Reflections on Hope

Bob Woodward in his book, The War Within, reports that the veteran Foreign Service officer David Satterfield, who had the opportunity to observe President George W. Bush at close range for several years, concluded:
If Bush believed something was right, he believed it would succeed. Its very rightness ensured ultimate success. Democracy and freedom were right. Therefore, they would win out. (p. 407)
That attitude – that right will prevail – captures the essence of the Christian hope.

Unfortunately, history frequently has proved any expectation of that which is right or good prevailing in the present wrong. Consequently, Christian leaders have often espoused the more cautious view that God's justice will establish the right and good only when the fullness of the God's kingdom is established. This thinking predictably induces in many a less than diligent inclination to work for justice in the here and now. Karl Marx famously focused on that tragic result, characterizing the Christian hope that right would eventually prevail as a tool for capitalist exploitation of the masses, future rewards promised by capitalist exploiters to compensate the exploited masses for their present suffering.

The social gospel movement, initiated in the U.S. in the late nineteenth century by Walter Rauschenbusch and others, sought to correct the otherworldly emphasis that then dominated the Christian hope with an emphasis on building God's kingdom in the present. The social gospel movement disquieted both many capitalists and theologians, who preferred the stability of the status-quo to the tumult inherent in striving to create a more just society in the present. The controversy that Martin Luther King, Jr., and the twentieth century Civil Rights movement in the United States sparked was in many respects a loud refrain of what had happened when the social gospel movement first debuted.

Focusing on a future hope is not only less disruptive in the present but also demands less from us. However, if we would walk faithfully in Jesus’ footsteps, then, like him, we must choose the more difficult path defined by justice and love. The fullness of God's kingdom may not emerge in my lifetime, or even in this generation, but that does not excuse me from working toward that goal. This is what Jesus did. Doing so led him to an early and an ugly death. We realistically cannot expect – though we must always hope – that the consequences of our efforts will produce better results in the present.

The expectation that right would prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan had two fatal flaws. First, expecting that right (e.g., democracy) would prevail in the near term expresses incredible hubris in one’s ability to control the world. No one person has that degree of control over his or her own life, let alone the lives of millions. Second, intrinsic to right prevailing in the world is that those who work for right to prevail must do so in a manner consistent with right. This is why Jesus chose the way of love rather than the way of the sword. Just War Theory provides a framework for ascertaining those few occasions on which the exercise of military right is morally necessary. Alas, the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan fall woefully short of satisfying that ethical standard. Only the choice of the governed and not external coercion can birth true democracy.

I admire those who constantly strive to help right prevail in the present and learn from those who do so seeking to embody the right, the just, the loving. I also know that I must prepare to cope with life when right does not prevail, for the present has no guarantees. The current U.S. policies in Iraq and Afghanistan sadly fall short of those standards.

Global Recession

DEPRIVE a person of oxygen and he will turn blue, collapse and eventually die. Deprive economies of credit and a similar process kicks in. As the financial crisis has broadened and intensified, the global economy has begun to suffocate. That is why the world’s central banks have been administering emergency measures, including a round of co-ordinated interest-rate cuts on Wednesday October 8th. With luck they will prevent catastrophe. They are unlikely to avert a global recession.
- “Bad or Worse,” The Economist, October 8, 2008 (accessed at http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12382253&source=features_box_main)

Yesterdays gospel reading (Matthew 22:15-22) with its injunction to give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God's, reminds us that humans are physical beings situated in a physical universe. The spiritual does not exist apart from the physical. Dismissing money as unimportant or dirty is an unrealistic, superficial approach to life. Money is the oxygen that keeps vital goods and services – bread, water, sewer, etc. – flowing. Religious leaders need the wisdom and expertise to provide informed and helpful reflections on the moral and spiritual dimensions of current economic issues.

The human capacity for greed, which one can define in terms of excessive selfishness and self-interest, means that unregulated or insufficiently regulated capitalism will always produce great injustice. The depression of the 1930s was, until this year, the most recent reminder of that truth in the United States. Conversely, the failed experiment in socialism reported in the book of Acts underscores the human community’s necessary reliance upon capitalistic economic structures. The challenge for a nation’s leaders, and its voters, is to devise a system that creatively balances, on the one hand, opportunity for individual initiative, creativity, labor, and reward with, on the other hand, safeguards to protect against exploitation and dishonesty and to ensure minimum standards of well-being for all.

In sum, ethics must precede and constantly inform economics. Substituting a false gospel of laissez-faire for the solid foundations of prudence and justice imperils our communal well-being.

Justice denied: military capital punishment

In late July 2008, President George W. Bush approved the death sentence for Army private, Ronald A. Gray. Gray, one of six personnel on the military’s death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, has lived on death row since his 1988 court-martial conviction for rape and murder. The wheels of military justice can turn exceedingly slowly, as Gray’s case has taken nineteen years to reach mandatory Presidential review. Appeals in Gray’s case, not yet exhausted, will probably require several more years to complete. If the Army eventually executes Gray, it will be the first military execution since 1961, an execution that President Eisenhower had approved in 1957. Meanwhile, a North Carolina court has sentenced Gray to eight life terms after he admitted raping and killing two women in North Carolina.

Effective deterrence requires prompt, consistent, and appropriate action. Nobody can accurately characterize executing a criminal more than twenty-years after conviction as prompt action. Criminals tend to commit crimes seeking immediate gratification and frequently cannot cope with delayed gratification. Excessively extending the time between conviction and punishment, as happens with all capital punishment cases in the U.S. and with Private Gray’s case in particular, eliminates the critical causal link between crime and punishment inherent in any effective deterrent.

Executing less than one person in the military every forty-seven years dramatically undercuts any attempt to argue for the consistency of imposing capital punishment within the military. The interval since the last military execution is so long that even the means of execution is uncertain. The lack of consistency – regretfully, Private Gray and his five death row compatriots are not the only military members guilty of capital offenses in the last fifty years – means that military personnel weighing the pros and cons of committing a capital offense will view the potential consequences of their act as a gamble rather than as sure and certain. For individuals who find the idea of delayed gratification unfulfilling, this lack of consistency eviscerates any deterrent power that capital punishment might have. Furthermore, the lack of consistency also highlights our fundamentally unjust sentencing process. For example, Private Gray, like 59% of civilian federal inmates on death row, is a person of color.

Fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq has currently stretched the U.S. military thin and, in the opinion of some military analysts, severely degraded the military’s fighting capacity. Executing one private for crimes that occurred twenty years ago will do nothing to instill more pride, raise morale, or improve warfighting capacity. Many in the U.S. military, many U.S. civilians, and much of the global community will regard Private Gray’s execution as inappropriate redress for the crimes he committed. If the U.S. military and civilian society felt more positively about the death penalty, both the military and civilian society would execute more people convicted of capital crimes with fewer delays. The crimes to which Private Gray has admitted and for which courts have convicted him are horrendous. Nevertheless, killing him will not undo the pain he caused, restore the dead to life, reconcile those he estranged, or atone for any wrong. Instead, Private Gray’s execution, if it happens, will represent one more, unnecessary, pointless, and avoidable death.

Private Gray is certainly not a Christ-figure. Like the two criminals whom Scripture portrays as crucified alongside Jesus, Private Gray has admitted to committing multiple crimes. Yet he remains our neighbor and a child of God. Nothing that a person can do places him or her beyond the pale of God's love.

I cannot imagine Jesus as Private Gray’s executioner. Nor can I imagine Jesus rejoicing at anyone’s death, be the person saint or sinner. I can imagine Jesus offering Ronald Gray forgiveness, healing, and new life. I can imagine Jesus encouraging us to keep Ronald Gray in our prayers and to incarcerate him until we can safely welcome him back into society. I can imagine Jesus writing in the dirt, telling us that the one without sin is the only one who should execute another, and then compassionately looking each person tempted to kill this child of God, in the eyes. With so much pain and brokenness already in the world, we who claim to walk in Jesus’ footsteps need to seize every opportunity to end pointless killing, an achievable goal at least in the case of Private Ronald Gray.

Bishop Robinson

Last night I heard the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, respond to questions at a Duke University Chapel forum co-sponsored by the Dean of the Chapel (the Rev. Dr. Sam Wells) and Duke’s Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgendered Caucus. As always, the bishop employed his great sense of humor to advantage and appeared actively engaged with those present.

Bishop Robinson believes that the Church is now experiencing the “beginning of the end of patriarchy.” I find his assessment reasonable and a sign of increasing justice in the world. Although many think the world, especially the West, less moral today than in mid-twentieth century, they tend to be, from my observation, people who would have then occupied and enjoyed positions of power. The proximity of the end of patriarchy, as people of power (primarily heterosexual white males) reluctantly open the table so that all voices are equally welcome and equally heard, has caused the huge outcry in response to his consecration rather than the issue of homosexuality, per se.

The Duke format did not allow time for in-depth theological engagement. However, Bishop Robinson threw out one tantalizing concept. Responding to a question from Dean Wells, Bishop Robinson wondered aloud whether God had become incarnate to know what it is like to be fully human. Could God have ever known the full gamut of feelings had God not spent time in a human body?

In spite of that moment of candor, the good bishop emphasized his theological orthodoxy several times. I wondered if he was being defensive, disingenuous, or like a great many Christians had simply not thought through all of the implications and connections of his various theological ideas.

The one point at which I found myself most strongly disagreeing with Bishop Robinson was when he optimistically hoped that the Anglican Communion would not split. The truth is that the Communion has already split in fact although not in name. The June Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON) in Jerusalem provides a convenient and identifiable point in time to associate with the Anglican Communion’s de facto split. The vast majority of bishops who attended GAFCON boycotted the Lambeth conference and do not intend to continue in communion with the Episcopal Church in the U.S., the Anglican Church in Canada, and those who hold similar opinions. Removing all references to the Archbishop of Canterbury from the canons of the Province of Nigeria further signifies the intent of the dissidents to disassociate themselves from historic Anglicanism’s “big tent” approach to Christianity. The schism results from actions the dissidents have taken; nobody has pushed them out of the Anglican Communion. We who remain in the Communion need to accept the reality of that schism, give those who leave our heartfelt yet sad blessing, and get on with God's business.