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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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Concerning social violence:

Jose 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 Niebuhrunmigrated-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."unmigrated-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."unmigrated-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."unmigrated-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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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 stratagem of power.'

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