Popularity

Concerning practical matters, popularity is often acceptable. That everyone in my community happens to drive on the right side of the road indicates that I ought to do the same, lest I should put myself or others in danger.

It is with artistic and intellectual matters, however, that popularity so often fails. Popularity is light and superficial; it floats about like dandelion pollen in the wind. The depths of man's creativity and interest will not be satisfied by lightness and superficiality, but by weight and quality.

Why Shouldn't We Talk About Politics at the Dinner Table?

We don't wish to talk about divisive matters over a meal because eating food among others is a social occasion that is best enjoyed cooperatively. Living in a polity where citizens have the right to vote for blue, red, orange, green, or whatever other colour creates division. We go to the polls every few years to roll the dice and compete with others, seeing if we can succeed in realizing our political aspirations. Even if these aspirations are constantly rolling around in our heads, we set them aside at times—such as meals with others who may not share our political beliefs—to foster social cohesion. "Social" and "political" are not synonymous, as you can have the former without the latter. Not talking about politics at the dinner table is customary.

But should this custom be accepted wholesale? Perhaps the problem is not so much talking about politics as it is talking about politics ineffectively. There's no more reason to ban political conversation in this context than there is to forbid the use of spoons simply because children tend to misuse them.

Of course, political participation is not necessarily graceful. Voters head to the ballot box, not a ballet performance. It is not an occasion for gingerly spinning, but for throwing fisticuffs into a cube of contradictory ideas.

Civil behaviour may not be able to render "equality"—"no quality" may be a more accurate term—but it covers a multitude of sins. One such sin would be name-calling. It is high time for indiscriminate insults like "Marxist" and "fascist" to stop being levelled against reasonable and ordinary New Democrats and Tories.

The Canadian federal election is upon us. What will happen tomorrow?

Separation of Church and State

How is a Christian who is situated in a society where church and state are separated able to form cogent beliefs about the morality of the state? For it would seem that the severance of church and state, when taken to its logical conclusion, would entail a Christian being severed from thinking about politics with reference to their religious beliefs. A Christian would then, in forming beliefs about the morality of the state, have to resort to some other moral foundation than that of their religion. Would this not inevitably result in an outright rejection of their Christian ethics?

Pacifism in Anabaptist Theology Does Not Oppose Old Testament and Government Violence

To my surprise, my last post appears to be consistent with Anabaptist theology, at least, one particular account of it. Lynn Martin over at Anabaptist Faith writes in a post: "Let me emphasize that by no means should the doctrine of nonresistance be interpreted as against secular violence or Old Testament violence." See the article "Early Church Fathers on War, Violence, and Pacifism" for more information if interested.

Violence in Scripture and the Nonviolence of Jesus

There is a thesis in Christian theology that goes something like this: it is problematic, and perhaps even irreconcilable, that Scripture includes both accounts of God permitting violence (especially the conquest of Canaan) and accounts of God's son, Jesus, advocating nonviolence. Whereas Deuteronomy 20:16 reads that God's chosen people, the Israelites, "must not let anything that breathes remain alive" in Canaan, Matthew 26:51–52 recounts Jesus telling a disciple to put his sword away after cutting off a slave's ear, saying that "all who take the sword will perish by the sword." There is no shortage of tensions like this in the Bible.

But as far as I can tell, such tensions are only problematic if nonviolence is a moral absolute. The easiest solution to this problem, then, is to simply say that nonviolence is not a moral absolute. It does not seem entirely unreasonable to me that violence could be permanently forbidden for the Christian since the time of Jesus's ministry, yet have been permissible for the Israelites on a situational basis in the past, whether that be historically or literarily. Moral absolutes not applying to a particular set of actions does not necessarily entail moral relativism altogether.

Chris Hedges wrote in a book published in 2003 that "Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history." Historically, violence is ordinary and peace is the exception.

Sometimes I wonder if pacifist theologians such as Gregory Boyd, who in Crucifixion of the Warrior God wagers that the conquest of Canaan was more so motivated by Ancient Near Eastern barbarism than God's commands, underestimate the difficulty of achieving nonviolence. As Christians today, we should certainly embody nonviolence. But perhaps it is utopian to think that this was a plausible option in the brutal conflicts of the past, and that nonviolence is readily achievable now and in the future for non-Christians.

Wolfhart Pannenberg might have been onto something when he said in an interview:

God is not that meekly love that many people say He should be. In the Old Testament, God is one who elected Israel, and this did not always include peaceful relationship with other people. We see, at present, what the problems are in that respect. That God elected Israel and that this would entail violence in relation to other nations was not the final aim of all of God’s actions. But God had elected Israel to become a witness of God’s will to righteousness for all human beings. Violence is not the last word. The last word of God will be the reconciliation and love.