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4. Christian faith reminds us both that we always live in a deeper dimension than the realm in which the political struggle takes place and that we can never simply flee the world of political contention into a realm of mystic eternity or moralistic illusion.

Wiki Markup5. Christian faith calls for a pragmatic approach to politics/ which develops it as the art of the possible, cautious always not to fall into new and worse forms of injustice in the effort to eliminate old ones. (According to such a pragmatic approach, power and self-interest are used, beguiled, harnessed, and deflected for the ultimate end of establishing the highest and most inclusive possible community of justice and order \ [= peace\]. Also, we must have a pragmatic approach toward every institution of property and of government, recognizing that none of them is as sacrosanct as is usually supposed, that all are subject to corruption, and that their abolition is also subject to corruption.)

6. Christian faith gives us a place from which we can operate in history, working at our historic tasks without illusions and without despair.

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To what extent is the distinction between "oppressed" and "oppressors" open to the corruption that follows upon assuming that social conflicts are between "saints" and "sinners," instead of between contending groups of sinners?

1. Certainly the oppressed are sinners as surely as the oppressors. And the church's ministry of reconciliation to the oppressed is to bring the deepest insights of Christian faith to bear on their situation – -- not counseling them against violence, but dissuading them from hatred, or setting their problem in a perspective such that their hatred is mitigated by the recognition that the sin of the capitalist is not peculiar to the capitalist and that therefore the destruction of capitalism will not remove sin from the world. To the objection that such mitigation of self-righteousness weakens the fury and wrath necessary to the success of the oppressed's cause, the response is that, on the most pragmatic level, this may very well not be true, because fury and wrath may only increase the size of the enemy's ranks and strengthen the righteousness of his cause.

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5. It can be eliminated in principle both because we are not created sinners and because the saving grace of God is ever-present, notwithstanding the fact of our universal sinfulness, overcoming the deepest root of social violence in our anxious distrust of God and our consequent disloyalty to God – -- as well as to all to whom God is loyal. Since it is this underlying distrust and disloyalty that leads to all our strategies of trying to secure our existence, and thus to self-aggrandizement and injustice toward others, social violence can in principle be eliminated because, notwithstanding our tendency to sin, we have a capacity to act justly to the extent that God's grace is effective in freeing us from ourselves.

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7. This position, however, is not properly described as pessimism. It is more fairly characterized simply as realism, in the strict sense of seeing things as they really are, in distinctiction distinction from how they appear to be or how we would like them to be – -- and this in both of the relevant respects: with respect both to the universal reality of human sinfulness and with respect to the all-encompassing reality, notwithstanding sin, of God's saving grace.

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Corrigendum ad 1, which should be reformulated as follows;:

1. There can be no fruitful discussion of "social violence" unless we take care to clarify what we mean by the phrase. To this end, I propose that we understand "violence" in general to mean the exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on persons or damage to property, and so any action or conduct involving such exercise. By "social violence" in particular, then, I suggest that we understand such violence in this sense as is inevitably involved in what Reinhold Niebuhr speaks of as the "social struggle" to achieve "social cohesion," as the mean between anarchy, on the one hand, and tyranny, on the other.

Concerning social violence:

Jose José Miguez-Boninounmigrated-wiki-markup

"\[W\]hether Christians or not, we are always actively involved in violence -- – repressive, subversive, systemic, insurrectional, open, or hidden. I say actively involved because our militancy or lack of it, our daily use of the machinery of the society in which we live, our ethical decisions or our refusal to make decisions make us actors in this drama."unmigrated-wiki-markup

"\[I\]n a continent where thousands die every day as victims of various forms of violence, no neutral standpoint exists. _My_ violence is direct or indirect, institutional or revolutionary, conscious or unconscious. But it is violence . . . . My violence is either obedience to or betrayal of Jesus Christ."

Reinhold Niebuhr

Wiki Markup"\[T\]he political strategies by which the world achieves a precarious justice . . . invariably involve the balancing of power with power; and they never completely escape the peril of tyranny, on the one hand, and and the peril of anarchy, on the other."

Wiki Markup"\[B\]ecause men are sinners . . . justice can be achieved only by a certain degree of coercion, on the one hand, and by resistance to coercion and tyranny, on the other hand. The political life of man must constantly steer between the Scylla of anarchy and the Charybdis of tyranny. "unmigrated-wiki-markup

"\[E\]ven the seemingly most stable justice degenerates periodically into either tyranny or anarchy."unmigrated-wiki-markup

"T\]he tensions of \ [a balance of power\] may become overt; and overt tensions may degenerate into conflict. The center of power, which has the function of preventing this anarchy of conflict, may also degenerate into tyranny. There is no perfectly adequate method of preventing either anarchy or tyranny."

Wiki Markup"\[T\]he kind of justice \ [achieved in democratic societies\] approximates the harmony of love more than either anarchy or tyranny."

"Human egotism makes large-scale co-operation upon a purely voluntary basis impossible. Governments must coerce. Yet . . . this coercion . . . is always in danger of serving the purposes of the coercing power rather than the general weal."

"The overt conflicts of human history are periods of judgment when what has been hidden becomes revealed."

Wiki Markup"\[T\]he ideal of love is not merely a principle of indiscriminate criticism upon all approximations of justice. It is also a principle of discriminate criticism between forms of justice."unmigrated-wiki-markup

"The Christian is freed by \ [the grace of God\] to act in history; to give \ [her or\] his devotion to the highest values \ [she or\] he knows; to defend those citadels of civilization of which necessity and destiny have made \ [her or\] him the defender; and \ [she or\] he is persuaded by that grace to remember the ambiguity of even \ [her or\] his best actions."

Schubert M. Ogden (following Reinhold Niebuhr)

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2. The distinction between violent and nonviolent resistance is not absolute. (If it were absolute, one would have to give moral preference to the nonviolent power wielded by a propagandist over the kind of violent power wielded by a generaLgeneral)

3. The differences between violence and nonviolence are pragmatic, not instrinsic intrinsic or absolute, the differences between their social consequences being differences in degree, not in kind. (Both place restraint upon the freedom of others, and both may injure or kill persons and damage or destroy property.)

4. Once pure pacifism has been abandoned, and the principle of resistance and coercion has been accepted as necessary to the social struggle for social cohesion, the dfferences differences between violence and nonviolence lose their absolute significance, although they remain important.

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6. A responsible relationship to the political order makes an unqualified disavowal of violence impossible.unmigrated-wiki-markup

*"The civil rights movement is usually remembered as a case in which nonviolence worked. You seem to want to counter that view, and you draw on Reinhold Niebuhr's theology in noting that the power structure in Oxford\[, NC\] responded to racism only when power was brought to bear on it and parts of town were torched."*

"The distinction between Niebuhr's theology and the civil rights movement is somewhat artificial. The difference between burning an unoccupied warehouse and refusing to surrender a seat at a segregated lunch counter is significant, but both actions are designed to exert economic pressure. Nonviolent direct action at its most effective was surely Niebuhrian in that it operated as political coercion, not moral appeal. King called nonviolence 'merely a Niebuhrian strategem stratagem of power.'

"The armies of nonviolence descended on Birmingham in 1963 determined to create intolerable tension in the community, to inflict an unbearable economic price, to shame the U. S. in the eyes of the world and undermine its claim to be a beacon of democracy, and to force the national government to intervene. Popular memory casts nonviolence as an appeal to the better angels of our nature, but this is sugar-coated nonsense.

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