This is my paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 7:15-19.  I think it's pretty good.  Ecclesiastes is perhaps my favorite book of the Bible.  It is written as though by King Solomon (a common literary device), and is ironically included just after Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible.  In many ways, Ecclesiastes is the earliest piece of existentialist philosophy.

What do you think?  Is the best policy to be good, but not too good, and to be bad, but not too bad?  Does wisdom make a man strong?

Bonus question: What is your favorite book of the Bible?  Least favorite? 

-NDSR

I have an extensive post on why I believe the New Testament calls for Christians to live nonviolently.  Somewhere around page 26 of the post, I get around to listing specific passages I believe teach nonviolent living.  In response to a request/suggestion, I am going to begin posting those passages as individual posts here.  This is part three.
Jesus is fully up-front about the radical implications of living for the Kingdom of God.  When conversations turn to pacifism, the first place questions go is to defending your family, yet Jesus calls these very allegiances into question.  Jesus doesn't even allow his followers to cling to their own lives.  Self-defense, it would seem, is no justification to deviate from the path Jesus lays out. 

And it is precisely to that path that Jesus calls us in the phrase, "Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple."  Christians who attempt to justify Christian violence often say that Jesus himself was a pacifist because his unique vocation was to die for humanity.  Christians today aren't called to die for humanity, and so are justified living differently than Jesus did.  Yet this logic seems foreign to Jesus, who explicitly calls his followers to live in anticipation of a suffering death, as he himself did.  If it is granted that Jesus would choose the way of suffering (or riddle or miraculous deliverance, etc.) rather than the way of violent self-defense, it follows his disciples should be characterized by the same.

-NDSR

Notice to Revelife editors: please do not feature this post.

Anyone keeping up with my writings in the last couple of months has probably noticed a decided lack of real questions being discussed.  This is regrettable, but for a pair of reasons it could not be otherwise.  The first reason is that I am busier and more multiplexed than I have been before in my life.  Working two jobs, raising a foster daughter, trying to talk my mother through her cancer treatments and surgery, it's a bit overwhelming.  I am actually looking forward to beginning work on my master's, which sadly is still a couple of years off while Lydia finishes her ed degree.

But the second reason is that I am thinking through some of my theo-political foundation.  This re-thinking has been so seismic and fundamental that it's difficult to put terms to it, and the truth is that I could not even complete a political stance assessment like the Political Compass right now.  I get bogged down on every question.  In the past two months, I have read or re-read the majority of Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, parts of Augustine's City of God, Locke's second treatise, Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality and de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.  

It is very difficult to read political philosophy without a perspective from which to critique it, but that's precisely what I am intending to construct, so it has been slow going.

Indeed, I have been continuing on the potentially helpful idea that a Christian doesn't require any theory of statecraft, because the only politics that matter to a Christian are the politics of the church.  But this is dependent on the assumption that the church is in fact a polis of its own, functionally living out a counter-narrative to the politics of any given state.  From this perspective, the Christian needs no particular theory of statecraft, because to the degree that the state is not the church, it is in rebellion against God, and there is no particular pattern to which rebellion should conform.

But now I am beginning to question even this fundamental view of the relationship of theology to politics.  Perhaps it is the case that the church is its own polis, but perhaps it is the case that a City of God exists which, in Max Stackhouse's words, "is not the church, but is the morally and spiritually ordered actualization of grace working among and within people in the heart and in personal relationships, as well as in both church and society."

This needn't be equated with the state, either, even though Protestant politics and ethics since the Peace of Westphalia have tended to do so.  Reading Pope John Paul II's Centessimus Annus, Stackhouse praises it for it articulateness in separating the Christian "we" from any national "we."  Stackhouse says,


In other words, these are the areas where such a vision of a City of God may be witnessed in the working of the world.  If that is the case, then the theopolitical orientation of the church and of Christians in general is vastly different than the somewhat inwardly focused view that I have always held, happy to quote Stanley Hauerwas in saying that the first task of the church is not to make the world a better place, but to make the world the world.  And perhaps there is a middle way here, saying that the church has a social ethic even as it is a social ethic.  If so, at what does that social ethic aim?

Stackhouse presents an answer that is strongly in line with the sort of localist catholicity I have been dancing toward in my own theopolitical reorientation.  I believe that a catholic localism might be the only political answer for a church facing globalization, which is terrifying in its governmental and corporatist scale and power.  (Consider for a moment the fact that four companies process 80% of the meat America consumes.  Consider the stunning correlative between where American foreign aid goes and those nations' use of torture.)  The form that such a catholic localism might take, according to Stackhouse:


Stackhouse says that we must locate our theology of a "City of God" (our theopolitics, as it were) outside as well as within the church because To be sure, "not all that God is doing in the world is in the church. Our great danger is that we worship a God who is much too small when we only see God as Christ in the church."  As well, Stackhouse observes, "the problem of sin is not between church and world, but within both. And the possibilities of redemption are not for the church only, but for the world also, which "God so loved...."

Now, I am by no means converted to Stackhouse's position.  In fact, I find it doubtful I would ever be converted to precisely his position, as he sees a place for Christians serving in multinational militaries as "conscientious participants."  What is more, I am still quite partial to the Barthian-Yoderian-Hauerwasian tradition I have been brought up in, and it is still intuitive for me to say with Origen that prayer is our most important civic duty and the worship of Christ our main political task, and with Stanley Hauerwas that "We will not serve the world well as long as we believe that the church is only incidental to the world's salvation."

But at least this gives me, finally, a real question that I can seek an answer to.  What configuration of political philosophy is necessary to arrive at a resolution to this conflict?  I think, and I hope, that it is helpful that I do not yet know what answer it is that I want to arrive at.

I probably will not arrive any time soon.

If anyone has read this far, I am impressed and a little bewildered, but, hey, feel free to spend your time however you'd like.  If you have opinions of any sort on this, I am eager to hear them.