Adiphorization Of Christian Ethics In Society And The Church

The ADIPHORIZATION of CHRISTIAN ETHICS in SOCIETY and the CHURCH --By Lyle Brecht, July 8, 2006 Can one ‘do’ ethics without an understanding of and input from science? This author answers, “No.” Does science have anything important to say without including theology? The answer is, “No.” Can philosophy answer any question worth asking without including science and theology in the answer. Again the answer is, “No.” What would it mean for our thinking and our actions if global warming were real? Or homosexuals were treated as if they were really human? Can we rightly imagine that the present ‘war on terrorism’ waged on behalf of the American people is moral (or even effective)?1 What might an ethical stance in the world look like if we actually modeled our behavior on that of Jesus, the Christ, as he might teach today, given the realities and exigencies of twenty-first century life? Can we say that we are truly living a Christian and ethical life if our actions, however ‘rational,’ are devoid of moral purpose? What if what actually characterizes our actions is their adiphorization; the demobilization of moral sentiments and beliefs from our day-to-day actions.2 For example, how many of us know individuals who are able to go to church on Sunday and express the most devout and pious demeanor, yet come Monday morning enter the fray of the workplace and engage in activity that includes ‘rational’ life-decisions that are ‘morally neutral.’ Might the greatest crime we can commit as Christians living in the world today be going about our daily business while morally asleep? Have many of us become just like the “pilot delivering the bomb to Hiroshima or to Dresden,” asleep at the 1

Since 9/11, America’s ‘war on terror,’ waged ‘to preserve the American way of life,’ has killed an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people, wounded another 250,000 people, and displaced more than a million people from their homes, the vast majority of those killed, wounded or displaced being women and children. 2

Zygmunt Bauman, “A Century of Camps? (1995)” in Peter Beilhartz, ed., The Bauman Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 270-1.

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moral wheel of life, able to proceed through the day, oblivious, “without detracting from one’s [perceived] moral integrity.”3

Might the society and the church today be incapable of modeling ethical life in community? Unable because the church, probably unbeknownst to itself and its clergy, has bought in to the very structure of modern, rational organization that produces the adiphorization of action – the separation of action from morality. The sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, outlines this structure that so effectively eliminates ‘the moral’ from our human agency in “the pursuit of artificial, rationally designed order.”4

“First, in a modern organization every personally performed action is a mediated action, and every actor is cast…in an ‘agentic state’: almost no actor ever has the a chance to develop the ‘authorship’ attitude towards the final outcome of the operation, since each actor is but an executor of a command and giver of another; not a writer, but a translator of someone else’s intensions.

“Second, there is the horizontal, functional division of the overall task: each actor has but a specific, self-contained job to perform and produces an object [or service] with no written-in designation, no information on its future uses; no contribution seems to ‘determine’ the final outcome of the operation; … “Third, the ‘targets’ of the operation, the people who by design or by default are affected by it, hardly ever appear to the actors as ‘total human beings’, objects of moral responsibility and ethical subjects themselves.”5 3

Zygmunt Bauman, “Sociology After the Holocaust (1989)” in Beilhartz, 254.

4

Bauman, “A Century of Camps,” 269.

5

Bauman, “A Century of Camps,” 270.

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The absolute genius of such ‘modern’ organization is that as responsibility for one’s actions (or lack of actions) float, responsibility and accountability for the morality of both agency and its outcomes disappear. Thus, in the case of the ‘morality’ of homosexuality, both opponents and adherents to inclusion and embrace of the homosexual person as fully human exhibit the most outrageously immoral and unethical behavior towards one another. Indeed, the behavior exhibited by the ‘fighting factions’ over the morality of homosexuality has overwhelmed legitimate arguments by their lack of ethical discourse. Likewise, on the topic of global warming it has been the church’s relative quiet on this issue that illuminates immorality and unethical action. The reality is that as the by far greatest contributor to greenhouse gases, the developed world, by its studied inaction, is relegating large populations of the developing world, not wealthy enough to get out of the way of the effects of global warming, to death and immiseration. Effectively, the western, developed world is engaged in genocide on an unprecedented scale – yet, the church is silent.6

Also, a symptom of this moral adiphoria is that when ethical issues are discussed in the church, many of the resulting conversations are nonsense. These conversations are nonsense in that they result in little explanation or understanding of moral reality. Might this be the case because many of our clergy and laity in our society fail to realize that a Reformation has occurred? A reformation that is as shattering of paradigms for interpreting reality as that the Church experienced during the 16th century. This reformation of moral thought is the shift from the rationality of modernity to a post-modern

6

‘Genocide’ is carried out by the state against ‘Others,’ those whom the state has first classified as ‘other than,’ as a “categorical killing. Unlike enemies in war, the victims of genocide have no selves…. Their only, and sufficient crime is having been classified into a category defined” as being an ‘Other’ (Bauman, “A Century of Camps,” 277).

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world-picture where rational action and morals are reunited.7 Modern ways of thinking about reality and interpreting Scripture, ways that clergy were taught in seminary years ago (and some seminaries and schools of theology still teach) are no longer useful; at least if one wishes to have conversations – a precursor for thoughtful, moral action – that are meaningful and not nonsense. What has changed is that reality can no longer be separated into two distinct categories of thought, the rational (science and scientific thinking) and the non-rational (religion and moral thinking) and remain segregated in our conversations regarding reality and in our actions for how we live our lives. The result of such modern thought-segregation is Holocaust, torture, and ecocide.8 This, we have learned from experience. Instead, the post-modern world-picture requires one’s conversation to include both rational and non-rational explanations and understandings of a moral reality to make sense.

But most of all, what this post-modern Reformation of thought requires is that this conversation be dialogic. That is, moral truth concerning reality emerges from the conversation itself, as opposed to being a given – something that is conveyed from speaker A to listener B on the basis of some ‘objective’ source. That is, ethics, at least an ethics that is not nonsense, has the potential to emerge from this dialogic conversation. And the conversation, by necessity, needs to be grounded in reality: a descriptive reality that is often best explained by science-talk, but only understood 7

‘World-picture,’ according to Ludwig Wittgenstein, might be thought of as a frame or framework through which we look to discern what is real and what is not, and what is important, from our vantage point. Ultimately, this looking creates a “picture” of the world that we use to decipher new data. New data needs to “fit” this picture. It must ‘make sense’ within our world-picture. Otherwise, new data (ideas, experiences, paradigms) are nonsense, even though they are ‘real’ in a larger sense. 8

Holocaust, torture and ecocide are all carried out by normal human beings acting on the behest of a rational society managed by “the omnipotent state in full and constant [pastoral] control of the body and the spirit of its subjects” (Bauman, “Dictatorship Over Needs [1984]” in Beilhartz, 262-63).

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morally and ethically using theology-talk. But this theology-talk is encounter with the Other that is primarily pastoral (self-affirming and embracing of the other) in its intent.9 Pastoral discourse that is moral should do much less violence than the type of ethical conversations we presently find ourselves where moral truth is split apart from our actions and is only “found” in Scripture or declared from the magisterium. The engagement in real moral discourse also offers the possibility for justice rather than judgment of the Other; humans mistakenly imagining that they know and understand the mind of God by ‘reading’ Scripture (in its broadest sense) as the Law. Isn’t this exactly what the Book of Job so brilliantly reminds us; we cannot pretend to know the mind of God (Job 38:1-11, 16-18).

For example, modern church culture often chooses the politics of the state over messianic politics;10 an ethnography where ‘Scripture tells us that homosexuality is a sin’ and must be judged as ‘less than’ by the prevailing royal (mainstream) culture. Therefore, letting homosexuals worship with us is one thing, but ordaining openly gay bishops (priests) is another. The church’s nomos-obsessed but ethically suspect clergy seemingly are presently engaged in a self-appointed salvific campaign to save the ‘true church’ from apostasy. Thus, ‘no same sex gender-specified clergy are allowed.’ Instead of ‘homosexuals’ one might substitute ‘women’ or ‘AfroAmericans’ or ‘Jews’ or ‘Muslims’ or any ‘Other’ (someone different than us). 9

Emmanuel Levinas might say an “Other” is someone whom we are afraid to look at their face. For if we did we would notice that they too are human; different, but just like us. “It is the summoning of myself by the other (autrui), it is a responsibility toward those we do not even know.” See Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993), 81. 10

The ‘politics of the state’ involve the mechanics of control and rationalization of human passions and creativity whereas ‘messianic politics’ involves seeking justice for all en tó nýn kairós (‘in the time of the now’ – messianic time). See Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to Romans, Patricia Dailey, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 53,67-8.

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Such moral judgment using the Law of Scripture even applies to the ‘Other’ of creation, our Earth, in the present developed world’s conundrum concerning global warming and ecocide. Where is our pastoral presence and companionship; a sense of mission? Can we awaken (Eph. 5:14)? Might we (or more accurately, can we?) listen to the Spirit, working overtime to subvert such politics of state? Will the messianic promise of justice be manifest? Was Derrida prescient when he imagined that “justice is an expression of the impossible”?11 Have we forgotten the Deuteronomist’s warning: Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue, so that you may live and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you (Deut. 16:20)? Do we imagine that Isaiah is calling us rather than God to be the judge and jury when he says: learn to do good. Make justice your aim: redress the wronged, hear the orphan’s plea, defend the widow (Isaiah 1:17)? Didn’t Jesus, in the remembrances (anamnesis) of the gospels, and Paul in his epistles, speak volumes to this ironic situation – using Law (whether Mosaic or Roman or Pharasitic), designed to protect the Other against discrimination and oppression, to discriminate and to oppress? Luke recalls Jesus saying: And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them (Luke 18:7)? Likewise, wasn’t Paul’s message that justice flows from grace, not from the Law: so that, just as sin exercised dominion in death, so grace might also exercise dominion through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom. 5:21)? Isn’t this what Paul’s letter to the Galatians is really all about? In this letter Paul, in no uncertain terms, is clearly stating that the

11

Quoted in Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 25.

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Law does not take precedence over the Gospel. And isn’t if nothing else, Jesus’ Gospel about loving one’s neighbors; those who are Other.12 Is the problem a deeper Christian Reconstructionism, those Christians who believe in a ‘Taliban-like’ reversal of human rights and call for a theocratic government that enforces personal morality, presently in vogue in some illiberal democracies today?13 Or is it a misplaced and bankrupt liberalism that believes, after all, ‘we are all equal in the sight of God’ when in reality this is barely the case either in the institutions of the wider society, the church, or in the living rooms of our homes. Is this the intentionality of such recourse to the Law by dissenting clergy and their lay supporters pleading for Scriptural-based censoring of the Other and Christian exceptualism? Might Scripture’s intent, rather than to provide Law, be to call to question the use of Law against the Other, and alert us to those situations where we fail to seek and enact justice? But is this breach of community trust (I am thinking of the actions of the clergy who seek redress in the Law in discriminating against women or homosexuals, or Afro-Americans, or any Other in the church, or are silent on the issue of global warming, ecocide, war, torture, and genocide) even about morality? Might the real question on the table be, ‘What sort of culture do we imagine here in the church or the wider society?’ Aren’t there really only two choices: either a culture of Law used to enforce exceptionalism, compliance, and control (the modern experience of complicity in injustice) or a culture of hospitality and justice. Even Augustine recognized this difference: “In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized brigandage” (City of God, 4.4).

12

See Frank J. Matera, Galatians (Sacra Pagina; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 11-19. 13

See Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006), 99-262.

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Today, are we even attempting to model the character of Paul’s ekklesia? 14 That is, a messianic community that is taking shape in the world on the basis of the death and resurrection and spirit-infused life of Jesus, the Messiah. Or has the culture of the modern state (using the power of Law and violence to control the Other) won out in the church? From this perspective, does the dissenting, moralistic clergy’s trek across the landscape of Scripture, whether officially authorized or self-delegated salvific mission, constitute a breach against this messianic community? Despite the best of intentions to keep us law-abiding, moral citizens of the Imperium, does this use of Scripture to separate morals from actions violate the basic tenets of the ekklesia – our community’s messianic culture? That is, does it places Law above justice and hospitality (attention to and appropriation of the needs of the Other – someone of difference, an alterity)? Might we imagine when Paul speaks about justification in his letter to the Romans, for example, that the purpose of justification is to transform human beings into people-of-God who do or at least attempt to do justice?15 But this is a justice beyond the rationality of Law. This is a justice that at its foundation rests on hospitality and compassion (a feeling-along-with-others through a framework of love) for the Other. For according to Paul, ek tes kataras tou nomou (“the Messiah has redeemed us from the curse of the law” -Gal. 3:13). Might justice, at least Jesus’ and Paul’s idea of justice, exceed, question, or even destabilize the Law?16 Also, does Jesus’ brand of justice proceed beyond

14

The ekklesia, one must remember, was a direct response to the cross that “exposed the structure of arbitrary sovereign power in its ultimate exceptional yet typical instance.” Instead of the Law imposed by the state, the ekklesia was to operate according to the principles of justice and hospitality. See John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (New York: Routledge, 2003), 93 quoted in Jennings, 188-9; Jennings, 20. 15

Jennings, 185.

16

Jennings, 41.

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the appropriation of the dominant culture’s ethos by a complacent and compliant ‘majority?’ As Emmanuel Levinas aptly remarks, “Morality begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent.”17 Could violence be being done to the men and women of our community, to our entire community – by abiding by Law and rationality of control, instead of seeking justice? Might we aim for forgiveness and reconciliation – that is, restorative justice that seeks to restore (shore-up) the voices of men and women in our community that are Other (different than) and that extinguishes the sexism and racism, homophobia and Christian exceptionalism in our midst, not tomorrow or sometime in the near future, but today. The sexism and racism and exceptionalism that I am referring to has to do with both particular androcentric instances and modern structural conveyances that are discriminatory by creating a ‘hostile, intimidating, and offensive environment’ for women and men in our community on the basis of reading Scripture as ordaining the Law, as opposed to modeling justice.18 A while ago I was having a casual and friendly conversation with a visiting bishop about moral actions regarding how the church treats homosexuals. In the middle of our conversation the bishop blurted, “I am bishop, you are not. I am right. You are not.” My response was, “If you imagine that by authority of being bishop everything you say is truth, the truth, then I see no basis for us to continue our conversation.” Thus, our conversation ended. This reminded me of another conversation that I had with an apostle. The young, blonde, energetic, college student came and sat next to me in the student union. She struck up a conversation by introducing herself as an apostle of

17

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Alfonso Lingis, trans. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 84 quoted in Jennings, 181. 18

“Yet it is the same law, let us say the law on which we now so much pride ourselves, the law of western (capitalistic) democracy, that makes invisible the sacrifice of millions of children to hunger and disease, and which not only deflects attention from this ‘sacrifice’ but also actually requires it…” (Jennings, 49).

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Christ. She began quoting Scripture, something from one of Paul’s letters, to make her point. Having more than a passing familiarity with this particular piece of Scripture, I asked to see her translation of this Scripture. This occasioned a blank look, “Translation?” “Yes,” I said, “what translation of this epistle are you quoting from? The reason that I ask is that Paul does not really say what you claim he said. Thus, your meaning is not correct. Paul wrote his epistle in Greek. The Greek was translated into English. There are many English versions of this translation. Your version has these problems…” Everything I was saying was news to her. She just sat there and stared at me with bright, wide eyes, listening. Why is it that we choose to have conversations about some aspects of reality and are so quiet about other aspects of reality? And, how come we use the authority of Scripture or our offices in the church to determine what is morally true or false regarding this reality? These questions remind me of another conversation, this time in a pastoral care class at seminary. The presenting situation was a community in crisis over Wal-Mart’s attempt to build a superstore there. The question on the table was, ‘Should you use the pulpit to discuss this issue of grave concern to your congregation in this community?’ Almost to a person, the seminarians in the room disavowed the use of the pulpit because the issue was ‘political.’ I demurred, “But was not everything that Jesus did, the example for how he lived his life, political?” Political in the sense that Jesus’ life and teachings revolved around the moral issue of doing justice. In the real-life example of this community, the Rector of the Episcopal Church in the affected community did take a stand, did speak from the pulpit, and did serve as an example of what Christian faithfulness and ekklesia looks like. She provided just leadership her community so desperately needed in its time of trial. But, this Rector’s involvement in this community dispute could have been inappropriate, even damaging. If the Rector claimed to have special knowledge of the truth, like the bishop in my example above, by right of her

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office or by her special interpretation of Scripture, like the apostle, I contend that her theology would have been heterodox, blasphemous and even evil, irrespective of her ‘good intentions.’ Which is my contention about many conversations regarding homosexuality and our lack of conversation concerning global warming, etc. That is, these conversations, or nonconversations, are too often heterodox, blasphemous, and even evil. They are not just. They are about Law. Scripture may not actually have anything specific to say to us today about either homosexuality or global warming. What if Scripture does not contain rules and regulations or even specific moral admonitions or ethical constructs that are useful, out-of-the-box, for faithful living in today’s world? Instead, what if Scripture does is model for us is a dialogic concerning relationality that leads towards justice. This is a relationality with self, God, our neighbor, and with creation. Maybe Scripture does not so much suggest a model for what to live as to how to live messianic lives in human community beyond the Law in just relation with one another, our God, the creation, and our selves. Might the narrative of the Bible be about becoming human by being in just relationship with the Other? And the Jesus of the New Testament models what this relationality looks like. Not only is this relationality not dependent on one’s position in society, it is not dependent on a literal reading of Scripture or the Law. Both Scripture and reality demand interpretation that is particular and contingent. Not only will this interpretation result in ambiguity that must be clarified through open, loving discussion (I am thinking of Jesus’ parables to the people here), but the interpretation must stand up to the plurality of the audience in question. Despite the Gospel of Mark’s Messianic Secret motif, Jesus had no secret knowledge that he kept to himself. His life itself was to be the example of what faithful living and being human looks like. Now we imagine this as Christian example but Jesus’ message was really universal – it applies to all people everywhere, in all times. And for this reason,

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Christians especially need to be particularly careful not to create situations of us versus them, insiders versus outsiders, the saved versus the lost; the excluded versus the embraced. For these conventional and traditional political categories and ‘states of exception’ that enable government to suspend the moral treatment of persons are exactly what Jesus came to tear down, to disassociate with the telos (fulfillment) for humanity here on earth. One cannot, at least with any orthodoxy or Christian compassion, use Scripture or the authority of position as determinants of moral truth concerning reality. How are we to arrive at truth? Truth that is both particular and contingent might be arrived at via a dialogic conversation. Dialogic, by definition, means that the truth emerges rather than is already known beforehand, before the conversation even begins. The forms of this dialogic have changed over time. Below, I briefly outline five frameworks or epochs (ways of speaking about reality) of human history (from the perspective of Western civilization) that are characterized by constitutive world-pictures that describe that history. These epochs are: pre-biblical, biblical, premodern, modern, and post-modern (or late-modern). Each is characterized by distinctive world-pictures made-up of language-games consisting of a grammar and rules for how that grammar is used to describe reality; to have conversations that arrive at truths.19 There are three primary language-games being played in each epoch that broadly fall into the categories of science, philosophy, and theology. Each combines in a certain, generally accepted way during each different epoch. But generally, ‘science’ is a method for explaining and understanding reality, ‘philosophy’ is a process for clarifying our thinking regarding how we talk about reality, and ‘theology’ describes how and on what basis we derive meaning from our explanations and understandings of reality. That is, 19

“Language-games,” from Ludwig Wittgenstein, highlights the reality that individual words and sentences have different meanings and connotations based on context. Also, these meanings “evolve” over time; word and sentence meanings are not static but dynamic, requiring interpretation to convey meaning.

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conversation with the Other that describes reality takes place in a three-part harmony using the grammar of science, philosophy, and theology. What makes any description particularly hard is that while we are forced to explain the past from the perspective of the present world-picture, oftentimes our language-games are left-over from the past, creating no end to confusion as we attempt to describe some aspect of reality. For example, the word ‘science’ in the world-picture of modernity had specific meanings and a set of underlying assumptions attached to this word that are radically different and much altered under the post-modern world-picture. Yet, the word ‘science’ remains the same, although almost no scientist uses the word ‘science’ to mean what it previously meant under the world-picture of modernity. I will attempt to illuminate what some of these differences are in my discussion below of ‘science’ in modernity and post-modernity. Another caution, from the perspective of our present post-modern worldpicture, is that these epochs of descriptive history may not be discussed in terms of ‘development’ or ‘progression.’ That is, post-modernity is not ‘better’ than modernity and modernity is not ‘better’ than pre-modernity. There is no assumed or connoted progressive development of descriptive capabilities from one time-period to the next. What can be said simply is that there is movement and there is difference among the world-pictures. For example, it is probably not accurate to imagine that Newton ‘discovered’ gravity. Gravity was known even in pre-biblical times (although under different words and conceptualization). What Newton did was to ‘invent’ a grammar (calculus) and rules for using this grammar that enabled him to describe gravity as a concept (idea) in a manner that could be appropriated by the particular language-games of science allowable under the worldpicture of modernity. Likewise, Einstein did not discover general relativity. Einstein used the grammar of non-Euclidian geometry invented by Riemann to describe gravity in a new way, entirely different than Newton’s description of gravity. However, this new description of gravity could only have been

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appropriated within the world-picture of post-modernity. For under the assumptions of science within the world-picture of modernity, Einstein’s description of gravity is nonsense. In the West, human power structures often appropriate and subvert the grammar of science, philosophy, and theology for utilitarian ends. A utilitarian state-of-being devoid of God with only instrumentalist value is a theopolitical construct,20 an imaginative invention of post-Enlightenment modernity.21 This presumption of utility creates a particularly nasty tangle of misunderstandings, misappropriations, and misapplications of languagegames and the grammar and rules that we use to describe reality. For example, the word ‘democracy’ without appropriate descriptors is used by power structures in the developed world under the world-picture of modernity to describe an ultimate form of utilitarian government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ 20

The term ‘theopolitical’ recognizes that supposedly secular political discourse “is really theology in disguise” providing “an alternative soteriology to that of a marginalized and privatized [meaningfully absent from public discourse concerning the common good and focused on individualistic spiritual interiority] Church.” As Christians, our objective must be to look to resurrect a Church as a Christian “community of freedom; a community of people acting together in reciprocal respect for one another’s dignity” and God’s good creation. A community where the ethics of the common good confronts the “destruction of people and nature [that] amounts to a celebration of collective suicide.” See William T. Cavenaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 2, 5, 9, 31; William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist (Challenges in Contemporary Theology; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 66; David Hollenbach, S.J., The Common Good and Christian Ethics (New Studies in Christian Ethics; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 83, 102; Franz J. Hinkelammert, Cultura de la Esperanza y Sociedad sin Exclusion (San Jose: DEI, 1995), 127, 195, 303 quoted in Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Liberation Theology after the End of History (London: Routledge, 2001), 12. 21

“Until the Enlightenment, the Christian tradition sustained the belief that God and not humans is the principal locus of consciousness and moral purposiveness in the cosmos. Similarly, the creation is first and foremost God’s possession, not humanity’s.” Essentially, as Karl Barth suggests, “a loan from God to humans.” See Michael S. Northcott, “Ecology and Christian Ethics” in Robin Gill, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 223.

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Yet, under the post-modern world-picture, the word ‘democracy’ just describes the process of voting whereby the most popular ‘candidate’ wins the right to exercise state power. Thus, Mussolini was ‘democratically elected’ in Italy, Hitler and his National Socialist Party were democratically elected in Germany, Pinochet was elected in Chile (post-coup), etc. Few today would imagine that any of these democratically elected governments could ever be characterized as ‘for the people, of the people, by the people’ as each regime dramatically curtailed human freedoms and committed atrocities against their own populations. In post-modernity, the word ‘democracy’ is best used with a qualifying, non-utilitarian, moral grammar that includes rules that discriminate between liberal democracy that leads to human freedom and illiberal democracy and ‘states of exception’ that leads to totalitarianism.22 Further, the post-modern world-picture also is capable of asking the question whether liberal democracy is always even a morally reasonable or responsible means for determining power structures in certain situations (this qualifying moral discussion, for example, makes no sense under the utilitarian world-picture of modernity).

When power structures attempt to offer totalizing solutions to problems, they often regress and appropriate grammar appropriate to a previous worldpicture. For example, post 9-11 one might argue that the U.S. government appropriated the grammar of modernity to describe a solution to the very post-modern problem of privatized, transnational terrorism. Not only does this situation create confusion in describing reality, it often leads to totalitarianism as a response to failed policy.23 22

“[M]odern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of a state of exception, of legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.” See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Kevin Attell, trans. (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2. 23

For example, provisions of the USA Patriot Act (October 26, 2001) and the Presidential Military Order (November 13, 2001) enable the state to hold persons without

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Below is a historical frameworks for how reality is described (from the perspective of Western civilization). Each epoch is essentially a partial answer to the question Ezekiel posed: Our transgressions and our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live? (Ezek. 33:10). Pre-biblical. Reality is described as a mystery of never ending seasonal cycles where gods initiate causal chains of events (e.g. rains, soil fertility, birth, death, etc.). There is no ‘self’ as present-day persons understand this term. Physical prowess and success in taming the environment for survival constitutes the currency of power. Biblical. Reality is described in terms of a historical telos leading toward salvation revealed to a chosen people, Israel, by their god, YHWH. Persons still do not have a ‘self.’ Personhood is constituted entirely through one’s relationship with YHWH, their family and their tribe. Power is constituted by the community for the good of the community as determined solely by YHWH, Israel’s God. Pre-modern. Reality is described primarily in terms of a revealed historical telos leading toward salvation for the whole world through Jesus Christ. In pre-modern times this was interpreted that, therefore, all peoples must ‘convert’ to the only one, true religion of Christianity. This perspective is what leads to the crusades against the Muslims, the pogroms against the Jews, the Inquisitions in Catholic Europe and the butchery and genocide of natives in the New World. In pre-modernity,

charge or without due process, and conduct non-court-authorized wiretaps on U.S. citizens, without probable cause. These measures radically erase previous constitutional and legal safeguards to personhood relative to the state, creating a new category of “legally unnamable and unclassifiable being” – a ‘detainee.’ The closest analogous situation of non-personhood was the legal “situation of Jews in the Nazi Lager (camps)” (Agamben, 3-4).

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the self is only constituted through an interior relationality with God. The person does not really exist outside this relationship. Power derived from hierarchal office that was bought, inherited, won from rivals, or appointed. The seventeenth century Enlightenment, through Descartes, introduced a dualism previously not imagined in previous epochs between matter and God, mind and body, the real and the unreal, the rational and the irrational. Both modernity (as initially defined by Spinosa) and post-modernity below are projects of the Enlightenment movement. ‘Religion,’ as we imagine it today as a ‘separate understanding or knowing’ from day-to-day reality was not really imagined until the Enlightenment. Modern. Reality is described primarily in terms of a humanocentric ‘rationality’ that reveals the ‘real workings’ of the universe bringing salvation through the ingenuity of humankind’s technical achievements. This progress through human rationality is the telos of history. This ‘modern’ description of reality collapsed as a result of the First and Second World Wars, the Holocaust, the development and use of the atom bomb and subsequent nuclear arms race with ICBMdelivered hydrogen bombs, and the environmental crisis, all of which destroyed the concept of linear technical progress (‘things are getting better and better every day’) fueled by human rationality (e.g. under what form of rationality was the Holocaust ‘constructed’ and 125 million humans industrially murdered in the wars of the 20th century?). In modernity, the self exists as an autonomous, self-directed being, entirely constituted through the interiority of the person. Power derives from hierarchy through privilege, prestige and control of those ‘lesser than oneself.’ Post-modern (or late-modern). Reality is described in particular and contextual ways that reveal a ‘contingent’ description of reality that

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includes both rational and ‘non-rational’ components. Whereas, modernity assumes an Archimedean Point external to the system under investigation from which reality can be described, postmodernity assumes, based on quantum mechanics (e.g. von Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle), Einstein’s Special and General Theories of Relativity, and Gödel’s two Uncertainty Proofs, that there is no Archimedes Point from which an ‘objective’ reality can be described (the investigator will always disrupt the system being investigated; depending on what the investigator chooses to investigate will ultimately determine what results he/she achieves; and complex systems can never be wholly understood or explained from within the system being investigated). The self in post-modernity has both interiority and exteriority. But the person is primarily constituted through external relationality with self, God, ‘the other’ (our neighbor), and with creation (‘the environment’). Power derives contingently from gift by the Other. With this power comes responsibility, accountability, and an expectation of just action towards the Other. The most dramatic illustration of the shift in power from modernity to postmodernity was the end of the Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet Union.24 Whereas modernity assumes that rational human decisions can always reveal the route to solving problems, post-modernity has doubts concerning using rationality alone as a means for solving problems. Under post-modernity human rationality is suspect based on work by Freud in psychology (about the strength of unconscious motivations); neurobiology in our ability to even apprehend reality (neurobiologists suggest that as much as 90% of stimuli reaching the human body remains below conscious detection); and work in 24

“The Cold War may well be remembered, then, as the point at which military strength, a defining characteristic of ‘power’ itself for the past five centuries ceased to be that. The Soviet Union collapsed, after all, with its military forces, even it nuclear capabilities, fully intact.” See John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 263.

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quantum physics that calls-to-question some of humanity’s most cherished beliefs regarding descriptions of space and time and causality. Instead of God being dead, absent, or disinterested (as under modernity), ‘God’ is a means of reintroducing mystery and subjectivity into previously deterministic, objectivist, modern descriptions of reality. Not only does God exist, but also he/she has many forms (plurality) and many means for participating in human salvation (ambiguity). In post-modernity, no ‘religion’ has a lock on ‘the truth,’ but neither does science or philosophy. Theology, instead of being bound only to religious discourse, also underlies discourse in science and philosophy just as science and philosophy underlie legitimate theological discourse (meaning discourse that can be said or shown to have meaning within the world-picture of post-modernity). What is particularly difficult for some individuals to imagine and accept is that we are presently living in a post-modern (late-modern) epoch. This is a place-time that we cannot escape from. For example, we cannot choose to live in a biblical or pre-modern world-picture. If we attempt to live in a worldpicture different than the consensual view, our grammar will be nonsense. The situation is as if one imagined an earth-centered universe, post-Galileo. One might even locate other groups of individuals who are also willing to discuss reality from the perspective of an earth-centered universe. However, no matter how good such conversation felt or how right one imagines such a world-picture, it is nonsense. This is the situation with many conversations concerning homosexuality and global warming (and our governments’ counter-terrorism policies, etc.). They are nonsense. I am thinking of three generally nonsense threads concerning conversations about homosexuality and global warming that take place within a postmodern context: (1) Scripture says that the behavior is evil (or good) and therefore should be prohibited (or allowed); (2) homosexuality is an ‘ethical issue’ and requires debate, but global warming (war, ecocide, economic injustice, etc.) is a ‘political issue’ so is not in the purview of the church; (3)

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both homosexuality and global warming are symptoms of the coming parousia. We really need to worry about neither as an issue of the church since everything is happening according to God’s purpose. The claim that Scripture specifies the morality or ethics of either homosexuality or global warming is tantamount to claiming that because Scripture speaks of slavery as a given institution of biblical times, the world should reinstitute slavery. Or because the Bible evidences particularly troubling patriarchal tendencies, one might be instructed to introduce ‘Taliban-like’ policies to re-subjugate women in the society and repress their access to public spaces and job opportunities. Scripture, without interpretation, says nothing about homosexuality or global warming that is useful in the post-modern world we live in today. The second thread that differentiates interest in the two issues of global warming and homosexuality by their ethicality or politicality is also suspect. Actually, both issues have ethical, moral, and political aspects, but usually much different than those commonly discussed. For example, the question concerning homosexuality might be if it is even ethical for the church to discuss the morality of this form of sexuality given today’s scientific and medical knowledge concerning the probability of genetics-determined homosexuality. Related to global warming, the ethical question is if it is unethical for the church to not discuss the morality of individual political decisions that exacerbate global warming that lead to genocide (for those peoples unable to ‘get out of the way’ from the consequences of global warming). Of course, the politics of any decision, just as in Jesus’ day, is the willingness to stand up and speak truth to power rather than being cowed by the established world-view of the powers and principalities of the ruling elite (‘the Imperium’) of the day. The third thread is particularly noxious. It claims that there is no reason for humans to fret over environmental degradation, human immiseration,

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injustice, torture, holocaust, or humanocentric ecocide as ‘this is all part of God’s plan leading to the parousia.’ Taking this tack, however, one immediately runs into a theological problem, often insurmountable in a particular ethical conversation, due to lack of Biblical literacy on the part the parties to the dialogue. Also, this is ultimately a theological problem because science is absolutely required to describe the objective aspects of reality that are part of any theological discourse concerning reality. One may no longer hide behind mountains of Scripture, depths of church history, or expert knowledge solely of theological doctrine. What is required for real theological discourse about topics of concern in the world is also a knowledge of science. Likewise, science without theology is merely pitiful positivist objectivism. It must always leave out the more interesting, subjective aspects of reality that provide the meaning to human-understood reality. And, in any dialogical conversation, where truth is emergent, one must be open to philosophic clarification of what we are attempting to say or show by means of the words, signs, symbols, and metaphors we employ to convey our discourse. In our post-modern world, individuals who have been schooled in matters of the church are often so weak in the grammar of science, that they are unable to actually have a theological or ethical conversation on an issue. I would like to take a few minutes to discuss a philosophy of science and illustrate this discussion using global warming as an example, although the science of homosexuality (or counter-terrorism, etc.) could also have served as an example: Listening in the Whirlwind. Global warming is a catchall phrase to describe abrupt climate change caused by a global atmospheric carbon imbalance that is presently occurring due to the burning of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal) for human-designated purposes. In some ways it is an unfortunate moniker in that although it describes a situation that at first may result in a gradual or even precipitous raising of average global temperatures, the net result could include a rapid cooling of large sections of

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the earth due to the destruction of existing ocean currents that warm the coastal areas, resulting in another ice age. Climate change is one of the major moral issues of the early 21st century, on par with immiserated population growth, using war to achieve oil security, and global capitalism that uses a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources without paying a fair value for their use, to which it is interrelated. For example, mortality estimates directly related to climate change (pandemics, loss of arable land, lack of fresh water, loss of cropland, flooding, and other unforeseen consequences) are currently estimated from a few hundred million to a few billion humans, as well as the loss of up to one quarter of presently living non-human species. Unfortunately, abrupt climate change has become highly politicized as to whether or not it is actually occurring and whether or not humans are primarily to blame when it should be no more controversial than discussions we may have regarding cancer or heart disease or whether we live in a universe of hundred billion galaxies on a spherical earth circling one of a hundred billion suns in just one of those galaxies. One of the reasons for this confusion is the conflation among three different forms of data related to climate change (global warming): (1) observable fact, (2) scientific theory, and (3) public policy choices. Abrupt Climate Change from Global Warming is an Observable Fact. The polar icecaps are melting, sea levels are rising, the permafrost is melting, related weather patterns are changing, species of plants and animals are migrating and dying out in previous habitats.25 Food can no longer be grown in areas where it has been grown for centuries. All this is as observable as taking a measurement against a known standard ruler or examining a patient to determine that they indeed have cancer or heart

25

See Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006) for the best descriptions of the natural history of global warming as it is manifest today.

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disease. There is no controversy that I am aware of by knowledgeable and morally upright people concerning this level of understanding about climate change; it is a long-known process that is related to the earth’s atmospheric system. Abrupt Climate Change from Global Warming is also a Scientific Theory. Science posits theories about how things happen in the world and then gathers observable data from the world to test the theory. One can never determine that a theory is true for certain. But, through experiment and analysis, one can weed out theory that is either wrong or can be subsumed in a more comprehensive theory. Thus, the game of science is to posit evermore improved theory that more accurately describes the ‘how’ regarding observable data. Since about 1970, scientists have posited that observable global warming presently being experienced on the earth may be partially due to humankind’s activities. This was a highly controversial theory among climatologists in the early 70’s. However, in the past 35 years, a preponderance of data has been collected that suggests that this theory of man’s influence on the bio-geochemical processes of the earth’s atmospheric system contributing to natural global warming processes is the best theory humans have been able devise at present.26 Currently, there is little debate among reputable scientists who specialize in this work that this is the best theory for how global warming is presently evolving. As a non-scientist it makes about as much sense to criticize or question this theory as it would to question the medical theory for how one may develop lung cancer from smoking cigarettes. The answer in both cases is that the theory is supported by the preponderance of data we have collected to date. If one is an expert, one still has the right, maybe even the moral obligation, to question the theory. However, if one is not an expert in 26

See Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life On Earth (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005) for a good overview of the science concerning global warming.

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the discipline, questioning the theory for one’s self-interested reasons is immoral. Altering the Rate of Climate Change from Global Warming is also a Set of Policy Options. Informed opinions of non-experts are really useful only here, at the policy level of discussion.27 The question is what should we do about global warming, if anything? For whatever we do or don’t do, there will be an economic and human cost. And because global warming is a global phenomenon, the cost may be very large, both in terms of impacts to GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and to human and non-human life. The policy options separate first into two groups: one group believes that global warming is too large a problem for public policy to have any impact. Therefore, we should not waste any investment capital at attempting to address the global warming problem, because whatever money we invest will not produce a return. Any investments should be made only to ameliorate suffering. Bjørn Lomborg and a fair number of reputable economists represent this group. The theological alarming and ethical aspects of this position revolve around the resultant racism, genocide, and mass immisseration embodied in this position. The second group believes that it is worth investing capital to address climate change from global warming. Almost all national governments fall into this category, including the U.S. The ethical issues involve whether enough capital is being invested in the right potential activities to ameliorate the human costs of climate change rather than making investments that either benefit a few at the expense of the Other or are actually made for the purposes of personal enrichment rather than the common good. The second

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See David G. Victor, Climate Change: Debating America’s Policy Options (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2004) for a good overview on how policy discussions might be framed.

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group has devised a number of approaches for investing capital to address climate change from global warming. The major policy options are as follows: (1) Invest in switching from fossil fuels to a hydrogen-based economy. This is the present U.S. administration’s primary position with respect to global warming. This is an extremely high-risk strategy as no hydrogen use infrastructure or affordable technology presently exists. To date, neither the U.S. Congress nor the private sector has allocated sufficient capital for accomplishing this objective.

(2) Invest in conserving present stocks of fossil fuel (oil, natural gas) while we work to re-tool national economies to be less dependent on fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal). This is the present policy strategy for the European Union countries, Japan, China, Brazil, and many other national governments, as well as some U.S. states, local governments, many Fortune 1000 businesses, and the U.S. military. Of the nations on this track, probably Holland, Sweden, and Norway are furthest along. Great Britain, under Tony Blair, has probably done the most to publicize the need for this policy, although Great Britain itself has lagged behind other EU countries in actually implementing policy. The U.S. military has actually funded some of the best research on practical approaches for conserving fossil fuels in the U.S. economy as part of work related to U.S. national security objectives. (3) Invest capital in ameliorating the impacts of global warming on a caseby-case basis as it occurs. This group includes all nations who are not investing capital in options #1 and #2 above, as well as some of the countries that are pursuing the conservation of fossil fuels. In the U.S., states and local governments and many Fortune 100 businesses have also been absorbing global warming related business costs and passing them on to consumers through increased taxes and pricing on goods and services.

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I hope that I have not scared those with a theological education to muteness. But I am suggesting that muteness is a better option that speaking nonsense, which many of our conversations concerning both homosexuality and global warming represent. To summarize: (1) we live in a post-modern (late modern) epoch, whether we like it or not; (2) post-modernity comprises a world-picture that limits what we can see that makes sense, and to which our grammar must conform in order to make sense; (3) in order to have descriptive conversations about reality requires a combination of scientific, theological, and philosophical grammar; (4) reality is not something provided to us from Scripture, scientific observation, tradition, or any other convenient means. In the post-modern world in which we live, reality (a contingent and provisional truth) can only be derived through interpreting “texts” (descriptions of what we know, can see, or can be shown).28 And this interpretation happens through dialogic conversations where the truth emerges from the conversation. The justice envisioned in Jesus’ and Paul’s vision of messianic community comes in when we are capable through these dialogic conversations of seeing a moral reality beyond the Law (the predetermined and rigid formulation of moral reality untouched by contingency and provisionality). Thus, theology involves a dialogic, and ethics emerges from this dialogic. What is ethical and moral is emergent from this communal conversation. This is both different than and opposed to an ethics that appears full-blown from the confines of Scripture or an ethics that assumes its relevance or relativity

28

“In effect, what is to be interpreted in a text is a proposed world, a world that I might inhabit and wherein I might project my ownmost possibilities. This is what I call the world of the text, the world probably belonging to this unique text.” See Paul Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language” in Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, David Pellauer, trans., Mark I. Wallace, ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 43.

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from situations. I am imagining that the message of Scripture, its embodied world-picture for being human in any epoch, but especially in postmodernity, is through its modeled relationality with self, God, neighbor, and creation. If we were actually practicing this modeled, Scripture-given relationality, I believe that our conversations regarding homosexuality and global warming (and other ethical issues of the day such as our ‘war on terrorism’) would be very, very different than those we find ourselves engaged in today. From an ethical perspective, many of our present conversations are heterodox, blasphemous, and even evil. It is long-past time to clean up our thinking and our speech to one another and to seek justice rather than the Law. Ultimately, this is the only pastoral response that can make a difference in the world we find ourselves living in today. Anything less is mere Band-Aid diplomacy – with God-talk.