as God and Savior. Even cultists will say they “follow Jesus” and sometimes, they seem to do that rather well in terms of ethical conduct. Our definition of “Christian” needs to be more robust and “thick” than just “following Jesus.”

“Living Theology: Knowing and Following Our Resurrected Lord”

This is a talk I gave at the recent MissioAlliance Gathering in Alexandria, Virginia. The forum topic was “Living Theology: Knowing and Following Our Resurrected Lord.” (The theme of the Gathering this year was “Resurrection Life.”) I was one member of a panel; each member gave his or her own talk on the topic. I was the first to speak; two panel members used some of their time to disagree with my talk. After the “talk” (essay) below I will respond to their critiques. One said that she thought it ironic that her talk—on pacifism—followed immediately mine. (Obviously she thinks that any talk about “warfare” is somehow contrary to pacifism.) Another said that he disagrees with me about Christians being called to go out into the world to engage evil powers and deliver people from their domination. According to him, I guess, Christians are only called to do this within the confines of the church. I will respond to these two objections to my essay (now a blog post) immediately following it:

My MissioAlliance forum presentation on “Living Theology: Knowing and Following Our Resurrected Lord”:

“Living theology” is many things, but chief among them is spiritual warfare. Because of the resurrection of Jesus we know and confess that “Jesus is victor!” But, as we also know, that does not mean that everything is as God wills. The world is still deeply disordered by dominations of many kinds that keep people enslaved. “Living theology,” “spiritual warfare,” is resurrection theology in action; it is the body of Christ seeking in the power of the Holy Spirit, the gift of the risen Jesus, to free men, women and children from every bondage that enslaves them. The enslaving “powers and principalities” are defeated but still fighting. The resurrection calls us into battle against them.

Prophet Christoph Blumardt wrote that

What matters is that people are delivered, cut free, and torn away from false masters, from…domination. God’s sovereignty opposes human dominion. That is the point, and that is why the struggle in us and around us is so hard. If God’s kingdom exists only to give us joy in heaven, if we were meant simply to put up with the way things are and accept all laws as they are, it would be an easy matter. Then all we would have to do is accommodate ourselves to the world. We could stupidly accept that the our whole history of war and hatred is part of God’s order, that violence quite naturally belongs to human life…. There thus arises a world god, whom the Savior calls the prince of this world. He claims our allegiance. But Christ, too, claims our service; he rises up in the name of God and shapes life on earth in opposition to that power that has established itself over the centuries. This is why it is such a struggle for God’s kingdom to advance on earth.[1]

“Living theology,” then, must include, perhaps even as its first task, exposing the enslaving, de-humanizing powers of the world system of domination, ministering deliverance to its victims, and developing a radically alternative form of life that is the true church, the outpost, the prolepsis of the coming perfect reign of God which is total freedom.

We “normal evangelicals” have become far too complacent about the demonic, the natural and supernatural powers that dominate and enslave people. We fear being considered fanatics if we engage in spiritual warfare either through political protest or deliverance ministry through prayer. Our beloved New Testament, however, is absolutely filled with narrative descriptions of such—in both the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. Our beloved Old Testament prophets specialized in speaking truth to power—about justice for the poor and oppressed. The whole Bible teems with imperatives to the people of God of all times and places to not only pay lip service to the lordship of God but to implement the lordship of God among ourselves and to denounce everything that contradicts it and announce the Kingdom will of God for freedom to be human. Jesus and the apostles were not satisfied, however, to denounce and announce; they engaged the powers of evil in what John Wimber called “power encounters.”

Based on the resurrection of Jesus that announces Jesus as victor (!) we must stop reducing our Christianity to “learning and serving” and begin living the theology of the conquering Christ in acts of deliverance that foreshadow the perfect freedom of the coming Kingdom of God. Living theology founded on the resurrection means nothing less than revolution against the de-humanizing, demonic powers of domination that still keep people loved by God and for whom Christ died and rose again in chains.

This living resurrection theology of freedom must be extended beyond the realm of human freedom to liberation of the earth from the corruptions of human civilization. That means we must stop being soft about environmentalism and say a definite “No” to those among us who deny what is happening to nature, the home God has given us that he intends to liberate from bondage to decay. Christian environmentalism must become an added dimension to spiritual warfare. Deniers of the danger must be denied a voice among us and we must step boldly forward to protect God’s good creation.

Please understand that, like Blumhardt, I am not talking merely about social work or political activism on behalf of an ideological agenda devised by worldly powers. I, like Blumhardt before me, am talking about engaging the evil powers and principalities that rule this fallen world system with spiritual force. This takes the courage of actions based on convictions that will inevitably result in some unfortunate or perhaps fortunate departures from our ranks. A smaller but more theologically correct and spiritually effective church is better than a Christian army without a clear vision or battle plan. We must decide who our enemy is and use every spiritual power given us by God to defeat it. Jesus is victor! We must join him in his final defeat of evil with resurrection power. (End of panel presentation)

Now I will respond to the two other panel members’ critical responses.

First, nothing about biblical spiritual warfare or what I said stands in any tension with Christian pacifism. Christian pacifism appeals to the teaching and life of Jesus; Jesus engaged in spiritual warfare. Christian pacifism opposes Christian use of deadly physical force; Christian spiritual warfare does not use deadly physical force. Christian spiritual warfare, as I described it (following Blumhardt) has nothing to do with physical violence and it is doubtful that its practices could ever be called violent in any ordinary sense of the word. The panel member who suggested that her Christian pacifism might be in tension with my description of spiritual warfare emphasized “reconciliation” as the most important practice of “living theology.” I certainly agree that reconciliation among people is an important practice of living theology. However, I would put that under the umbrella concept of spiritual warfare—opposing powers and principalities that tear people apart and pit them against each other. Ironically, then, Christian pacifism (including the practice she mentioned of “peacemaking teams”) is a form of spiritual warfare. I believe many Christian pacifists misunderstand “warfare” in the term “spiritual warfare.” Like “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (banned from many mainline Protestant hymnals due to a misunderstanding of its message as promoting physical war), “spiritual warfare” has nothing whatever to do with literal war or violence. And I assume even the Christian pacifist (a woman Mennonite minister) on the panel would not regard the biblical injunctions for Christians to engage in spiritual warfare as something to be ignored or cut out of Scripture. (I refer, for example, to Matthew 10—which I will mention below in response to the second critic of my talk.) I suppose one response (that I anticipate appearing here) is that “warfare” has become so closely connected in most people’s minds with physical violence, death and destruction, that it is best to drop the term altogether. I disagree—insofar as we qualify it with “spiritual.” Virtually every biblical and theological word is essentially contested in our pluralistic and largely post-Christian society. I do not believe in dropping everything of the “language of Zion” just because of widespread ignorance about its meaning. The language of spiritual warfare is so deeply embedded in the Bible that to simply drop it because it might be misunderstood is to alter Christian tradition at its very roots. A deeply committed Christian pacifist can and should engage in spiritual warfare in its New Testament meaning.

Second, in response to the other panelist, the New Testament itself includes commands to engage in and examples of spiritual warfare against “powers and principalities” outside the church. He argued that Christians are not called to go out into the world (presumably meaning outside the confines of the church) to deliver people from bondage to the powers and principalities that oppress them. Really? Before even mentioning the New Testament, I would ask if he seriously thinks Christian involvement in fighting against human trafficking is wrong. Of course not. But, given my description of spiritual warfare, fighting against human trafficking is a form of spiritual warfare. I assume he was focusing, though, on “deliverance ministries” in the common sense of exorcism which I do include under spiritual warfare. But even then, Jesus certainly did not limit his deliverance ministry, not did the apostles in Acts, to demonized people who came into the circle of Jesus’ disciples, the synagogues or the churches. The same is true with Jesus’ and the apostles’ healing ministries. Matthew 10 is a locus classicus of Jesus’ commission to his followers to engage in spiritual warfare outside the confines of religious organizations. I also regard Matthew 16:18 as support for my contention that “living theology” includes going out into the world to engage in spiritual warfare. What else could “the gates of hell” not “prevailing” against the church mean? The imagery used by Jesus there is clearly the church battering down the “gates of hell.” What are the “gates of hell” there, in Matthew 16:18? I would say they are all the powers and principalities, literal evil beings and social systems, that oppress and enslave people. It’s one thing to urge caution in how Christians engage in spiritual warfare outside the confines of the church; it’s another thing to suggest that Christians ought never to engage in spiritual warfare or even deliverance ministries outside the church. In fact, I suspect had we had more time the critic and I would have found greater agreement than perhaps audience members thought existed between us.

The background “point” of my talk about “living theology” as engaging in spiritual warfare, very broadly defined, is my constant question to my fellow American evangelical Christians (and other kinds of Christians in America especially). That question is: Have we not demythologized and “normalized” our Christianity so that it is not even recognizable as New Testament Christianity? What would the apostles think of us? How can we read the Acts of the Apostles and reconcile their “living theology” with ours? Cessationism is, of course, one way. But even most Christian cessationists believe in spiritual warfare—elsewhere (not here in “civilized America”). I am looking for New Testament Christianity in twenty-first century America and having difficulty finding it. Most of those (churches and ministries) that claim to have retrieved it and practice it seem extremist and fanatical to me. But maybe that’s just because I’m an Enlightenment-influenced, modern person.

The great irony I see in today’s Christianity is our American evangelical fascination with “Global South” (what used to be called “Third World”) Christianity which engages in spiritual warfare and believes in an invisible world of spiritual powers that Christians ought to oppose with all might and spiritual force. The irony is that we applaud it “down there” and “over there” but don’t want it here. We still think that we, America, are so “civilized” that we don’t need what they have. They are so “uncivilized” and “primitive” that they need what we don’t. This strikes me as an especially pernicious form of American exceptionalism and cultural accommodation.

[1] Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, The Gospel of God’s Reign: Living for the Kingdom of God, trans., Peter Rutherford, Eileen Robertshaw, and Miriam Mathis, eds., Christian T. Collins Winn and Charles E. Moore (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 17.

“Sin Boldly: Christian Ethics for a Broken World”

Roger E. Olson, Foy Valentine Professor of Christian Theology and Ethics, George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University

The Maston Lecture, November 6, 2013, George W. Truett Theological Seminary

            Few movies have affected me as strongly as the 2011 film “Machine Gun Preacher” starring Gerard Butler as Sam Childers, drug addict turned Christian missionary who takes up an AK-47 for Jesus in the Sudan. Based on Childers’s true life story, the movie raises gut-wrenching questions about Christian ethics and especially whether use of deadly force is ever justified for the Christian. As those who have seen the movie know, Childers joined a mission trip to the Sudan and there encountered children being slaughtered and forced to kill others by the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army. Faced with the opportunity to resist this horror with deadly force, he reluctantly accepted it and became the Lord’s Resistance Army’s worst nightmare. Because of his violent resistance to LRA numerous children’s lives were saved and many more were rescued from child soldierhood.

The movie raises the question—Put in Sam Childers’s place, what would I do? But, of course, that’s unlikely. So it raises another, more realistic question—What should I, as a Christian theologian and ethicist, tell others about Christian use of force in a world of monsters whose victims include small children?

It’s easy to come away from watching that movie or reading about the abolitionist John Brown or Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the plot to kill Hitler and say “Oh, yes, well, put in those positions I would probably do the same.” It’s harder to give ethical advice that justifies Christian use of force—even in defense of starving children or against military dictatorships that “disappear” thousands of dissidents such as was the case in Argentina and Chile in the 1980s.

To be sure “Sin boldly” is an unusual theme for a talk about Christian ethics in a seminary chapel. And yet, as I will argue, it’s worth thinking and talking about in such a broken world as ours. Contrary to certain modern and contemporary Christian ethicists who say an absolute “no” to all Christian use of force I must reluctantly say, with Luther, “Sin boldly…and repent more boldly still.”

Yes, “Sin boldly” is Martin Luther’s best known quote—at least among university students. In a letter to his former Greek professor and right-hand man in Reformation Philip Melanchthon dated August 1, 1521, the Reformer wrote to his friend:

If you are a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary but the true mercy. … Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly for He is victorious over sin, death and the world. As long as we are here in this world we have to sin. This life is not a dwelling place of righteousness, but, as Peter says, “we look for a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” It is enough that by the riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sins of the world. No sin will separate us from the Lamb…. Do you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of your sins is too small? Pray boldly—you are too mighty a sinner not to!

But “sin boldly” goes against the grain of our Christian, and I might add American, perfectionism. Isn’t it always possible to do the right thing? The perfect thing? Isn’t that what Christian ethics is all about? To tell us what is the perfectly right thing to do in every foreseeable situation? Isn’t being American being perfectly right?

My thesis here today is that this perfectionism is wrong; it forgets the truth of the old maxim that “the perfect is often the enemy of the good.” On the other hand, perfection is an impossible ideal worth striving for—with God’s help. But when perfection proves impossible, as is so often the case in this broken world, God’s mercy is available. The Kingdom of God is not yet and, in the meantime, this time between the times, it is our duty as citizens of that Kingdom yet to come to approximate it in real and living ways and sometimes that means using the powerful means that we have. When we must use force, coercion, however, we must avoid baptizing it as righteous and regard it rather as a sign of our brokenness, the world’s brokenness, and the not yetness of the Kingdom.

This talk arises from my experience of teaching a course on Christian social ethics almost thirty times in this place—once each semester and occasionally twice in a semester. I have chosen for my students to read and discuss four great recent and contemporary Christian social ethicists—Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, Gustavo Gutierrez and John Howard Yoder. Reading Yoder led me to a study of Stanley Hauerwas whose Christian ethic is strongly informed by the Mennonite thinker. So here I will combine Yoder and Hauerwas, overlooking their differences, and refer to their Christian perspective on social ethics as “Yoder-Hauerwas” or, simply, “Christian perfectionism.”

Every semester as I read these great Christian thinkers with my students I experience cognitive dissonance. As I read Rauschenbusch, whichever of his books I’ve chosen that semester, I find myself agreeing with him almost completely. But when I read Niebuhr, who harshly disagreed with Rauschenbusch about fundamental issues, I find myself vigorously agreeing with him, too! Then, when I read Gutierrez, even in those areas where he disagrees with Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr I succumb to near total agreement with him! Finally, like so many who read Yoder and Hauerwas, I find myself agreeing with them—even where they diverge radically from Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr and Gutierrez! Either this is a sign of mental weakness or I am simply observing that each has a partial grasp on truth, such that what nineteenth century theologian Horace Bushnell called “Christian comprehensiveness” lies somewhere behind and within all of them. Of course, I prefer to think the latter is the case.

One thing I have observed as a historical theologian is how often theologians, and I’m sure practitioners of other disciplines, make a great name for themselves by seeming to disagree strenuously with someone else who has a great name when, in fact, there’s truth in both perspectives and they in fact need each other for balance and comprehensiveness. A famous example of this from the last century was the debate between Karl Barth and his fellow Swiss “dialectical theologian” Emil Brunner over “natural theology.” It reminds one of the old beer commercial where two barroom friends debate about whether their favorite brew “tastes good” or is “less filling.”

For all their differences, I believe, Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, Gutierrez, and Yoder-Hauerwas need each other; all have something good and right and true to contribute to a contemporary Christian social ethic and each corrects potential errors in the others.

One talk is too brief to cover all the subjects these Christian ethicists deal with, so here I am going to focus on the one relevant to the case study I began with—the Machine Gun Preacher. Is Christian involvement in social unrest, social struggle, the often messy, rough and tumble of politics, even violence ever ethically justifiable? Should Christians engage in attempts to bring about justice in this broken world, even if that requires participating in its brokenness? Or ought Christians to sit on the sidelines of social conflict and beam messages of love into the fray hoping God will use them to bring about some modicum of peace and justice?

Is this a relevant question today? Well, anyone who is familiar with the popularity of Hauerwas’s ethic of “the Christian colony” within the world knows it’s a relevant question. Many Christian people, especially young people, are attracted to Hauerwas’s approach which even Hauerwas admits is largely inspired by the earlier ethical writings of Yoder. Christian pacifism and perfectionism are extremely popular today, especially among reflective young Christians who care deeply about issues of violence, poverty, war, empire and the threat of Constantinian theocracy. So, yes, this is an extremely relevant issue for every concerned Christian to consider.

Before diving into it, however, I think it’s best to reveal my own approach to Christian ethics in general and social ethics in particular. Ethics, including Christian ethics, is no exact science; there are many perspectives on it—including differing definitions of what ethics is. I suspect the popular, what I call “folk,” approach to ethics, especially among conservative Christians, is learning and following rules. Adults especially like this approach when dealing with young people always on the verge of rebellion. “Follow the rules!” we like to say. Most of us know, however, that rules often conflict and there are situations where no rule applies, at least not clearly or directly, and rules need grounding, justification. Why that rule and not another one?

This disillusionment with rules often causes especially young people at a certain stage of moral development to rush to embrace “situation ethics,” the idea that every situation of moral choice is unique and that rules are generally unreliable and often just wrong. Situation ethics, popularized by radical theologian Joseph Fletcher in his 1966 book by that name, says there are no absolutes except love. It attempts to leave it to individuals to apply love directly, as led by intuition, without mediating principles, to every moral dilemma “in that moment.” Of course, this approach to ethics is overly simplistic and individualized and leads into relativism. And yet, it was a natural reaction to the absolutism of some rule-based ethics, especially conservative religious ones that often ignore the exigencies of unexpected existential situations and demands for moral decision and action where the known rules would lead one to act irresponsibly. Kierkegaard’s “teleological suspension of the ethical” then lurks in every situation. Ethical anarchy results.

I believe all ethics is rooted and grounded in stories, grand narratives about reality and especially about “the good life.” Here I agree with Hauerwas who, in The Peaceable Kingdom, rightly argues that there are no neutral, value-free, not already committed ethical norms. All ethical norms are tied to narratives, stories about the meaning of life—why we are here. So let me propose this definition of ethics:

Ethics is deciding and acting in accordance with the good life, properly understood. It is developing a character, a set of virtues, consistent with the good life and making decisions to “do the right thing” based on the good life and the character, virtues, consistent with it.

So what is the Christian vision of the good life? I propose two biblical texts—one from the Hebrew Bible and one from the New Testament—that especially clearly reveal God’s idea of the good life: Isaiah 65:17-25 and Matthew 5-7. Time prevents me from reading all of that, so, relying on my hearers’ familiarity with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, I will read only Isaiah 65:17-25:

See, I will create
new heavens and a new earth.
The former things will not be remembered,
nor will they come to mind.
¹⁸ But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I will create,
for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight
and its people a joy.
¹⁹ I will rejoice over Jerusalem
and take delight in my people;
the sound of weeping and of crying
will be heard in it no more.

²⁰ “Never again will there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not live out his years;
the one who dies at a hundred
will be thought a mere child;
the one who fails to reach a hundred
will be considered accursed.
²¹ They will build houses and dwell in them;
they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
²² No longer will they build houses and others live in them,
or plant and others eat.
For as the days of a tree,
so will be the days of my people;
my chosen ones will long enjoy
the work of their hands.
²³ They will not labor in vain,
nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune;
for they will be a people blessed by the Lord,
they and their descendants with them.
²⁴ Before they call I will answer;
while they are still speaking I will hear.
²⁵ The wolf and the lamb will feed together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox,
and dust will be the serpent’s food.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,”
says the Lord. (NIV)

I propose that this biblical “picture” of the good life is depicted as well as can be in a picture in Edward Hicks’s 1833 painting “The Peaceable Kingdom.” The one word for it is “Shalom”—meaning well-being.

In Isaiah the focus is on peace, prosperity and long life for all. In Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount the focus is on self-sacrificing love for others, everyone looking out for others’ well-being, giving and forgiving.

This “Shalom” is the Christian vision of the good life; it is the life to come, here on earth, as N. T. Wright rightly emphasizes in his 2008 book Surprised by Hope. This is the story of the meaning of life the Bible gives us; it is our telos and God’s. Christian ethics lives from this; we seek to be persons whose character is shaped by this vision and, at our best, we try to make this world as much like that as possible. Or we should.

But the messiness of Christian social ethics, the reason for all its troubles, appears the moment we add something to Hicks’ beautiful picture—the Lord’s Resistance Army enslaving and slaughtering the children. Suddenly we are reminded that this world is not the Kingdom of God, is not a place of Shalom. Then Christian ethics becomes suddenly complicated, caught between its highest good, its vision of the good life, and what Freud called “the reality principle.” What ought Christians with power, and we all have some power, do in a world inhabited by moral monsters?

Bear with me now as I go through the basic ideas of Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, Gutierrez and Yoder-Hauerwas. I choose these because they are representative of modern and contemporary Christian social ethics and each has a distinctive perspective on the crucial question at hand—what should Christians with power, driven by their vision of Shalom, do in a broken world such as this one?

Walter Rauschenbusch was a Baptist. That’s the first thing we need to know about him; he was one of us, he belonged to our tribe. He taught church history at the oldest Baptist seminary in North America and participated in the progressive movement that thrived in his home city of Rochester, New York a century ago. He was a leading spokesman for the Social Gospel—the Christian wing of the progressive movement that sought justice for workers, children, women, minorities and the poor. He was a friend of John D. Rockefeller, also a Baptist, but also the most notorious “robber baron” of his day. And yet Rauschenbusch wrote books harshly critical of the captains of industry and American capitalism in general. Among them were Christianity and the Social Crisis in 1907, Christianizing the Social Order in 1912, and A Theology for the Social Gospel in 1918.

For Rauschenbusch, the Kingdom of God, understood as benevolent fraternity, loving brotherhood among all people, was the heart of Jesus’s message and example. For him, a social order brought completely under the law of love as taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount was the concrete outworking within history of Shalom and was something Christians should strive for and expect to achieve to a very high degree. He denied perfection, but argued that it would be possible to approximate the Kingdom of God as he understood it if Christians with power would throw their moral weight and political influence behind the progressive movement and democratize every corner of society.

Rauschenbusch clearly and strongly believed in Christian involvement in reforming the social order—even to the point of taking up the reigns of power, if offered them by a free electorate. He had a clear eyed vision of the direction history, meaning the progressive evolution of the social order, should take—toward the full democratization of everything including the economy. He regarded Jesus as, among other things, a prophet of democracy, of equality, and of equal fraternity among all people. For Rauschenbusch, the good life, the life organized according to love, would be a voluntary brotherhood based on cooperation rather than competition and it would be achieved through moral persuasion and, when necessary, pressure, but not violence. According to him the fullness of the Kingdom of God, the social expression of Shalom, is “always but coming.” In other words, it is always coming insofar as we strive for it through social and political activism for reform, but we should not expect it to arrive in its perfection or completion until Jesus returns.

Rauschenbusch anticipated many objections and answered them. One that Yoder-Hauerwas followers, among others, would probably ask him is why, if Christian participation in politics using power is the right thing to do, the Christians’ mandate, it is nowhere commanded in the New Testament? Here is his response in The Social Principles of Jesus (1917):

From the beginning an emancipating force resided in Christianity which was bound to register its effects in political life. But in an age of despotism it might have to confine its political morality to the duty of patient submission, and content itself with offering little sanctuaries of freedom to the oppressed in the Christian fraternities. Today, in the age of democracy, it has become immoral to endure private ownership of government. It is no longer a sufficient righteousness to live a good life in private. Christianity needs an ethic of public life. (49)

In other words, given our changed social and political situation, in which Christians have freedom to push for reforms in government and the economy and in which Christians have social and political power, it is downright sinful to sit on the sidelines and allow evil to prevail. This is a broken world, but it can be fixed if enough Christians join the progressive movement for reform toward equality.

Hauerwas is right that Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel was a social ethic for Christians who think they own the culture. Without doubt Rauschenbusch thought America to be a Christian country that is only halfway Christianized. He did, however, argue for Christian cooperation with non-Christians, especially Jews, who share our vision of Shalom. But he did not anticipate the cultural pluralism of contemporary America. And there was a note of triumphalism in his reforming program. Today Christians need to grapple with the reality that neither America nor any other country is Christian. The idea of a “Christian nation” is a myth; about that my friend Greg Boyd is entirely correct.

As we will see, there are other flaws in Rauschenbusch’s social ethic, ones ably pointed out, if somewhat inflated, by Niebuhr. Nevertheless, Rauschenbusch inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. and other later Christian and some non-Christian social reformers. I would go so far as to argue that the fall of Apartheid in South Africa was indirectly helped by Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel insofar as they pioneered modern progressive Christian social and political activism.

What advice would Rauschenbusch give to the Machine Gun Preacher? Well, he did not believe in violence—even as a necessary evil. Yes, he permitted confrontation and conflict, but not physical violence. That, he believed, was contrary to the spirit of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. He would applaud the Preacher for daring to get involved in direct ways and for seeking to emancipate the child soldiers of the Sudan, but he would urge him to stop short of using deadly force.

But, Niebuhr might ask, how exactly do you stop the Lord’s Resistance Army without violence?

Our next Christian social ethicist is Reinhold Niebuhr, probably the most influential American theologian of the twentieth century. Niebuhr earned his stripes, so to speak, while pastoring in Detroit during times of social and economic unrest in the automobile industry. He brought union leaders to speak in his church and preached and wrote articles against Henry Ford and other industrialists for not providing, among other things workers needed, workers compensation for those injured on the assemblies lines. Eventually he taught Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York and wrote numerous books mostly about social ethics. His picture graced the cover of Time magazine’s twenty-fifth anniversary issue in 1948. Several presidents from Carter to Obama have credited Niebuhr as their “favorite” theologian or philosopher.

But, ironically, in spite of his progressive social and political ideas, Niebuhr made his name by criticizing the Social Gospel! After World War 1 and the ensuing turmoil in Europe and America, especially during the Great Depression, and with the rise of Fascism in Europe, Niebuhr became disillusioned with the Social Gospel’s optimism about the Kingdom of God and our human ability to achieve it through love, persuasion and patient pressure. He saw, for example, that no amount of moral persuasion was making a dent in the great American industrialists’ oppression of their workers. And he ridiculed the very idea that we should ask African-Americans and other oppressed minorities simply to forgive their oppressors.

In other words, Niebuhr looked at Hicks’s picture of The Peaceable Kingdom and saw an eschatological, utopian, impossible ideal. The real picture, the picture we must have of this world as it is and always will be until the end, is one of massive injustice, oppression and violence of the powerful against the powerless. The Peaceable Kingdom picture of Shalom should drive us forward, to purify all our accomplishments and achievements, but we should not think it a realistic scenario for this-worldly history. Insofar as we do, he feared, we will inevitably take some human society, ours, for example, and lay The Peaceable Kingdom picture over it and claim we have “almost arrived.”

Niebuhr was allergic to optimism. His social ethic was labeled “Christian Realism.” Some preferred to call it unchristian pessimism! But Niebuhr feared our natural, fallen human tendency to pat ourselves on the back and baptize our social programs and arrangements as “Christian” and fall into complacency. We aim for love, he said, and miss justice. That’s because justice is messy and often seems contrary to the true spirit of love which is perfect selflessness. Justice includes the self in its calculations of conflicting claims about rights. Justice recognizes the world for what it is—a battlefield in which all, both righteous and evil, are infected with egoism and have a tendency to claim too much moral rightness for themselves. In fact, according to Niebuhr, all our motives are tainted and all our causes and programs are broken and all our achievements of justice are at best partial.

Because the world is so broken, Niebuhr believed, if we Christians are to be involved and effective in bringing about even approximations of justice, partial achievements of Shalom, we must be willing to compromise with the ungodly. Of course, he didn’t mean “compromise” as in “capitulate” to sin; he meant looking around for philosophies, movements, ideas that may not be rooted in revelation or rise to biblical standards of love and join with them, use them, cooperate with them insofar as they are imperfect tools for “making the best of” this sinful, broken, fallen world. Niebuhr realized and admitted that such compromises would necessarily involve Christians in sin, but, he believed, the only alternative is withdrawal from the fight for justice and that, he believed, would be irresponsible.

For Niebuhr, in contrast to Rauschenbusch, “justice” falls far short of love. The love Jesus taught and called for is perfect selflessness, disinterested, sacrificial benevolence that gives whatever one has to the nearest needy neighbor without weighing what he deserves or she will do with it. Love simply gives. Justice, on the other hand, calculates. It weighs competing interests and needs and rights and uses reason to establish balances of power. It seeks freedom and equality for all without utopian illusions; it settles for modicums of freedom and equality and requires messy, risky, struggles for them.

According to Niebuhr, love injects mercy into justice and calls it to ever higher achievements of equality among people. But justice makes love concrete in the real, broken world where absolute love between competing powers is impossible.

Niebuhr’s was a social ethic for people with a tragic sense of history, for those who feel compelled to become involved in the rough and tumble world of politics and social unrest toward justice, for those who are willing to risk disobedience to perfection for the sake of establishing a more just and equitable world.

Let’s look at Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement during the 1960s and see in it elements of both Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr. King frequently talked about the goal of the movement as “brotherhood” and a “commonwealth of equals,” even as “the beloved community.” That’s Rauschenbusch language. And he eschewed violence as a means of achieving justice for the oppressed; he urged use of loving persuasion toward enemies and oppressors. On the other hand, he engaged in organized struggles, confrontations and conflict and risked violence as a consequence of his non-violent sit-ins and marches. People died in the struggle; King felt the burden of those deaths and sensed the ambiguities of his own power. He was ambivalent about the social unrest he and the movement unleashed, but believed it was worth it to achieve justice. I see in King a combination of Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr. His high idealism and non-violent activism was partly inspired by Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel; his realism and willingness to use power for confrontation risking conflict for the sake of justice was partly inspired by Niebuhr.

What advice would Niebuhr give to the Machine Gun Preacher? I think he would congratulate him for daring to get involved in a bloody, messy struggle to save children’s lives but warn him against over use of violence, against vengeance, and against ever believing his cause is wholly righteous and without sin. He would urge him to use only what deadly force was absolutely necessary to save the lives of innocent children and to never think of himself as innocent. He would advise him to seek God’s forgiveness for being involved in violence even though it was thrust upon him and he had little choice given the circumstances. He would remind him that this is a broken world and there is no perfection and violence is always a sign of that brokenness, even when it is necessary. He would tell him to “sin boldly and repent more boldly still.”

Now I turn to Gustavo Gutierrez and liberation theology. Popular North American and especially conservative Christian images of liberation theology are distorted. Gutierrez, the “father of liberation theology,” is not a pacifist but draws back from endorsing violence even in the most just causes. He prefers non-violent approaches to social justice which he defines as equality of opportunity for all people regardless of social class or race or gender. Violence he believes is only justified when it is a response to the unjust “institutionalized violence” of the oppressors—the “first violence” that calls forth the “second violence” of the oppressed to liberate themselves from dehumanizing uses of power, domination and control. Many people in North America celebrate Independence Day, the Fourth of July, even in church but condemn other oppressed people’s revolutions—even when they are against military dictatorships that use death squads to murder non-violent dissenters such as Jesuit priests and nuns.

Gutierrez, like Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr, is driven by the vision of Shalom—peace, justice and prosperity for all. In A Theology of Liberation he urges utopianism—a vision of just such a Kingdom of God on earth—as a means of social progress towards equality. However, what he adds to Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr, although it may be implicit in them, is the principle of “preferential option for the poor.” Christian love, he argues, requires solidarity with the poor and by “poor” he does not just mean materially poor; he means powerless. For Gutierrez, justice is what happens when the poor are lifted up and empowered to live self-determining, human lives—lives where they have opportunity to achieve at least a modicum of their human potential.

Again, I see a hybrid of Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr in Gutierrez. I’m not arguing that he consciously, intentionally combined them although there is evidence that he read both. He was more influenced by the “political theology” of European theologians Joannes Metz and Jürgen Moltmann. However, there are echoes of both Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr in Gutierrez’s liberation theology.

In complete congeniality with Rauschenbusch Gutierrez regards the poor as special objects of Christian love. Also, with Rauschenbusch the Peruvian theologian is unapologetically utopian—calling Christians especially to hope and plan for the Kingdom of God on earth and to settle for nothing less than peace, prosperity and justice for all. But he goes beyond Rauschenbusch in seeing differentiating wealth as always a sign of the brokenness of this world. And he agrees with Niebuhr that Christian use of political power, even violence, is sometimes necessary to move a society closer to justice. Where he disagrees with Niebuhr, however, is in regarding the conflict and social unrest necessary to establish justice as sinful and requiring repentance. While he doesn’t regard it as something to celebrate, neither does he think the appropriate response to the overthrow of an oppressive regime is sackcloth and ashes.

Gutierrez’s is a social ethic for revolutionaries. Not necessarily for guerilla fighters (he urged his friend Camillo Torres not to join a group of guerillas) but for Christians and others who are impatient with the slow pace of justice and feel called to enter into the conflicts of history on the side of the oppressed.

Ironically, many people who hold up Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a saint and martyr criticize liberation theology. I think Gutierrez would remind them that the German pastor and theologian joined a revolutionary cell and volunteered to pull the trigger on Hitler. They turned him down and used him in other ways, but he knew he was complicit in their plot and that the blood of Hitler and anyone else who might be killed in the coup would be on his hands as much as on anyone’s.[1]

Now, because some question this, I want to diverge from the main line of my talk for a moment and insert a “side bar” about Bonhoeffer and violence.

According to his student and biographer Eberhard Bethge Bonhoeffer asked, paraphrasing here, what is the duty of a Christian who sees a madman driving a car into a crowd of people? To go behind the car picking up the wounded and giving them first aid? Or, if possible, to get the madman out from behind the wheel of the car?

Some fans of Bonhoeffer have recently questioned whether the German pastor, committed to pacifism as he was, really became involved in a plot to kill Hitler. Mennonite theologian Mark Thiessen Nation and two scholars recently published a book entitled Bonhoeffer the Assassin? with the thesis that the author of The Cost of Discipleship and Ethics did not participate in any conspiracy involving assassination. However, this is flatly contradicted, as they admit, by Bethge. Bethge leaves no doubt about Bonhoeffer’s knowledge of and support for the plot to kill Hitler. However, this was, he says, a “boundary situation,” not a matter of principle.

Bethge reports that as early as 1932 Bonhoeffer hinted at the future and what it might require of Christians. In a sermon preached that year the German pastor-theologian suggested that “times would come again when martyrdom would be called for.”[2] Speaking prophetically, Bonhoeffer said about the coming martyrdoms that “this blood…will not be so innocent and clear as that of the first who testified. On our blood a great guilt would lie: that of the useless servant who is cast into the outer darkness.”[3] This is a hard saying, but Bonhoeffer left us many hard sayings to reflect on. Bethge clearly interpreted it as meaning not that the new martyrs would go to hell but that they could not count on innocence in necessity. Bethge, a theologian in his own right, recorded about Bonhoeffer’s decision to join the conspiracy against Hitler, which he knew very well included a plot to kill the dictator, “Thus, the ‘boundary situation’ led Bonhoeffer to abandon all outward and inward security. By entering into that kind of conspiracy, he forsook command, applause, and commonly held opinion.”[4]

End of Bonhoeffer side bar and back to the main body of my talk.

So what would Gutierrez’s advice be to the Machine Gun Preacher? Well, that’s fairly obvious: Use only deadly force that is absolutely necessary to stop the Lord’s Resistance Army from carrying out its maniacal slaughtering of entire villages and kidnapping and murdering of innocent children. Don’t rejoice in the bloodshed, but don’t feel guilty about it, either. Do what you have to do out of love—for the innocents and for those who are threatening them.

Finally I come to the real purpose of this talk—the Yoder-Hauerwas challenge to all of the above—to Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr and Gutierrez.

Over the past two to three decades numerous well-intentioned, smart, caring and thoughtful young Christians have jumped on the Yoder-Hauerwas pacifist, perfectionist bandwagon and reminded all of us that obedience to Jesus is the first principle of social ethics and that the church is not a launching pad for social revolution but the city set on a hill to show the world its true self and the better way of life God wants for it.

Perhaps the Yoder-Hauerwas approach is best summed up in the Duke Divinity School theologian’s phrase that “the church is the Christian’s social ethic.”

Jesus did not come to overthrow unjust, even oppressive social systems; he came to establish an alternative social order within this broken world. The focus of Christian social ethics should not be on reform or revolution of the world but on being the church as God intends it to be following the Kingdom principles of Shalom laid out in the Sermon on the Mount.

Christians who become involved in social struggles using political power, coercion and deadly force are usurping God’s role; God has not called us, his people, to be managers of history but to leave that to him and organize ourselves in the “upside down Kingdom” of Jesus. Within the church love and justice are never forced into opposition or even dialectic; obedience does not have to be sacrificed for effectiveness. The church, as the “community of the beloved” can change the world through example, if God uses it for that purpose. But that is ultimately up to him; we are only called to be that community. Yes, to be sure, we can speak truth to power from within it. Or, better put, the community of Christ can speak truth prophetically to power. But Christians, individually or organizationally, must not take up the reigns of worldly power to attempt to bring in the Kingdom of God using ungodly means. “Sin boldly” is the path to perdition; compromise with evil is the door to disobedience and ultimately dissolution—of God’s plan and purpose for the church.

For Christians, according to Yoder and Hauerwas, the cross unites love and justice. That’s true of Jesus’s cross and ours. Self-sacrificial service and voluntary subordination are the way to the Shalom Jesus revealed.

The Yoder-Hauerwas social ethic is one for perfectionists. And I don’t mean that in a pejorative way; it’s a social ethic for Christians with high ideals and determination to be obedient to the way of Jesus even if that requires ineffectiveness in worldly terms. It is a social ethic for those who really believe in the brokenness of the world and trust God to heal it, if he chooses, using the church’s wholeness as a witness to his healing power.

Yoder and Hauerwas and their followers target especially Niebuhr for his alleged compromises with worldly power and for leading his followers down the primrose path away from Jesus and toward Constantine. Niebuhr, of course, were he here to argue with Hauerwas, would no doubt respond that the path he trod did not lead toward Constantine or away from Jesus but toward a better, more just world and away from withdrawal and abdication of responsibility. And so the argument goes on—between the Yoder-Hauerwasians and the Niebuhrians today.

What advice would Yoder and Hauerwas give to the Machine Gun preacher? Well, that also, as in the case of Gutierrez, seems fairly obvious: Put down your machine gun and other weapons and work with the churches of the Sudan and Uganda and America and elsewhere to provide a safe sanctuary for victims of violence and oppression. And prepare to die just as Jesus did. The servant is not greater than his master and should not use means his master would not use.

I began by admitting my own cognitive dissonance when reading these theologians and social ethicists. I agree with all of them! And I disagree with all of them! While reading Rauschenbusch I find myself inspired and energized to go forth and reform the world using persuasion and pressure with Shalom always in view as the goal. While reading Niebuhr I find myself comforted and encouraged to rely wholly on God’s grace, mercy and forgiveness when I must fall short of the high and perhaps impossible standards set by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. And in Niebuhr I find a realistic account of the world and a ringing call to responsibility for it. While reading Gutierrez I find myself fired up to fight for the poor, the powerless and the oppressed, to go forth into the halls of power prophetically to challenge the privileged and the systems that support them and keep the disadvantaged pressed down. While reading Yoder and Hauerwas I find myself called to commitment to the church of Jesus Christ and to work together with others of like mind to make it the locus of Shalom in this broken world, to help it be the witness Jesus was to those around him of God’s love and mercy and transforming power. Also to make it a sanctuary for the helpless, hurting and oppressed.

From Rauschenbusch I receive the vision of a human fraternity of equals organized according to loving service without domination or oppression. From Niebuhr I receive the realism of the inevitability of sin even within Christian community and the call to social transformation without illusions of righteousness. From Gutierrez I receive the ideal of the preferential option for the poor and the call to solidarity with them. From Yoder and Hauerwas I receive the reminder that the church is my main social ethic and to avoid all triumphalism including especially Constantinianism.

So where to go from there? Where do I come down and what advice do I give—with regard to those areas of incommensurability between these four approaches to Christian social ethics? While there is no perfect hybrid of all four, I do think they are capable of combination with adjustments none of them would want. But here goes, anyway.

First, I agree with Yoder and Hauerwas that the church is the Christian’s primary social ethic. Our first duty, calling, is to help the church be the witness of Shalom to the world God intends it to be. But that means investing primary interest and energy in it. And it means avoiding all entanglements of the church with the state after the Constantinian pattern. The church is not called to be a launching pad for revolution but a community of love, the community of the beloved. The church should never take up arms for any cause; the church is the family of God, dysfunctional as it is in its own brokenness, that lives from self-sacrificial service each to every other.

Second, however, I agree with Niebuhr and Gutierrez that Christians, that I, must be open to the call of God to take up power, even deadly force if necessary, to defend the weak, the helpless and oppressed. With Niebuhr I agree that such use of coercive force for any cause is less than perfect, is even sinful, and never something to be celebrated or boasted of. With them I agree that Christians should not abandon government to pagans but lovingly, for the sake of the poor, the powerless and the oppressed, risk sinning boldly by daring to get involved in the messy world of secular statescraft shaping public policy and, even occasionally, fighting for the lives and rights of especially the helpless.

John Stackhouse, an evangelical theologian at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada, expresses this sentiment very articulately in his book Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World:

Most of the time…we know what to do and must simply do it. Sometimes, however, the politician has to hold his nose and make a deal. The chaplain has to encourage his fellow soldiers in a war he deeply regrets. The professor has to teach fairly a theory or philosophy she doesn’t think is true. The police officer has to subdue a criminal with deadly force. We are on a slippery slope indeed—and one shrouded in darkness, with the ground not only slippery but shifting under our feet. So we hold on to God’s hand, and each other’s, and make the best of it. (288)

Whenever I am tempted too strongly toward the Yoder-Hauerwas ethic of love perfectionism, absolute non-violence, including refusal of all coercion and force, I think of the Christian abolitionists of the first half of the nineteenth century. William Wilberforce accomplished much good by arguing forcefully, with much political negotiation and more than a little pressure in the House of Commons, for abolition of the slave trade. In America many Christians, including revivalist Charles Finney and his Oberlin students, practiced civil disobedience and even occasionally violence to rescue slaves from bondage and help them escape to Canada along the “underground railroad.”

For African slaves Shalom meant freedom from kidnapping, bondage, torture, family separation, degradation of their humanity. For those who dared to take up the reigns of power to fight for their Shalom it meant sinning boldly by political compromise, sometimes deceit and subterfuge, civil disobedience and even occasionally open rebellion against unjust laws.

Who is to say that’s all in the past and now we can settle back comfortably in our Christian communities and disengage from the struggles for justice that still surround us?

With great reluctance and admission that repentance is called for, were I in the Machine Gun Preacher’s shoes I hope I would have the courage to do the same as he. And I hope I would remember that even such a just cause is fraught with ambiguity and unrighteousness and requires grace, mercy and forgiveness.

Nineteenth century theologian-pastor Theodore Parker first said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I am here arguing that sometimes we have to help it bend. May God grant us the courage, faith, humility and repentant hearts as we take the risk of helping it bend.