Nuclear Security State

T H E N U C L E AR SECURITY STATE

Terrorism and the Problem of Human Evil Lyle Brecht School of Theology 11 November 2005

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T HE NUCLEAR SECURITY STATE Terrorism and the Problem of Human Evil Lyle Brecht 11 November 2005

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness. –Reinhold Niebuhr1

The Politics of Fear What characterizes civil society in the United States more than anything else at the beginning of the twenty-first century is its disconnect with God, with neighbor (the other), and with creation. Few national policies bear any resemblance to the nature of the problems they are meant to address. There have been numerous attempts to explain this discrepancy between policy and relationality.

The latest theories of political science, microeconomics, macroeconomics, environmental economics, game theory, national security, and industrial ecology have all been employed both to describe and to explain how and why America has lost its ability to be in relationship with God, with neighbor, and with creation. For today America’s hegemonic position in the world economy is threatened by global poverty, global warming, global terrorism, global environmental degradation, and global economic competition. Federal government policies either do not address the structural issues that underlie today’s problems in relating or these policies either defer solutions to the future or actually make the prob1

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1962), 63 quoted in Charles T. Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge State Press, 2001), 148.

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lems worse by wasting resources of limited capital and time for initiatives that are merely BandAids that do little to stem a gapping wound. Each day Americans wake up to their morning news that is no news. The difference from yesterday is that entropy has increased somewhat. We are just a little further apart from God, our neighbor, and creation. We are just a little bit closer to an unredeemable state of chaos. There are some ‘political realists’ among us that claim a range of salvific solutions that call forth a deep abiding faith in an Absolute Truth of ‘the neoconservative agenda, ‘the strength of the American military machine,’ ‘the current Republican (or Democratic) administration or President,’ ‘the American Spirit,’ ‘nationalism,’ ‘the strength of the American economic system,’ ‘conservatism,’ liberalism, ‘the moral majority,’ ‘evangelical politics,’ etc. But each of these Absolute Truths is merely chimera. They have their few minutes of being the next right thing and fixing the attention of a distracted and easily distractible ‘public,’ but they then seem to evaporate as the sun rises on yet another day of increasing entropy, faltering relationships, and increasing fear. This gnawing fear, always present, is never quite named until a real relational crisis strikes, known variously as another 9/11 (the threat of terrorism), Katrina, balance of trade deficits, national debt, bankruptcy, job loss, health problems, and if you are a woman: domestic violence, rape, breast cancer, etc. Little wonder that we are so adept at self medication: consuming millions of gallons of alcoholic beverages, millions of prescribed tranquilizer pills, billions of dollars of illegal drugs, billions of dollars of self-help therapies – all designed to keep at bay this gnawing fear that something is not quite right, that something might happen, that we are further apart from God, our neighbor, the creation. Of course, something is happening, despite the self medicated bliss. That something is a reality of human loss and human suffering: a reality that our policy experts and elected officials judiciously and conveniently sidestep or ignore completely. For this reality of human loss and human suffering is supposed to be kept at bay by our nuclear security state. What I would like to offer in this discussion is an alternative approach to thinking through the reasons for why we are unable to formulate policies that actually address in substantive ways the relational problems we face as a society in the beginning of the twenty-first century. This approach may be best thought of as political theology of Christian economy of grace. Although, a theological approach could be profitably used if based on Judaism, or Islam, or even Buddhism, Hinduism, or another of the world’s great religions, the political theology that I am expousing is

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Christian.2 This is the theological perspective that I am most familiar with and the religion of which the majority of Americans are familiar. Thus, the grammar that I will use in this discussion is that of Christianity. For many this will seem odd to use a theological grammar, rather than a grammar of economics, science, public policy, national security, etc. However, what I will attempt to show is that the grammar of theology may be the only grammar that provides an adequate purchase on the relational problems we face. The reason, I contend, is that a political theology underlies all the grammar we take for granted when we are discussing economics, science, public policy, national security, etc. It is always just under the surface. We need to acknowledge its presence and we need to claim it. For without understanding the political theology that is framing the grammar with which we determine national policy, we will continue to develop policy that only operates at the margins of the real issues we face as a society on the edge of chaos, and entropy will just continue to increase as our inchoate fears rise inside each of our bodies. My thesis is that when one thinks about the American nuclear security state, it becomes apparent that the nuclear security state is a natural outcome of a society that has not been willing to come to grips with its own theology. What is also revealed about the nuclear security state is that is a totalizing environment that abridges human freedom, perverts democracy, diverts our attention and scare resources away from real problems of relationality that are solvable, and limits our 2

For example, the fundamental morality and underpinnings of human justice are concurrent across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: (1) Sacred scripture “tells us the kinds of people we are to become if we are to hear its message faithfully;” (2) Sacred scripture “is both a historical document and a canonical and sacred text for a believing community; (3) Sacred scripture contains information that is “useful to guide behavior today;” (4) “Human love and justice is modeled for us in [sacred] scripture” (e.g. “the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”). See John R. Donahue, S.J., “The Bishop and the Proclamation of Biblical Justice’” in David A. Stosur, ed., Unfailing Patience and Sound Teaching: Reflections on Episcopal Ministry in Honor of Rembert G. Weakland, O.S.B. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), 246-248. Given these starting assumptions, the following predicates for human justice are equally true for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: (1) Human history and human institutions and political arrangements are not “‘secular” in the sense of being outside God’s plan for humanity.” Thus, morality and human justice (see above tenets) “should inform a person’s public life in community;” (2) “Made in the image and likeness of God, all people have a human dignity and fundamental rights that are independent of their gender, age, nationality, ethnic origin, religion, or economic status;” (3) “The fullness of human life is found in community with others;” (4) Moses/Christ/Mohammed’s “message imposes a prophetic mandate to speak for those who have no one to speak for them [the powerless: the “poor”, the “widow,” the “orphan,” and the “stranger in the land”], to be a defender of the defenseless;” (5) To “misuse [] the world’s resources or [appropriate] them by a minority of the world’s population betrays the gift of creation” and distorts our community with others (see #3 above); (6) “On earth, we belong to one human family and as such have mutual obligations to provide the policies of all people’s across the world” (Donahue, 240-2).

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imagination as to what is possible within the realm of human society. In other words, the nuclear security state, designed originally to protect our society from human evil, has become a great evil itself. Apart from the great evil that the nuclear security state represents, it also is the genesis for another evil, a form of counter-evil; terrorism. Terrorism will continue to exist, and grow in its virulence until we come to grips with the evil engendered by the nuclear security state. Thus, counter-terrorism strategies that attempt to fight the violence of terrorism with ever increasing counter-violence will only increase terrorism aimed at the nuclear security state. It is like throwing gasoline on a raging fire in order to put the fire out. It is an incredibly dumb policy that is sure to fail. It will fail because the endgame for terrorism against the nuclear security state is the use of the nuclear state’s own nuclear weapons against the state. The nuclear security state will meet the ultimate evil terrorist attack using nuclear weapons. Currently, there is no one hundred percent means to prevent a terrorist nuclear attack. There is no coherent counterstrategy that can be imagined once a terrorist nuclear attack occurs. And once such an attack occurs, the nuclear security state has absolutely no means at its disposal to prevent another such attack from occurring.

Defining Evil as the Banal Human Suffering of the Innocent It is not so much the suffering3 as the senselessness of it that is unendurable. – Nietzsche

A Question of theodicy (divine justice): “Where is God?”4 Why do the righteous suffer? Why do the wicked prosper?5 How can God allow a “world fascinated with idolatry, drunk with 3

“Human suffering” – the experiencing of psychological, spiritual, or physical pain, distress, loss, disturbing change, misfortune, injury, disability or death by a person or group of persons. Valerie Gray Hardcastle in her The Myth of Pain (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1999) argues persuasively that “all pains are physical and localizable [in the human person] and that all are created equal.” 4

“I heard a voice in myself answer: ‘Where is he? He is here. He is hanging on the gallows…’” Elie Wiesel describing a discussion between inmates of Auschwitz as they watch while a young boy dies in agony. See Elie Wiesel, Night (1969), 75-76 quoted in Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology trans. R.A. Wilson and John Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 273-74. In a more recent context: “Lord, you who are everywhere, have you been in Villa Grimalde too?” Villa Grimalde was the most notorious of Chile’s clandestine torture centers under Pinochet. Quoted in William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist (Challenges in Contemporary Theology; Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 1. 5

Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all those who are treacherous thrive? (Jer. 12:1-2).

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power, bloated with arrogance”6 that produces such profound suffering? If God was just he would not let these bad things happen. Why me? What did I do to deserve such suffering? Is my suffering a result of my sins (mipnei khata’einu – “because of our sins”)7?

Types of suffering: (1) natural suffering assumes that suffering is as natural as death;8 (2) selfcaused suffering assumes that suffering results from unhealthful or destructive actions by the person or afflicted on the person by their surroundings;9 (3) suffering caused by human sin understands suffering as a punishment for human sin;10 (4) suffering of the innocent (i.e. the Book of Job) is what creates the problem – if the innocent suffer, then God’s goodness is called into

6 Abraham

Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 183.

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“Mipnei khata’einu – ‘because of our sins’ became the general explanation for all disasters of Jewish history” as revealed by the prophets of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament). In the face of the northern kingdom of Israel being conquered by Tiglath-pilester III of Assyria in 722 BCE and the destruction of the Temple and deportations from the southern kingdom of Judah to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in 587/6 BCE, the prophets gave the Israelites hope by declaring that this was, after all, God’s will for their sins and all the Israelites needed to do to reclaim their land was to repent and follow YHWH’s torah (instruction, teachings). “God has hidden his face (hester panim) as punishment” for the sins of the Jews. See Mark S. Smith, The Memoirs of God: History, Memory, and Experience of the Divine in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 36; Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale State Press, 2001), 192. 8

Why is my pain unceasing, My wound incurable, Refusing to be healed, (Jer. 15:18). Suffering was an expected aspect of life in the ancient world: for all our days are full of pain, and our work is a vexation, even in the night our mind does not rest (Ecclesiastes 2:23). 9

This particular ancient view of suffering has been demystified and its primacy established through modern psycho-social explanations based on Enlightenment propositions that human behavior can be ‘scientifically’ studied and explained and medically ‘treated.’ For example, in the U.S., persistent pain costs “somewhere between $40 and $100 billion annually in medical services, loss of productivity, and compensation payments….It is the second most frequent illness [emphasis mine]…and affects about fourfifths of all people (Hardcastle, 9). 10

See footnote #4. The assumption is that “Ultimately there is only one will by which history is shaped – the will of God; and there is only one factor upon which the shape of history depends: the moral conduct of the nations [and its peoples]” (Heschel, 174). I will punish the world for its evil, And the wicked for their inequity; I will put and end to the pride of the arrogant, And humble the haughtiness of the tyrants….For the ruthless shall come to naught, The scoffer shall vanish, And all who watch to do evil shall be cut off (Isaiah 13:11; 29:20).

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question.11 For Job, the question of theodicy is replaced or sidestepped by satisfaction in a deep, personal relationship w/ God.12 However, the Holocaust13 calls Job’s solution into question for there can be no possible divine permission that allowed the Nazis to engage in Holocaust.14 The divine Lord of history, the gracious One, the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob who delivered the people of Israel from their

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The most extreme form of this type of suffering is torture, especially as used as part of an overall strategy of political repression intended to alter a person’s identity, degrade him and strip him of human solidarity, but in most cases not to kill him. Torture destroys the victim “ as a potential actor through the fragmentation of the ego. The feeling and reality of powerlessness in torture is so extreme that the subject is no longer subject, but mere object.” The State uses torture not only to destroy the “political project, if any, in which the person is involved, but also the entire network of psychic processes that bind the person to others” For example, both Hitler and Mussolini used torture to depoliticize the citizens of their respective state’s leading up to WWII, to prevent the mobilization of the majority of citizens in their countries who did not support their policies leading to war (Cavanaugh, 38-40). 12

I had heard You with my ears, But now I see You with my eyes; Therefore I recant and relent, Being but dust and ashes (Job 42:5-6, NJPS); By hearsay I have heard you. But now my eye has seen you, Thus I am poured out and smitten, And am become dust and ashes (Marvin Pope, Job [AB Vol. 15; New York: Doubleday, 1973], 349). 13

Here Holocaust is differentiated from genocide: Genocide (coined by Raphael Lemkin, a refugee Polish-Jewish lawyer in the U.S. in late 1942) being the partial destruction of a national, ethnical, or religious group; holocaust being the planned total annihilation of an entire national, ethnical, or religious group. What was unique about the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis, for example, was their planned worldwide murder of all Jews everywhere and “the actual murder of all Jews the murders could lay their hands on” (Bauer, 1-13, 264). 14

For example, why the one million Jewish children under the age of thirteen “were killed is the most bothersome question of all….If the answer is that we can never understand God’s intensions, the obvious and trite – but arguably true – reply is that we have no wish to know God’s intensions or reasons, whether we understand them or not, because any divine or human reason for not preventing the murder of a million children….can be judged evil” (Bauer, 211).

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opressors in Egypt, was nowhere to be found at Auschwitz.15 Is God dead?16 Has he hidden his face (hester panim) as punishment to humanity? Has God voluntarily removed himself (tzimtzum) from the universe, becoming the God who runs away (deus absconditus)?17 Is God powerless to prevent such evil?18 Is God using this evil thing for good?19 Existentialism’s answer is that there is no answer to suffering – it just is – there is no incompatibility between the physical suffering of the innocent and the existing of a loving and just, all-powerful God.20

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The existential question asked in Elie Wiesel’s Night, for example, is: “Does God’s transforming power through which God acts in history entail suffering?” In Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55), “the prophet’s message insists that suffering is not to be understood exclusively in terms of the sufferer’s own situation….Israel’s suffering is not a penalty, but a privilege, a sacrifice, its endurance a ritual, its meaning to be disclosed to all in the hour of Israel’s redemption….Her suffering and agony are the birth-pangs of salvation” (Heschel, 149). 16

“…Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam has inscribed deeply into contemporary consciousness both awareness of the appalling malignancy and destructiveness of evil in human life and also man’s utter aloneness in combating the powers of evil in the world.” See Gordon Kaufman, God the Problem (1972), 171. The most horrible thing about the Holocaust, for example, is not the fact that the Nazis were inhuman, but that “they were indeed human, just as human as you and I are (Bauer, 264). For example, “The horror of torture is magnified by the realization that this is being done to me by another human being. It is a perversion and destruction of the very idea of human relationship” (Cavanaugh, 43). Woe to those who call evil good And good evil, Who put darkness for light And Light for darkness (Isa. 5:20). 17

Tzimtzum (contraction) posits that God removed himself from History to permit the world to exist. “God withdrew himself so that human free will could exert itself, for good or evil” (Bauer, 189). However, “By choosing to be absent, he may be held responsible for the evil he permits, and we can call it evil by setting it against the moral standards” set in Scripture (Bauer, 190-1). 18

The problem with this perspective is that it postulates a weak God, a God no one really needs. For what can he do anyways? Our prayers will go unanswered because God has no power to grant them (Bauer, 190-1). 19

“Jewish religious tradition holds that everything, evil as well as good, comes from God, is designed by God. So evil is also part of God’s plan, whose ultimate goal is always the good, which means that evil, misfortune, horrors – all of these are only seemingly bad, and they ultimately lead to good” (Bauer, 188). 20

For the existentialist, History is a nightmare, the world is drenched in blood: The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants, For they have transgressed the laws, Violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant (Isaiah 24:1, 4-6). Thus, the task of the prophet is to “rend the veil that lies between life and pain” (Heschel, 179). Albert Camus, in his The Plague (1947) symbolized the evils of National Socialist Germany’s Third Reich (kingdom), which cost the lives of 49 million people, most of whom were civilians, including the extermination of six million Jews and the murdering or enslaving of hundreds of thousands of Poles, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners, Gypsies (Romas) and handicapped German nationals, by comparing the Nazis to a random outbreak of bubonic plague (Bauer, 262).

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Christian solution to suffering includes four primary beliefs: (1) neither suffering nor sin is a part of God’s creation, nor are they willed by God; (2) both the Hebrew prophetic hope21 and the assertion of Christian faith that evil, sin, and death will in the end be overthrown (Christus Victor);22 (3) belief in an afterlife is a central part in the Christian resolution of the problem of suffering;23 (4) God is totally involved in history and nature of this world calling creation into being and continuing to march before it with a persistent call.24 Human reality involves brokenness and suffering.25 How could God’s presence then only be discerned where all is good and beautiful? God must also be present in, not beyond, where things go 21

“The darkness of history…conceals a light. Beyond the mystery is meaning. And the meaning is destined to be discovered” (Heschel, 179). Though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, Yet your Teacher will not hide Himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your Teacher (Isaiah 30:20-21). 22

God is involved in suffering: For a long time I have kept silent, I have kept still and restrained Myself; Now I will cry out like a woman in travail, I will gasp and pant (Isaiah 42:14). As sufferers, Christians know themselves to suffer not alone but together w/ Christ; not in despair, but in hope. Christian suffering is productive. This freedom to suffer becomes the good news of the NT when those who endure suffering offer it to God (as Christ did on the cross!) so that it may be the means by which God’s grace can work (for resurrection in our lives). God’s power is not the power of invulnerability, but of solidarity with the world in its pain. God is with us through our suffering: Because you are precious in My eyes, And honored, and I love you….For the mountains may depart And the hills be removed But My steadfast love shall not depart from you, And My covenant of peace shall not be removed, Says the Lord, Who has compassion on you (Isaiah 43:4; 54:7-8; 49:15; 54:10 [Heschel, 153-4]). 23

Heaven is a symbol for the possibility of transformation for all things. While maintaining its own nature, this age passes into the next and is transformed in it, just as the earthly body of our Lord Jesus Christ was transformed in the resurrection. Through Jesus Christ, w/ the power of the Spirit of transforming love, we are called to participate with God in the hope of redeeming the world’s thlipsis (suffering), stenochoria (distress), and diōgmos (persecution). 24

“Crying out to God and running to God without waiting for a reply, is an act of hope and faith. It is the driving force of the human spirit that informs religious experience. We cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and he heard our cry and saw our affliction, our toil and our oppression. He brought us out of Egypt with his strong hand and outstretched arm (Deuteronomy 26:7). Had God not responded, theology would not exist.” See Jean Donovan, “Diving into Darkness: The Religious Experience of Women Survivors Of Domestic Violence,” Religious Experience and Contemporary Theological Epistemology, 4th International Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology Conference, Leuven, Nov. 5-8, 2003, available at http://www.theo.kuleuven.ac.be/ogtpc/lest4/seniors#Marie%20BAIRD (accessed 02/04/05). 25

For example, in the theology of Rabbi Irving Greenberg, a contemporary Jewish thinker, with the exile and destruction of the Temple (in 587-6 BCE, the Spirit of God (shekhina) has also been exiled from the people of God. “In effect, the world itself is broken” and it is the task of the faithful – those who obey the Torah in Judaism and Christ in Christianity and Allah in Islam– to bring light into this brokenness in the midst of their common suffering. This involves working in partnership with God in bringing good to the world (Bauer, 191-2).

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terribly, horribly wrong – places where we are broken and suffering. 26 A God who cannot suffer is not God. The cross is the preeminent place where God shows his engagement, his radical involvement and identity with human beings and their history, including our brokenness and suffering to the point of death.27 God’s gracious, loving solidarity and communion with the depths of human pain and suffering, of lostness and brokenness in the death of Christ on the cross illuminates our Christian ministry to also be in solidarity with others in their suffering. Solidarity with the ‘other’ begins with accusatio sui, an alienation from self, an emptying (kenosis) that results in metanoia, a turning away from one’s former path,28 a conversion to a new way that “is seen as a taking of the cross, standing where Christ once stood…. This is the essence of Christian humility, the recognition of one’s total poverty [dependence on God], the ‘emptying out’ of human wisdom and human righteousness.” It is a true coming together with the ‘other’ in that it “unveils the truth” of our dependence on a God who reveals himself only in weakness, our

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This view contrasts sharply from a theology of divine impassibility that posits an uninvolved God, “resting in sublime self-enjoyment of the divine goodness and glory” of creation. See Jane Linahan, “Experiencing God in Brokenness: the Self-emptying of the Holy Spirit in Moltmann's Pneumatology” Religious Experience and Contemporary Theological Epistemology, 4th International Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology Conference, Leuven, Nov. 5-8, 2003, available at http://www.theo.kuleuven.ac.be /ogtpc/lest4/seniors#Marie%20BAIRD (accessed 02/04/05), 5. 27

This is Martin Luther’s theologia cruces (“theology of the cross”), developed in 1518, which posits that, “God displays himself ‘visibly’ publicly and historically, only as the humiliated and tortured Jesus.” Thus, it is useless to “consider the transcendence of God, ‘His glory and majesty,’ independently of the human encounter with him in the godlessness of the cross…. God himself…shatters all our images [of Him] by addressing us in the cross of Jesus.” See Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New testament to Saint John of the Cross (Cambridge, MA.: Cowley Publications, 1990), 157-8. 28

“Metanoia” is a physical movement and new engagement with the world, not just a change of attitude or intension. “The thrust of the Spirit does not end with the discovery of the battered victim lying in the ditch. It drives us, to make a commitment to that victim to enter actively upon his or her pathway, to make a commitment to his or her liberation.” See Roberto Oliveras Maguero, “History of the Theology of Liberation,” in Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, eds. Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino (Maryknoll, NY” Orbis Books, 1993), 9 quoted in Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Liberation Theology after the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering (London: Routledge, 2001), 177-8.

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interdependence with others, and our common suffering.29 “If God is free to act and to be present in all the diverse conditions of human life [even those times of human suffering], men and women are free to go find him there.” 30 From this vantage point, one might argue that the “ultimate cause of poverty, injustice, and oppression [as sources of human suffering is the] breach of friendship with God and others.”31 The dream of God may be that through suffering and our willingness to forgive in the face of this suffering, we may be reconciled to the ‘other’ and to God. For “Like a tireless, and long-suffering parent, our God is there for us when we are ready to hear His still, small voice in our lives.”32 This is the same God that is in the ‘other’ who may be the cause of our unjust suffering. For the

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For example, a close reading of New Testament Scripture reveals that “Jesus is not naïve, he does not ask us to be passive [in the face of suffering], he does not require us to give up fighting against evil – but he shows us that equivalence in evil, even in the name of justice, does not transform human society. What is required is an attitude that is not determined by what has already been done, an innovative, a creative gesture. Otherwise enclosure within a repetitive logic is inevitable, and the term of this logic is the exclusion or death of at least one of the parties. It is forgiveness that represents this innovative gesture: it creates a space in which the logic inherent in legal equivalences [i.e. counter-violence] no longer runs.” See Christian Duquoc, “The Forgiveness of God,” Concilium 184 (1986): 39 quoted in Bell, 149. In this forgiveness of God and our fellow human, the endless cycle of violence and counter-violence as the response to human suffering is interrupted and “holds out the promise of a peace [e.g. the cessation of suffering] that is more than the uneasy truce of adversaries” (Bell, 150). 30

(Williams 1990, 158-160, 163). William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536) in his Obedience of a Christian Man builds on and extends Luther’s theologia cruces by describing why the solidarity with others is a requirement of our God-given freedom. Rowan Williams summarizes Tyndale’s thinking: “We are delivered by Christ from slavery into freedom; and that freedom is experienced and expressed as indebtedness – not to God, but to each other….God’s service to us in Christ is both the model and the motive force for our relation to our neighbor” (Lev. 19:18; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27; Rom. 13:9; Gal. 5:14; James 2:8). See Rowan Williams, Anglican Identities (Cambridge, MA.: Cowley Publications, 2003), 11-13. 31

Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, rev. ed. Ed. Trans. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 24 quoted in Bell, 151. The basis for this friendship is forgiveness. For through forgiveness, “The victim is freed from the enmity that is borne of a violation that cannot be undone; the victimizer is freed from the guilt and loathing that comes from never being able to undo the violation. Forgiveness places them both in a position to risk a new relationship. Ultimately forgiveness is an act of hope that denies the destructiveness of injustice [i.e. the suffering of the innocent] the final word, instead insisting that something else is always possible” (Bell, 152-3). 32 At

its foundation as God’s very good creation, “this is a moral universe, which means that, despite all the evidence that seems to be to the contrary [in a world where the innocent suffer], there is no way that evil and injustice and oppression and lies can have the last word. God is a God who cares about right and wrong. God cares about justice and injustice. God is in charge.” See Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time ( New York: Doubleday, 2004), 2, 11.

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Church, a moral social order “is based not on defeat of enemies but on identification with victims through participation in Christ’s reconciling sacrifice.”33

The Nuclear Security State as a Banal Way of Being-in-the – World: The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence, National Security, and an Unconquerable Military The number of nuclear devices have grown from a few controlled by two nuclear states to 31,732 nuclear devices controlled by nine nuclear states 34 and more than 40 states35 with 3,755 tons of weapons-usable fissile materials who could make 240,000 nuclear weapons.36 Today there is no single organization with the mission to “keep terrorists from obtaining nuclear weapons or fissile materials to carry out a nuclear terrorist attack” nor is there a prioritized budget and plan for preventing a terrorist nuclear attack. Few existing nonproliferation programs have any mechanism in place for independent review and accountability; experience and problem solutions are not 33

For example, we can no longer account ‘virtue’ as that which is won through the defeat of the ‘other’ (Cavanaugh, 9-10, 11). If habits of mind are “not so much something you see as something through which you see everything,” then the habit of mind Christians are being called to cultivate is a new vision that embraces the other in our thinking. From this perspective “Christian ethics is more fundamentally about habits, and thus about producing certain kinds of people, then about decisions, or producing certain kinds of consequences.” See Michael Hanby, “Interceding: Giving Grief to Management,” in Stanley Hauerwas, 238. 34

This estimate includes all known tactical (battlefield – suitcase and backpack weapons, atomic land mines, air-defense warheads, atomic artillery shells, etc.) and strategic (sitting atop missiles aimed at military installations and cites) nuclear (fission) and thermonuclear (hydrogen fusion) devices in the inventories of nuclear states: Russia (20,000), U.S. (10,600), China (400), France (350), United Kingdom (200), Israel (100), India (40), Pakistan (40), North Korea (2). Iran is presently engaged in a nuclear weapons program and Saudi Arabia is presently debating the option to acquire a nuclear deterrent, but these states do not yet possess them. See Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) nation reports available at http://www.nti.org/e_research/ profiles/index.html (accessed 9/09/04). 35

Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency speech to the IAEA general conference in Vienna, Austria, September 20, 2004 as reported by the Chicago Sun-Times, September 21, 2004 available at www.suntimes.com/ output/news/cst-nws-nuke21.html (accessed 9/21/04). 36

The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), run by former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright, estimates that at the end of 2003 there was a total of 1,855 metric tons of plutonium and 1,900 metric tons of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) globally. It takes ~10 kg. of plutonium-239 or 16-25 kg. of HEU enriched to ~90 percent uranium-235 (U-235) to fuel a weapon. See ISIS, “Global Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium HEU) Stocks: Summary Tables and Charts (June 30, 2004)” available at http://www.isis-online.org/global_stocks/summary_tables.html#chart1 (accessed 10/05/04).

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shared across programs; and there is no central repository of information concerning security for nuclear weapons and fissile materials around the world.37

The shift from modernity to post-modernity is primarily a shift in the inclusiveness of human freedom, defined as self-determination of human policies. In modern times, those with disproportionate access to the world’s resources served as colonial powers that exploited less-powerful indigenous populations for the primary benefit of the colonial power.38 Post-modernity is built on the premise that colonialism, in whatever hegemonic form, is not sustainable over time and is ultimately destructive of both the hegemonic power and the exploited, less-powerful indigenous population.39 Thus, underneath the political rhetoric, false religiosity, and unrestrained violence of international privatized terrorism is a moral quest for self-determination and enhanced human freedom for the personae miserae (the powerless).

Terrorism as Counter-Evil to the Evil of the Nuclear Security State If one bothers to ask basic questions regarding political realities that engender terrorism, a number of universal drivers emerge, which are constellated in unique ways depending on which terrorist political group one is examining. Such universal drivers for terrorism include sociopolitical drivers revolving around issues of: (1) population pressures and demographics, (2) affluence dif37

Matthew Bunn, Anthony Wier, John P. Holdren, Controlling Nuclear Warheads and Materials: A Report Card and Action Plan (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard State [Commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative], March 2003), 42-3. 38

For example, in the U.S. drive to “liberate” oppressed peoples so that they may experience human freedom, it is vitally important that this is achieved in a manner that does not remind an indigenous population of “colonialism” or lead to conditions that in any way, shape, or form smack of colonial hegemony. For a view of colonialism as international privatized terrorism’s roots see Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim : America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Pantheon Books, 2004). 39

There are a whole range of socio-political and political-economic reasons for this paradigm shift from modernity to post-modernity. However, a practical reason is that historical colonialism, in whatever form, has always led to conflict and in an era of proliferated WMD, the cost of such asymmetrical conflict with WMD is potentially unsustainable to even the wealthiest and most powerful countries. For a discussion of modernity and post-modernity as it applies to statecraft see Robert Cooper, Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004).

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ferentials, (3) technology access, (4) relative poverty, (5) market failures such as “perverse pricing” of externalities, (6) policy and political failures of inclusiveness and power-sharing arrangements, (7) the scale and rate of economic growth, (9) cultural and religious values, and (10) the local impacts of globalization. Counter-violence without addressing the underlying drivers will only lead to more terrorism – on a grander scale than what the U.S. has yet experienced. More terrorism – on a grander scale that what the U.S. has yet experienced is inevitable because under the present counter-terrorism strategy of the U.S., the international privatized terrorists are encouraged to use CBRN weapons as an opening to the next level of warfare. From a game perspective, this is a rational course of action.40 The use of tactical nuclear devices (or other CBRN weapons) on U.S. soil by terrorists is high because: 1) the use of CBRN weapons produces a winning endgame for the terrorists; 2) CBRN weapons are relatively inexpensive and offer the greatest destructive value per dollar cost; 3) there is a large and growing supply of both CBRN weapons and international terrorists to carry out such attacks, and 4) the U.S. continues to position itself as the most attractive target for international privatized terrorism.41 A range of scenarios can be modeled whereby the terrorist side’s attack comprises the detonation of one or more CBRN weapons in one location, in multiple locations, over a relatively short time or over a period of weeks, months or years. The type of attack can also be modeled to include a biological, chemical, or radiological component along with or in lieu of the tactical nuclear component.42 Remember, the international privatized terrorists’ strategy is to develop attacks that undermine underlying systems that support economic well-being or destroy confidence in these

40

Various assumptions concerning the exact attack scenario and probabilities related to the ability of a terrorist group to obtain tactical nuclear devices (or other CBRN weaponry) and carry out complex logistical planning and execution steps leading to a CBRN attack can be assessed and argued. 41

Each of these four propositions or explanations are themselves controversial and demand considered debate. However, for the purposes of this discussion, we will assume that they are true or nearly true and see where the game scenario leads us. Then, once we have followed through with one complete game scenario, we can modify these assertions to see how that would impact our counter-terror moves to such an attack. 42

The model itself is based on an assumption that the game we are presently playing with terrorists today is one of wealth destruction and escalation of a violence/counter-violence cycle. The objective of the game from the terrorist’s perspective is to destroy as much of America’s wealth as possible for a given dollar of cost and to encourage the U.S. to respond with disproportionate violence.

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support systems and their ability to protect and nurture the national economy and to force a disproportionate violent response from the U.S. government to such an attack.43 For example: • For less than $2 million, the attacks on 9/11 produced about $90 billion in property damage and lost income (experiential data) and created a one-time, short-term (less than 2 years) structural $200 billion dollar cash outflow (as measured by the U.S. war response to these attacks). •

For less than $50 million, one could model a series of CBRN attacks timed over a short period that could produce a long-term 2%-3% reduction of each year’s annual GDP or ~$600 billion cash impact over a period of 2-5 years.

•

For less than $500 million, one could model a series of CBRN attacks timed over a longer period that could produce a long-term 10% reduction of each year’s annual GDP or $2,000 billion cash impact over a period of 3-7 years.

Many scenarios can be elaborated and alternate assumptions put forth that alter this conclusion to the terrorist threat somewhat – but always at an unsustainable cost (the diversion of such a large portion of GDP to counter-terrorism activities as to be unsustainable over any length of time). That is, instead of the game ending in a terrorist-winning move, we can envision a series of countermoves that defer for a time a capitulation to the terrorists’ demands at an unsustainable economic cost. To continue to play an unwinable game is pure folly or badly managed hubris. From a strategic perspective there are two fundamental questions that need a definitive answer: 1) Is the present game truly unwinable if CBRN weapons are used by our opponent, and 2) If we are in fact playing an unwinable game, how can we alter the game itself in our favor?

43

From this perspective, the international privatized terrorists attempt to damage our productive capacity and our will to carry on economic activity in the face of adversity. These terrorists function as modern anti-entrepreneurs leveraging capital to destroy rather than to create wealth. With this perspective of terrorism as primarily a dis-economic activity, monetary measures can be used as a proxy to discern results of various counter-terrorism strategies. While many scenarios can be envisioned where the terrorists bungle such an attack, from a game strategy perspective, we believe that one must assume that the best game move will be chosen by the opponent – that is, the terrorists will make the best use of a tactical nuclear device (or other CBRN weapon), and not a sub-optimal use.

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The results of the analysis so far suggest that indeed, once our opponent plays CBRN weapon in the game, the terrorist always wins under the U.S. present counter-terrorism strategy, as there are not winning conventional countermoves readily available. 44 Presently, our approach to counter-terrorism, while multi-faceted, relies heavily on threat assessment (primarily through intelligence gathering), forward deployment of military and paramilitary forces, and law enforcement. Planned activities include preemptive attacks; a true homeland security strategic capability that includes hardening of domestic infrastructure; and a more coordinated perimeter policing, among other defensive measures. However, this strategy and its attendant budget are precisely what the models suggest that the terrorist opposition can and will contravene and ultimately win against with CBRN weapons.45 The more traditional counter-terrorism measures, primarily hard power that relies upon coercion and violence for effectiveness because they are well-understood and can be implemented with existing intelligence, military and federal law enforcement infrastructure are what are receiving most of total budget allocated toward countering the terrorist threat. Yet, our model predicts that this approach alone is doomed to fail over time (see above discussion). Part of the reason the present approach to counter terror will fail is that we are approaching the problem as a point solution: identify known terrorists, discover their plans, interdict their materiel, deter their attack, find them, and prosecute them. All of these activities are fairly narrowly constituted, linearly dependent, and focused on results, if we have: 1) the capability for discovering plans and specific individuals associated with those plans, and 2) the capability to interdict the attackers and their CBRN materiel before they are able to carry out an attack. Unfortunately, there is little data to support the supposition that such a set of assumptions is valid or a greater degree of success can be achieved than for example, discovering the plans of organized crime syndicates and interdicting drug shipments into this country. With enough diligence

44

If one believes that there are strategies and vetted counter moves (tactics) that enable the U.S. to continue with its present counter-terrorism policies and strategies after such an attack, these need to be input into the models and exposed to debate as to their soundness. Absent such new ideas and analysis, clearly a discussion of the game itself and what changes might be made to its underlying structure rises to uppermost importance. 45

While the counter-terror models are sensitive to budget (how much we have to spend to accomplish a certain level of threat preparedness), they are also sensitive to speed – how fast can we close off a specific threat opportunity, and more importantly – how fast can responsible organizations learn to counter new threats that the terrorists think up. Thus, pouring more and more dollars into solving the problem will not necessarily produce more security if the result is a bigger and slower bureaucracy.

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and organization, over time one can expect to be successful at learning the plans of and interdicting some percentage of drug shipments into the U.S. However, when one considers the consequences of an attack using CBRN weapons, the percentage of leakage matters a lot. One means to measure the probability of a CBRN weapon entering the U.S. is to assess the relative probability of a specific drug shipment entering. That is, when we are able to close our boarders to all illegal drug shipments, one may also assume that it is equally improbable for a CBRN weapon to enter. Since the shocking events on September 11, 2001, that killed 3,000 civilians, two wars have been fought that may have killed as many as 100,000 civilians 46 and over $300 billion47 has been spent on the ‘global war against terrorism.’48 Yet, despite extensive funding for the war on terrorism, nuclear threats from privatized terrorist organizations or rogue states today are highly probable, more likely than at any time in the past,

46

“Eighty-four percent of the deaths were reported to be caused by the action of the Coalition forces and 95 percent of those deaths were due to air strikes and artillery. Report by researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published in the Lancet Medical Journal (October 2004), summary available at http://www.jhsph.edu/Press_Room/Press_Releases/PR_2004/Burnham_Iraq.html (accessed 10/28/04). 47 As

of Sept. 30, 2004, for example, the U.S. government has spent ~$120 billion, and it has allocated -or plans to spend -- $174 billion in Iraq and this is expected to reach $200 billion in FY’05 once other expected supplemental spending is added. Another $100 billion for global expenditures related to the Afghanistan war and incremental expenditures for homeland security since 9/11 through FY’05 is probably a conservative estimate. However, this amount does not take into account potential lost gross domestic product from the Iraq war since March 2003, which has been estimated at $150 billion. See Warwick J. McKibbin and Andrew Stoeckel, “The Economic Costs of a War in Iraq” (March 7, 2003) available at http://www.brook.edu/ dybdocroot /views/papers/mckibbin/20030307.pdf (accessed 10.25/04). For comparison purposes, Yale State economist William D. Nordhaus estimates that in inflation-adjusted terms, World War I cost just under $200 billion for the United States and the Vietnam War cost about $500 billion over eight years, from 1964 to 1972. The cost of the Iraq war could reach nearly half that number by next fall, 2 1/2 years after it began. See Jonathan Weisman and Thomas E. Ricks “Increase in War Funding Sought” Washington Post (October, 26, 2004), A01 available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62554-2004Oct25.html (accessed 10/26/04). 48

“War” is unfortunate language in that eliminating the threat of terrorism most likely will not be achieved through dramatic and decisive conquest. Other soft-power components such as diplomatic, economic, political, moral and justice-seeking measures must also be employed. See Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (PublicAffairs, 2004).

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and the number one threat to global economic security.49 A terrorist attack involving as few as three tactical nuclear devices (less than 0.25-10 kiloton yield each) on a developed country could kill more than a million people and create such economic chaos as to temporarily reduce the per capita GDP to that of a developing country.50 However, no known counterterrorism strategy which relies primarily on intelligence, coercion, violence, and war to counter nuclear terrorism (irrespective of budget or organizational structure) is capable of providing 100% protection from a nuclear attack by terrorists.51

49

National Security Council, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, available at www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf (accessed 9/19/04); National Security Council, National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction, December 2002, available at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/ 2002/12/WMDStrategy.pdf (accessed 9/19/04), 1. The underlying assumptions to this assessment are that this is a big issue, worth spending significant resources on; that terrorists would plausibly attack a nuclear facility and that insiders would plausibly steal from such a facility; that terrorists could plausibly make a nuclear bomb if they got the material (or detonate a stolen bomb if they got one of those); and that there is minimal chance of detecting and stopping a terrorist bomb before it was delivered. 50

For example, many nuclear terror attack scenarios mistakenly imagine that only one nuclear weapon would be used. More likely is that multiple nuclear weapons would be detonated by design within a finite time period to produce the largest potential economic loss. For about $500,000 (according to the 9/11 Commission), the multiple, closely-timed terrorist attacks on 9/11 produced about $90 billion in property damage and lost income (experiential data) and created a one-time, $300 billion dollar cash outflow (as measured by the U.S. war response and lost gross domestic product (GDP) from this U.S. response to 9/ 11). A terrorist attack involving three or more nuclear devices could cost no more than $5 million and produce a short-term reduction in annual world GDP equal to $10,000 billion cash impact over a period of 7-10 years (estimate) as cleanup and restoration post-attack proceeds and impacts the world economy. If the attack occurred in the U.S., the majority of this cost would be incurred by U.S. taxpayers.

51

The economic value of a program that prevents nuclear terrorism is by how much that program would reduce the probability of a terrorist attack using nuclear weapons, given the hurdle rate, the required rate of return necessary to invest in prevention versus paying the economic cost of the attack itself. To calculate the amount of this ‘economically justified’ investment, the probability of an attack if no program is put in place must be known. For example, if the probability of a nuclear terrorist attack is only one percent during any one year, that means there is a 40% chance that a nuclear weapon will be used by terrorists sometime within the next fifty years. If the cost of such an attack is approximately one trillion dollars, then it is worth it for the global community to spend $130 billion just to cut that probability in half. See Matthew C. Weinzierl, “The Cost of Living: The Economics of Preventing Nuclear Terrorism,” The National Interest (Spring 2004), 122.

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What is desperately needed today is a new counter-terrorism strategy, a counter-terror strategy that does not make the U.S. itself look like the terrorists it is fighting in its “war on terrorism.”52 Such a rethinking of counter-terror strategy is especially necessary before the U.S. or its allies is hit with a terrorist attack using CBRN weapons of mass destruction that kills or injures 30,000 or 300,000 people, rather than 3,000 people as in the 9/11 attacks. This rethinking of counterterrorism strategy is especially important before such a WMD attack occurs in the future so that the U.S., in its response to such an attack, does not react in a fashion that escalates the violence even further and leads the world into a global world-war of devastating destructiveness and loss of human life and property. Instead of thinking about this as a “war against terrorism,” this can be more accurately thought of as a “proxy war” fought by privatized groups of individual actors (e.g. al Qaeda is presently a prime example of such a group) who use terrorism as a technique to achieve political objectives that have the intention of producing structural changes in power-sharing relationships that are international in scope.53 It is a “proxy war” in that al Qaeda, for example, is fighting as an agent on behalf of its “sponsors” rather than for its own power or territorial objectives.54 This proxy war, from the perspec-

52

For example, in a January 25, 2002 memo from Alberto R. Gonzoles to President George W. Bush entitled: “Application of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war to the conflict with al Qaeda and the Taliban,” the White House attorney is concerned that Bush administration officials could be prosecuted for ‘war crimes’ as a result of the measures to combat terror adopted by the administration in response to the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda. 53

Terrorism as used here is systemized violence against a predominantly civilian population that may take the form of lethal force, symbolic violence, economic disruption, and other forms that impinge or impede on the normal human freedoms that are reasonable, normative, and expected by such civilian population. Thus, terrorism has been a common a tactic of war used, for example, by the Germans against the Jewish populations of Poland, Germany, etc. during WWII; by the U.S. in its fire-bombing of Tokyo, etc. (e.g. 100,000 civilians were killed in one night’s air raids) against Japan in WWII; the U.S. “pacification” program in Vietnam; Pol Pot’s “ruralization” project in Cambodia that systematically killed millions of Cambodians; as a tactic of the U.S.-supported mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan war; Sadam’s use of WMD against the Kurds in northern Iraq in the 1980’s; etc. “International” describes the fact that the combatants are not fighting a domestic civil war within their respective domestic nation states, but internationally, across state boundaries. “Privatized” describes the fact that the terrorists are privately funded and are not controlled by the policies or directives of any particular nation state. 54

This is a real war, at least from the perspective of the U.S., in that the U.S is engaged in the maximum use of “force to compel our enemy to do our will.” Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton State Press, 1976), 75.

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tive of the “enemies of the U.S.” has two primary political objectives: (1) to provoke a nonproportional violent response by the U.S. government that leads to escalation of violence, and (2) to achieve disproportionate economic costs for the U.S. that over time will negatively impact the U.S. economic hegemony in the world.55 Using the analogy of war, al Qaeda’s attacks of 9/11 and the U.S. immediate response to those attacks constitute one battle in this “proxy war.” Viewed from this perspective, al Qaeda decidedly won this battle, not because of the death and destruction in New York and Washington, DC on 9/11, but because al Qaeda achieved its two primary political objectives: (1) to provoke a non-proportional violent response by the U.S. government that leads to escalation of violence, and (2) to achieve disproportionate economic costs on the U.S. The misconception of such disproportional retaliation by the U.S. is that such massive use of force will effectively destroy the fighting forces of the enemy; to “put [them] in such a condition that they can no longer carry on the fight.”56 However, this approach to this “proxy war” is doomed because the “sponsor” for whom the enemy (al Qaeda in this specific “battle”) is best imagined as groups of individuals who believe in the ideals of human freedom and democratic self-determination ideas espoused by the U.S. 57 That is, at the core of the “war against terrorism,” the two opposing sides are the “theory” of the U.S. regarding human freedom, human policies and self-determination vs. the praxis of the U.S regarding human freedom, human policies, and self-determination. The role of the agents engaged in terrorism acting as proxies is primarily to call attention to the world community that what the U.S. espouses as its democratic values and how it lives these values are irreparably and immeasurably disjunctive.

55

This assumption redefines terrorism as a “political socio-economic act” rather than a tactic to create a climate of fear and anxiety. Using this definition enables one to model terrorism as a “project” and to think about counter-projects from a capital budgeting, investment analysis perspective (e.g. what programs achieve the greatest return (reduction in terrorist “economic acts”) for invested capital?). 56

von Clausewitz, 90.

57

It is not accurate to portray “us” as “those who love freedom” and the enemy as “those who hate freedom.” The reality is that if “our” freedom despoils or constrains “their” vision of freedom, from the “other’s” perspective we are oppressors, not lovers of freedom. If we are discussing the Middle East, for example, terrorism has been used as a technique against oppressive governments (oppressive as measured by currently accepted international U.N. norms, for example) who could be classified as socialistic, authoritarian, or totalitarian – many of which at one time or another have received military aid from the U.S. (e.g. Sadam Hussein’s government in Iraq was a large recipient of U.S. military aid in Iraq in the 1980’s even as he used WMD on his Kurdish population in northern Iraq).

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To cast the “war against terrorism” in theological terms of a Manichaeism “good versus evil” only tends to reinforce the world community’s understanding of the U.S. as a fundamentally evil, imperial nuclear security state that must be fought against. That is because the fundamental charge of the international privatized terrorist against the U.S. is hypocrisy – “a gap between appearance and reality, between saying and doing, caused by a misplaced hierarchy of values and excessive emphasis on external matters [“material things”] to the neglect of the interior.”58 For, rather than a force for human freedom and democratic self-determination, the U.S. is perceived as a nation that says one thing, “terrorism as a tactic of war” is evil, but practices something entirely different, “is willing to engage in terrorism itself for its own self-serving purposes.” Terrorism is commonly believed to be a tactic to create a climate of fear and anxiety. Fear and anxiety may result from terrorism, but this is often neither the primary reason, nor result hoped for by the modern international terrorist. The difficulty is that terrorism is often discussed as a monolithic conceptual entity. But terrorism is actually pluralistic and polyvalent; it is not one thing. Also, depending on which category, type and form of terrorism someone is concerned with, dramatically different counter-terrorism approaches make sense. Within international terrorism there are two predominant forms: publicly financed terrorism and privately financed terrorism. International terrorism is usually sociopolitical terrorism: terrorism that is attempting to cause a set of specific political objectives of a “transnational” nature: •

By publicly financed actors: e.g. U.S. soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib jail abuses of civilian detainees reported by International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as “systematic;59 C.I.A. operatives involved in interrogations of al Qaeda detainees that contravene Third and Fourth Geneva Convention Act protocols for treatment of prisoners. Typically, only internationally constituted 3rd party inter-

58

This was the charge against the scribes and Pharisees by Jesus as recounted in Matt. 23:13-21. See Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., The Gospel of Matthew (Sacra Pagina, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 326. This recollection of hypocrisy is also attested to in the Nevi’im (the “Prophets) of Jewish scripture which preserved the prophets’ words as “not only significant for the circumstances in which they were originally pronounced but potentially relevant for later ones as well…[in their] crucial role in critiquing and trying to change society.” See Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, editors, The Jewish Study Bible: Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation (Oxford: Oxford State Press, 2004), 457-8. 59

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), “Report of the ICRC on the Treatment by Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq During Arrest, Internment and Interrogation,” February 2004.

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veners (e.g. UN “peacekeeping force,” International Red Cross, World Court, etc.) are an effective countermeasure for this form of terrorism. •

By privately financed actors (“privatized”): e.g. al Qaeda 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and on the Pentagon in Washington, DC; some of the attacks on Coalition forces in Iraq; and some recent attacks in Saudi Arabia. As Richard Clarke points out in his op-ed “The Wrong Debate on Terrorism (NY Times, April 25, 2004,),” this is a “battle of ideas” whose most effective long-term counter is neither military violence nor diplomacy but “finding ideological and religious counterweights” to motivating figures and thought patterns that legitimize this type of terrorism.

International privatized terrorism is like an advertising campaign directed at the “civilized world.” Like advertising, its job is to reach the masses and to gain a “share of mind” on the part of the consumer. From this perspective, international privatized terrorism as advertising has been immensely successful; probably the most effective advertising campaign ever conceived at reaching a global audience and establishing “share of mind.” The purpose of international privatized terrorism as advertising is to produce massive, overresponsive counter-violence on the part of the government and communities violated by the terrorist event. When this violence/counter-violence cycle occurs, this achieves a share of mind at the lowest cost per viewer, similar to “viral marketing.” International privatized terrorism as advertising has produced stunning results, not only is its message top of mind, but it has produced a massive counter-violence/violence spiral that keeps its message top-of-mind week-to-week. The message, or information content, of terrorism as advertising directed at the “civilized world” is twofold: (1) “your narrative, how you define reality, is incomplete in that it does not adequately take us into account,” and (2) “you are not as strong and powerful and invincible as you believe that you are.” These are primarily “religious” as opposed to secular messages. Counter-terrorism strategy typically makes the mistake of approaching international privatized terrorism like a point-source pollution problem: “If only we can rid ourselves of the few terrorists who are doing this activity, then we will be safe.” Yet, the reality is that international privatized terrorism is like the result of non-point-source pollution in that it has general, tacit approval

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of the am harets,60 who make up the vast majority of the world’s population. The am harets are the implicit “us” in the information content of terrorism: “your narrative is incomplete in that it does not take us into account” and “you are not as strong and powerful and invincible [relative to us] as you believe that you are.” Even though terrorism is carried out by only a relatively “fringe” few on behalf of the am harets, the underlying message is believed to be “on-target” by the vast majority of the world’s population (even as terrorism itself as a technique of political warfare is widely denounced by the majority of the world’s population). As long as the message is on-target and international privatized terrorism is viewed as an effective, least-costly means to convey this information to the elite of the world, there will be an effectively infinite supply of new terrorists to replace those that are killed or dispersed.

The Hermeneutics of Neglect: What the Nuclear Security State Neglects as it Unsuccessfully Fights a Global War Against Terrorism All human activity is a cry for forgiveness. 61 Who shall absolve us from the guilt of the holocaust? Colonialism? ...A nuclear catastrophe? 62 The extinction of even one species?

Two inextricable and unstoppable forces are challenging business-as-usual and causing a rethinking of comfortable, cherished economic, environmental, and social policies, as well as the emergence of new theological paradigms that call to question the very existence of the nuclear secu60

Am harets is a Hebrew word meaning “people of the earth.” In the first century C.E. it was applied derisively to refer to individuals as “country bumpkins,” those perceived as “less civilized” whose speech was less refined and who were not up-to-date on the latest ideas from the centers of culture in that day and age. In today’s post-modern era, the am harets comprise about five billion of a total 6.3 billion human population and are found in differing degrees in all nations, including “developed” countries. 61

Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford State Press, 1933), 97-8. 62

Rowan Williams, A Ray of Darkness: Sermons and Reflections (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1995), 4.

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rity state. These forces are: (1) the increase in the world’s population from ~6.5 billion today to approximately 9.1 billion in 2050, a 40% increase; 63 and (2) the new world economy that is driven by globalization and technological innovation64 where both positive and negative influences flow between the developed and the Third World. 65 The result of these two unstoppable forces that are changing the face of the world and calling to question business-as-usual policies that are non-sustainable is ecocide66 – the destruction of basic life-support systems of this earth we inhabit and the immiseration of the much of the world’s present population outside of a small group of highly ‘advanced’ Western democracies where “most humans exist in conditions of severe abasement [and even] inside these democracies, considerable fractions of the population live on the edge of poverty:”67

63

Population Division, United Nations report, February 24, 2005. Virtually all the additional growth in population will occur in less developed countries: from 5.3 billion today to 7.8 billion in 2050. The population of developed countries is expected to remain at today’s level of ~1.2 billion over the same period. 64

This technological innovation causes much good, but in many cases, much harm to the environment. “The only question is whether [our environmental problems] will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choosing, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies.” See Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005), 498. 65

For example, the First World exports its toxins to the Third World (e.g. The Inuit have the highest concentration of neurotoxins and gender shifters such as toxaphene, mercury and PCPs of any human population on earth. These toxic chemicals have been migrating from the tropics to Arctic food chains and into the diets of northern peoples for decades, far exceeding levels considered safe for humans in the First World.) and the Third World exports its diseases and problems to the First World (e.g. AIDS, SARS, cholera, West Nile virus, influenza, illegal immigrants, terrorists, debt, etc.) [Diamond, 517]. 66 As

used here, “ecocide” means the inattention to environmental issues that can singly or when combined cause collapse of natural and man-made systems that humans depend upon to sustain life and culture. 67

Charles T. Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge State Press, 2001), 16.

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•

We are releasing toxins into the earth’s atmosphere that act as poisons of the earth’s lifesupport systems.68 Through the chemicals we discharge into the air, we have torn a hole in the earth’s ozone layer that protects us from the ultraviolet radiation from the sun and caused global warming;69

•

At an accelerating rate we are destroying natural, existing habitats – the forests, grasslands, wetlands, and deserts or converting them to man-made habitats (cities, villages, farmlands, pastures, roads, golf courses);70

68 Air

pollution, rather than being a local problem is slowly being understood by science as a global problem; what happens in Beijing will affect Boston, what happens in Boston will affect Paris (the ‘butterfly effect’). We can no longer look at air quality as a local, or even regional concern. For example, although over 160 million tons of pollution are emitted into the air each year in the United States, and approximately 121 million people live in areas where monitored air was unhealthy because of high levels of the six principal air pollutants, this is a significant improvement (~29% better) over the toxins released into the air by U.S. industry in 1970. However, we now know that the air over the U.S. is polluted not just by U.S.-based industry, but also by industrial activities in China and other places around the world. See “Air Trends,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, available at http://www.epa.gov/air/airtrends/ (accessed 05/14/05). 69

Today, the concentration of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere is ~376ppm, the highest level in the past 420,000 years and already climate change is the primary factor in an estimated 150,000 deaths per year (World Health Organization data). CO2 from burning carbon based fuels comprises ~half of the greenhouse gases released annually into the earth’s atmosphere and 90% of the greenhouse gases produced by the U.S. economy. See James Gustave Speth, “Climate Change after the Elections: What we can do in America” (December 2004) available at http://www.redskyatmorning.com/ downloads/ afterword_paperback_ 010505.pdf (accessed 01/24/05), 3, 9. Diamond, 487. Has mankind become an embodiment of “The Destroyer” and the earth a new Abaddon? In the Hebrew Bible and Septuagint (LXX), the agency of ‘The Destroyer’ was usually reserved for God or God’s avenging angel(s) (Exod. 12:23) but was also used to designate a human agent of destruction (e.g. an individual, group, or nation; Job 15:21; Isa 21:2; 49:17; Jer 48:8, 15, 18; Rev 11:18). Abaddon (Heb. }a∑baddo®n) was used as a poetic synonym for the abode of the dead (the ‘bottomless pit’) or place of destruction (ABD). 70

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•

Through unsustainable land use practices we are causing soil erosion at rates 10-40X the rates of soil formation, salinization of once productive cropland, loss of soil fertility, and soil acidification and alkalinization;71

•

We are rapidly decreasing a significant fraction of wild species and populations of the world’s flora and fauna and loosing their genetic information through habitat destruction, the introduction of toxins into the environment, and unsustainable land management practices.72 Once a species is extinct, we cannot bring them back;

71

Diamond, 489-90. “Soil erosion constitutes the most serious continuing farm problem in the United States;...no other modern nation of the Western Hemisphere, north of the equator, is wasting its agricultural lands as rapidly as the United States….vast areas have been laid waste in China, Persia and other old countries, but those countries used their lands for thousand of years, whereas we have used the oldest of ours for only about three hundred years, the greater part for only about forty to eighty years.” See Hugh Hammond Bennett, United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service, available at http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/about/history/speeches/19321104.html (accessed 05/13/05). The National Cooperative Soil Survey identifies and maps over 20,000 different kinds of soil in the United States. 72

Extinction rates are usually estimated indirectly from principles of biogeography. Although no precise measurement of the numbers of species being extinguished can be made (because the exact number of species inhabiting the earth is unknown), best guess estimates are that species extinction as the result of human impacts on the environment are presently running approximately 1,000 – 10,000 times greater than the background natural rate of extinction (excluding episodic events, like the ‘Great Extinction’ ~250 million years ago that saw 95% of life disappear). The problem with this situation, for example, is that presently humankind use only 7,000 kinds of plant species for food, although there are at least 75,000 edible plants in existence, many that are potentially superior to the crop plants in widest use. Also, there are other thousands of species of bacteria, yeasts and other microorganisms that carry genetic information potentially capable of producing medicines that cure human and livestock diseases, substances for soil restoration, and new materials useful to mankind. See E. O. Wilson, “The Current State of Biodiversity” in E. O. Wilson, editor, Biodiversity (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1988), 10, 11, 13, and 15.

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•

The world’s freshwater resources are finite and rapidly shrinking as more crops need to be irrigated and world’s population increases;73

•

Today, 20% of the world’s population living in 30 or so of the wealthiest countries, consume 85% of the total annual output of the world’s production of goods and services.74The per capita impact for the world’s population is continuing to rise; it is not decreasing. For example, a First World citizen presently consumes ~30X more resources than a Third World citizen and produces ~30X more waste than do Third World citizens.75

•

While two billion of today’s population currently depend on the world’s fisheries for protein, the majority of the world’s fisheries have been seriously degraded or have already collapsed;76

73

Diamond, 490. For example, “only one-third of the water that annually runs into the sea is accessible to humans. Of this, more than half is already being appropriated and used….China, with 22 percent of the world’s population and only 6 percent of its fresh water, is [already] in serious trouble. See Marq de Villiers, Water: The Fate of our Most Precious Resource (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 24:5. “By the middle of this century, at worst, 7 billion people in 60 countries will be faced with water scarcity, and, at best, 2 billion in 48 countries, depending on factors like population growth and policy-making. Climate change will account for an estimated 20 per cent of this increase in global water scarcity.” See “Political Inertia Exacerbates Water Crisis, Says World Water Policies Report,” First UN System-Wide Evaluation of Global Water Resources (March 7, 2003) available at http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/pressrels/2003/sag119.html (accessed 05/13/05). 74

J. F. Rischard, High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them (New York, Basic Books, 2002), 8. 75

Diamond, 495. For example, “every year, 300 to 500 million tonnes of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes accumulate in water resources from industry. More than 80 per cent of the world’s hazardous waste is produced in the United States and other industrial countries.” See “Political Inertia Exacerbates Water Crisis, Says World Water Policies Report,” First UN System-Wide Evaluation of Global Water Resources (March 7, 2003) available at http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/pressrels/2003/sag119.html (accessed 05/13/05). 76

Diamond, 488. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA) report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations says “24 percent of the world’s fisheries are overexploited, depleted or in recovery from depletion. More than 50 percent are ‘fully exploited,’ or fished to their maximum capacity to replenish. The remaining 21 percent are ‘moderately exploited and could support modest increases in fishing and in harvests.’ ‘Stock depletion has implications for food security and economic policies, reduces social welfare in countries around the world and undermines the wellbeing of underwater ecosystems,’ said Ichiro Nomura, FAO assistant director general for fisheries.” See U.S. Department of State release available at http://usinfo.state.gov/gi/Archive/2005/Mar/08-613777.html (accessed 05/13/05).

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•

All these environmental stresses are creating the conditions for outbreaks of new disease organisms and pandemics in certain areas of the world.77

What is posited here is that the root of our ills is not the distortion of the relation between man and nature – the attempt to make ecology or environmental economics, or industrial ecology or even ‘sustainability’ return us to the Garden of Eden78 – but to acknowledge that the distortion is the relation between man and God.79 What should be perfectly clear from the above summary of the present environmental problems facing the earth and its human communities is that to date our institutions have failed to provide the stewardship and priestly oversight necessary to conserve and protect God’s very good creation. How we are presently living in community is nonsustainable and we need to make some immediate changes in how we live together. Also, not only has the Church failed in its mission to adequately promote Christian forms of living-in-theworld, but by default our State and colleges have failed to train the future leaders of the country in ways for its leadership to be part of a sustainable solution to the large scale problems facing humanity in the twenty-first century world.

Following this train of thought to its conclusion is the idea that however we have been making policy in the past, no matter how ‘successful’ this policy-making has been perceived to be, it may no longer adequate for the world we find ourselves in today. From this perspective, I am offering, as gift, some preliminary theological and political reflections on developing a theological hermeneutic (framework) for thinking about the nuclear security state, terrorism, and the problem of human evil. The purpose of this reconfiguring of our ways of thinking about these things is for 77

“The problems of failing states and the tremendous drain on resources in developing countries from AIDS and other pandemics, environmental stress, and corruption affect our ability to partner with allies and friends to meet humanitarian needs in the interest of promoting stability and democracy. This, in turn, poses challenges and requirements…germane to the suppression of terrorism and limiting the spread of WMD, delivery systems, and advanced conventional weapons.” See “Security Threats to the United States,” Thomas Fingar, Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research, Statement Before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington, DC (February 16, 2005) available at http://www.state.gov/s/inr/rls/42445.htm (accessed 05/13/05). 78

“The Recovery of Eden story is the mainstream narrative of Western culture. It is perhaps the most important mythology humans have developed to make sense of their relationship to the earth.” See Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 2. 79

See John Milbank, “Out of the Greenhouse” in John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 257-67.

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envisioning new means and invigorating tried and true means for making policy that the world needs today.

An Economy of Grace: Relinquishing the Nuclear Security State for the State of Grace What I have in mind is the last wilderness. I sweat to learn in heights of sun, scrub, ants its gashes full of shadows and odd plants, As inch by inch it yields to my hard pass. (Marie Ponset) 80

The Sustainable State as an Economy of Grace: Under this theological and political perspective of the State as an economy of grace, states are sustainable places where persons participate in learn about the world into which they are being called by God to contribute their talents, treasure, and time for the betterment of human kind. The assumption is that this learning will equip them to enter our businesses, hospitals, government offices, and courtrooms and become, over time, ministers of a sustainable way of being-in-the-world, carrying on a tradition of productive Christian fellowship and wealth creating of benefit to the community that has been ongoing for two millennia. One of the most important functions of the sustainable State as an economy of grace in today’s world, at least the world of 21st century America, may be to provide a space where Christian practices of being in relationship with God, with neighbor and with creation may be learned and

80

Verse is from the poem, “Explorers Cry Out Unheard” in Marie Ponset, The Bird Catcher (New York: Alfred Knoff, 1999), 65.

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shared.81 If this is a reasonable objective for today’s State, I would like to posit that the State of the South has as its primary goal to model the form of sustainable community where relationality with God, neighbor, and creation is expressed and opportunities to learn from this modeling are offered. What I am suggesting is that the theology experienced (not necessarily taught in classes) by college students at the State is a political theology. It is a political theology in that “it concerns how social relations should be ordered.”82 What I am further suggesting is that the sustainable practices we teach is primarily through modeling, in that it is lived out daily in Christian community where relationality with God, with neighbor, and with creation is practiced. Thus, the State as sustainable community and an economy of grace is primarily experienced not as a subject for “abstract intellectual discussion, but a way of living in which beliefs are embedded” in who we are and are becoming as a sustainable community.83 Also, by attempting to live in this fashion, and the State’s explicit demonstration of its belief in sustainable living in Christian community through its modeling behavior, this becoming of a sustainable economy of grace will be making a demonstrable commentary on the prevailing political and social practices of the communities and businesses that surround the State which are practicing other, non-sustainable ways of being-in-the-world.84 What will make our State a sustainable community and economy of grace? I would like to suggest that one approach to establishing our State as a sustainable economy of grace is for it to incorporate its operating activities into the economic Trinity where “dialogical fellowship of love

81

This relationality with God, with neighbor (the ‘other’), and with creation is really about relations of love and political freedom in that it acknowledges that “We are all in our lives intimately related with one another, that this relation is in part constitutive of what and who we are” and that this relationality is created foremost by our love. “Love is crucial because it directly opposes the picture of ourselves that we typically assume – that we are fundamentally autonomous, fundamentally independent, isolated monads who must work to be connected to anything outside ourselves.” “This openness towards others is [also] the core and primordial basis of what we call ‘politics,’ though our contemporary understanding of this term is so debased that it bears only the most attenuated connection to this deeper sense of politics” (Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, 8, 15-6). 82

Kathryn Tanner, “Trinity” in Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 319. 83

Tanner, “Trinity,” 319.

84

Ibid., 320.

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and mutual service” is raised up. 85 What that means in practice is that as a sustainable community we become “dedicated to… what Jesus was dedicated to in his relations with other people” as the primary form of relationality. Thus, this form of Christian sustainable being-in-the-world becomes the practice for living in community and models for students (and all members of the community) what being an economy of grace looks like on-the-ground. 86 If acknowledging the potential of living together as a sustainable economy of grace is a good idea and the form of this lived-out theology is Trinitarian in that we wish to model our community relationships after the life of Jesus, then we need to think through models of the atonement. I would like to recommend that we momentarily set aside current models of atonement such as: Abelard’s moral influence model, the Christus Victor model, Anselm’s vicarious satisfaction model, Athanasius’ penal substitution model, and the happy exchange model of Luther.87 Instead I propose that we use an incarnation atonement model where “Humanity is at one with the divine in Jesus – on the cross as everywhere else in Jesus’ life – and that is what is saving about it.”88 The idea behind this incarnation atonement model is to recover a grace-full “God who works unswervingly for our good, who puts no value in death and suffering, and no ultimate value on self-sacrifice for the good, a God-gift-giving abundance struggling against the forces of sin and death in the greatest possible solidarity with us – that of incarnation.”89 Thus, “Jesus is obedient to the mission of God, and that is a good thing, but that obedience is itself the result of the same saving [grace-filled] force of incarnation that accounts for what is saving about the cross.”90 Essentially, “The whole of Jesus’ life – before, as after his death – is such a life-giving

85

Ibid., 329.

86

Ibid., 331.

87

Tanner, “Incarnation, Cross, and Sacrifice,” 36.

88

Ibid., 43.

89

Ibid., 47.

90

Ibid., 47.

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sacrifice given by God for us to feed on, for our nourishment.”91 This presence of Jesus as model of relationality with God, with neighbor, and with creation then provides a realistic model for all of us living in an economy of grace to begin to learn and to express Christian practices whereby we offer [our selves] as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, [as our] spiritual worship (Rom. 12.1, NAB).

The Gift of Sacred Space Instead of the Policies of the Nuclear Security State: Is it possible to think about policy policies in grace-filled ways that are more useful than nonsustainable policies of the nuclear security state driven by utility 92 and dis-economics?93 I would like to suggest that by thinking about sustainable policies for human policies within the context of the State as an economy of grace, that it is possible to choose forms of human policies that are sustainable and that generate more wealth and greater increases of economic, social, cultural, and natural capital for the State. Used in appropriate grace-filled ways, sustainable policies can result in epiphanies of relationality with God, with neighbor, and with creation. Yet, used inappropriately for utilitarian purposes and dis-economic monetary gain that creates victims; in ways that distance us from God, from our neighbor and from creation, non-sustainable policies becomes just another form of illiberality with sinful and evil consequences as it “destroys communal bonds among the children of God.”94 I would like to begin by sketching a few propositions for thinking about sustainable policies of grace-filled sacred space, both of land and of buildings within the context of the State

91

Ibid., 56.

92

Utility, as a primary decision criteria for policies, “imposes the primacy of… success [measured in economic terms] as superior ways of being human, and the selfish and irresponsible enjoyment of life as an indisputable value.” See Jon Sobrino, Where is God? Earthquake, Terrorism, Barbarity, Hope trans. Margaret Wilde (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), ix. 93

‘Dis-economic’ refers to situations that seem attractive when analyzed from a project perspective, but actually do not create any wealth when analyzed from a systems perspective due to externalities and unaccounted for costs that the project view does not take into account. Most dis-economic activities stem from greed, ‘the rapacious desire for more goods or wealth than one needs or deserves.’ 94 Archbishop

Oscar Romero, Voice of the Voiceless: The Four Pastoral Letters and Other Statements (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), 133.

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as an economy of grace that is modeling Christian ways of being-in-the world as a means of uniquely fulfilling its educational mission. The idea of sacred space is something that comes up in almost all religions, in all times and cultures. When most people imagine sacred space, they think of a church or someplace that is beautiful. However, the idea of sacred space, at least in its Christian context, means much more; more than even someplace holy that exists in space and time. For example, I would like to discuss two different forms of sacred space that come up early in the Pentateuch. In Genesis 2:8, the Garden of Eden is the quintessential idea of sacred space. But the Garden of Eden is not only a holy place, set apart because God dwells there, but it is a model for how persons are to relate to God, to neighbor (other persons), and to God’s very good creation. The second example of sacred space is in Exodus 35-39 where God reveals to Moses plans to build a Tabernacle where God is will take up home with his covenanted people of Israel whom he has just liberated from slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt. One of the most important things about these two examples of sacred space in Christian Scripture is that the sacred space is not only holy in that God dwells in this space, but also this space is gifted by God95 unconditionally as a means to give persons a community with a certain shape.96 The shape of this community for which sacred space is a sign is an economy (Gk. oikonomiía, or ‘household management’) of grace. This economy of grace is a way of being-in-the-world where persons remember “God’s favor and all the ways God’s favor is expressed – in creating the world,” in creating all the creatures that inhabit this world including our selves, and for “forgiving and redeeming us” even as we sometimes turn away from God and follow our own desires rather than the desires of God.97 When we receive the Eucharist during the liturgy of the mass, for example, God creates sacred space within us as we participate in “the mutual giving of Jesus

The idea of ‘gift’ figures importantly in the New Testament as ‘to give’ (Gk. Diídoœmi) is used 416 times, one of the most frequently used verbs. See Risto Saarinen, God and the Gift: An Ecumenical Theology of Giving (Unitas; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005), 36. 95

96

Kathryn Tanner, “Economies of Grace” in Schweiker and Mathewes, 376.

97

Tanner, Economy of Grace, 5.

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and his Father [and we] have become part of a fellowship initiated and sustained by gift.” Participating in sacred space reminds us of God’s unmerited love and grace giving.98 With this background, what might we say concerning sacred space and how the State can participate in renovating, refurbishing and building space that is sacred as a means for modeling an economy of grace? Some propositions include the following: (1) God creates only sacred space in the world. 99 God is the creator of all of creation100 and loves the world.101 This means that her creation is ‘good’ and that “all things are consistent, justly ordered, and have integrity,” whether apparent to humankind or not, and “intrinsic worth apart from their utility.”102

98

Rowan Williams, Eucharistic Sacrifice – The Roots of a Metaphor (Liturgical Study #31; Nottingham: Grove Books, 1982), 29. 99

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. (Psalm 19:1-4, NRSV).

100

I am the LORD, who has made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself (Isa. 44:24). 101

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life (John 3:16). 102

Calvin B. Dewitt, “Behemoth and Batrachians in the Eye of God: Responsibility to Other Kinds in Biblical Perspective” in Christianity and Ecology, edited by Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary Radford Ruether (Athens: State of Georgia Press, 2002), 306. God’s absolute power over the kosmos (‘heaven and earth’ and ‘History’) comes from the fact that he is the Creator.

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(2) Only God can create (baœraœ}) 103 sacred space.104 “Neither the creation, nor any of her creatures belong to human beings, but to their Creator, who cares for all of it….they must be treated with respect and cared for.”105 (3) Human persons were created in God’s image (imago dei). Thus, human persons are both priests and stewards to God’s good creation, which is sacred.106 Because humankind is part of God’s creation, we do not stand apart and separate from ‘the environment’ but are part of God’s wholeness, along with the biosphere and the Earth. “The Lord God took humankind (adam) and put us in the Garden of Eden (‘the Earth’) to conserve it (ábad) and to keep it (shamar)” in all its vitality, energy and beauty (Gen. 2:15). As God keeps us, so should we keep God’s Earth.107 (4) Human persons, as God’s imago Dei, “have a special honor of imaging God’s love for the world.” Just as “every creature reflects back something of the love God pours out through all creation” humankind’s job is to conserve and keep the Earth.108 Human persons, as priests and stewards to God’s very good creation, are drawn toward developing spaces In Genesis, the term ‘created’ (baœra},Heb.; ktiísis, Gk.) means the dynamic bringing into existence of all there is by God. This is not a one-time act of origination, but a continual, ongoing succession of creative actions by the Creator. All of heaven and earth and all of history depends on God, is directed by Her, and owes Her obedience. Creation provides the setting for doing God’s will. 103

104

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (Genesis 1:1-5, NRSV). 105

Dewitt, 306.

106

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:27-28, NRSV). 107

Dewitt, 301-3, 307.

108

Dewitt, 307.

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that remember (anamnesis) and reflect (anaphora) God’s economy of grace. When human persons do a good job of this, the space can be described as sacred space.109 When human persons fail at this task, the space is profane (showing a contempt for God; unholy; to treat with irreverence). From these propositions, we can derive a few design principles for the built environment that reflect the State as a sustainable economy of grace: (1) All spaces built by the State for its use should remember and reflect God’s presence in this world. Thus, these spaces built by the State should be sacred, not profane.110 (2) Profane space increases only one or two forms of human capital that reflect God’s gift giving to his creation. Sacred space increases all four types of human capital: a. Economic capital is measured in economic terms based on life-cycle costs, not first order costs. These costs take into account the entire system of inputs and outputs from the policies so that all costs are factored into the economic analysis to determine if the policies, from a community-wide, systems perspective is sustainable and economically advantageous or disadvantageous. For example, LEED (Leading Energy Efficiency Design) standards are conceptually and programmatically just one means for assuring that one designs the lowest economic cost (i.e. produces the most economic capital) building given the purposes of the building over its expected lifetime.

109

“Most human beings are much more receptive to material forms than to ideas and material forms leave the deepest effect upon the human soul even beyond the mental plane.” See Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 255 quoted in Ellen F. Davis, “The Tabernacle is not a Storehouse: Building Sacred Space” (February 23, 2005), 4. 110

Places of worship are only one form of sacred “communicative and instructive, as well as decorative” space that is “wholly in harmony with God’s creative intention for the world.” The purpose of this form of sacred space is renew and to “shape the people who spend time there; to form them (us) as believers…. [to] contribute to our awareness of new possibilities for living in the presence and glory of God” (Davis, 3, 4, 8).

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b. Social capital is measured by the “capacity to generate social value like friendship, collegiality, trust, respect, and responsibility.”111 Social capital enables human persons to listen and learn from one another; to embrace the other rather than to exclude the other, for exclusion only leads to violence. c. Cultural capital is measured by the capacity to generate new ideas; ‘to inspire and be inspired’ to contribute one’s energy and creativity for the betterment of the community in which one lives. For without this aspect of sacred space, tired monotony, ossification, and stasis sets in and the civitas of common life together decays.112 d. Natural capital is measured in the policies’s support of sustainability. That is, its footprint (use of nonrenewable resources or destruction of renewable resources) is as close to zero as current technology and building methods enable.113 (3) Profane space disconnects us from God, from neighbor, and from creation. Sacred space reflects humankind’s informed trust in God as gift-giver, connecting us with God, with neighbor, with creation (the environment): a. Sacred space relocates the human self into a larger reality than one had before entering this space. Sacred space creates a “movement from a more constricting to a more freeing context…. We discover our unique place, the unique part we are set apart to play, in the story of Jesus, of being dislocated and relocated” in the space of God’s created world.114

111 Arjo

Klamer, “Property and Possession: The Moral Economy of Ownership,” in Schweiker and Mathewes, 343-5. 112

See David Hollenbach, S.J., The Common Good & Christian Ethics (New Studies in Christian Ethics; Cambridge: Cambridge State Press, 2002). 113

See Paul Hawkin, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (New York, Little Brown and Company, 1999). 114

David Willis, Clues to the Nicene Creed: A Brief Outline of the Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 30.

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b. Sacred space facilitates the human person in locating him/herself in the narrative of God’s people in history. c. Sacred space enables the human self to feel connected with other persons in his/ her relationality with God, with neighbor, and with creation and to acknowledge this relationality as gift.115

Sustainable Policies of Sacred Space as Part of the State’s Economy of Grace: Nonsustainable policies too often continues based on a non-Christian, humanocentric theology of utilitarianism116 that serves as a “moral framework for decision making” (70). 117 Utilitarianism is generally legitimized and sustained due to two factors: (a) a central myth of modernity that equates the telos of history as human progress caused by goods resulting from economic policies and technological innovation; and (b) the belief that the goods of human progress can be always justified as moral exclusively through self-reflective interiority and determined by human happiness measured in economic terms.118 Thus from the perspective of utilitarianism, “God is superfluous to the order of the material world” (57) as self-identity and worth is defined primarily by the unsustainable consumption of the goods of human progress and human-initiated policies “is but a false copy of the Body of Christ.”119

115

“In the history of God’s dealings with the world, which culminate in Christ, God is seeking in evermore perfect ways to communicate to what is not God the fullness of gift relations that constitutes the perfection of God’s own intra-Trinitarian life” (Tanner, “Trinity,” 361, 370-1). 116

‘Utilitarianism’ means the more human desires that can be met, the more moral good that has been created. Utilitarianism is the virtue of prudence turned into vice in that it places the utility of humankind as the center, and limits the freedom of God to be God. This view is Pelagian in that it denies that we are saved by God’s grace alone and makes God or human agency a utility. 117

Page numbers in parenthesis are from Michael S. Northcott, The Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge State Press, 2001). 118

This form of utilitarianism might be described as Gnostic Docetism.

119

William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 46. Often policies and its projected creation of economic capital are viewed as salvific. Yet, other forms of valued capital, such as natural, social, and cultural capital are destroyed in the process.

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Thus, when we use the grammar of ‘policies’ we are ultimately making a theological statement. I would like to introduce some discrimination in our theological grammar to improve our linguistic competency at speaking about and enacting a graced form of sustainable policies.120 I suggest that there are three-forms of policies: (1) greedy policies, (2) disproportionate policies, and (3) sustainable policies. Greedy policies are non-sustainable policies for exclusively utilitarian purposes. The world is viewed as nothing more than object to be ‘improved’ through autonomous human agency. And ‘improvements’ are measured by convenient economic metrics that tend to view what is really real as that which is reified and reduced to fit these metrics.121 However, the economic metrics used result in the fallacy of ‘misplaced concreteness’ where faulty cost accounting undervalues natural capital122 and fails to account for the destruction of social and cultural capital.123 Also, the non-sustainable policies project goes on with little or no intentionality for promoting relationality

120

What I am imagining are four potential areas of linguistic incompetence: (1) “a tendency to mis-speak: they may make statements whose well-formed character or Christian authenticity is a matter for dispute;” (2) “they may deploy well-formed Christian statements inappropriately;” (3) they may be unsure how to speak, how to continue the practice of Christian discourse, in strange or novel circumstances;” (4) “they may make Christian statements whose well-formed character is undisputed and yet fail to understand how those statements are compatible with one another….[This is] particularly acute when the statements in conflict lie at the core rather than the periphery of Christian belief.” See Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 16-8. 121

Economic metrics usually measure the creation of only ‘economic capital,’ which is the capacity to generate economic income or economic values. Oftentimes decision-makers end up making terrible decisions if they base them solely on economic measures, as economic measures alone do not take into account other, often more important measures of capital and wealth formation. 122

Natural capital are those naturally occurring inputs from the environment such as clean air, water, soil, healthy ecosystems, watersheds, wetlands, forests, knowable climate, etc. that if man had to provide these resources one his own, rather than imagine them as a given, would have very large attendant costs to provide, if that was even possible. 123

Social capital is the “capacity to generate social value like friendship, collegiality, trust, respect, and responsibility.” Cultural capital is the “capacity to inspire and be inspired.” Decision makers too often make decisions that increase economic capital while decreasing social and cultural capital, both of which are absolutely necessary for true wealth creation in the community that is sustainable. See Arjo Klamer, “Property and Possession: The Moral Economy of Ownership,” in Schweiker and Mathewes, 343-5.

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with God and neighbor, or with creation.124 As this form of non-sustainable policies, through its indiscriminate results creates victims, and its fruits are separation from God, from neighbor, and from creation, it is also probably immoral policy from a Christian perspective.

Disproportionate policies is non-sustainable policies that produces disproportionate damage to relationality with God, neighbor, or with creation commensurate with its economic benefits. If such policies continues, the moral presumption is that the developer had the intention to do harm as it failed to intend to avoid this disproportionate damage.125 The moral response should such disproportionate policies occur is that the decision makers involved be held financially responsible for restitution for community-wide damages where possible. Thus, it is appropriate to require large upfront surety or performance bonds from developers before policies starts where disproportionate policies may occur and damages result, to protect the citizens presently living in the community affected by such policies. Sustainable policies is policies that is undertaken that corresponds to what is purposed and what is purposed corresponds to a ‘descriptive’ responsibility of the decision makers to promote moral and sustainable policies that creates real net wealth for the community.126 The result of sustainable policies is that it is prejudicial in promoting relationality with God and neighbor, and with creation. This form of policies does not tend to create victims as both greedy and disproportion-

125

To prevent this form of disproportionate policies, I am advocating an ‘industrial ecology’ approach to decision-making about policies. This approach assumes that the proper economic view of any policies project is “not in isolation from its surrounding systems, but in concert with them…. Factors to be optimized [and accounted for] include resources, energy, and capital” not at the project level, but at the community-wide systems level. See T.E. Graedel and B.R. Allenby, Industrial Ecology, 2nd edition (Upper Saddle, NJ: Pearson Education, 2003), 18. 126

The neighborly goals of this form of moral, sustainable policies are, at a minimum, “Social relationships that enable and support active engagement with other persons, therefore, are constitutive of selfdetermination.” Thus, we often “face a choice between pursuing the good of social participation for all or accepting the evil that occurs when the strong dominate the weak or the privileged try to wall themselves off from the vulnerable” (Hollenbach, 77-8).

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ate policies does.127 Sustainable policies usually results in proportionate gains in Christian life in community and real wealth creation. 128

The State as an Economy of Grace: Modeling Decision-Making about Policy Formulation as Relationality with God, Neighbor and Creation: Policies rationales that serve to commoditize policies as an economic activity, as primary consideration, constitutes sin.129 It is a sin of self-deception in that too often we are merely exchanging one form of capital (e.g. social, cultural or natural capital) for economic capital with a loss of value. There is no net wealth creation from the perspective of the community (or system). This policies is unsustainable, because it creates no real net wealth in the community, but just transfers chips from one pile (the community’s) to another’s (the developer’s). The self-deception is that we forget that all we have, including our selves “is on loan or held in tenancy from God, who retains full possession… and whose purposes – the good of all – must therefore be served” if one is to remain in rightful relation with God.130 Remaining in right relation with God is developing in sustainable ways that create real net wealth for the community as measured with overall increases in economic, social, cultural, and natural capital. This is sustainable policies. Thus, from the perspective of God’s unconditional and unmerited giving to the world and to human selves, it is heretical for us to act as though economic capital alone is a God with sover-

127

Greedy and disproportionate policies often rationalizes the victimization that occurs by the heretical doctrine of temporal retribution that posits that since God’s rewards are always just, wealth is God’s reward. Thus the less well off, those who may suffer as a result of the policies is also God’s will, to punish the sinful. See Gustave Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. by Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987), 22. 128

These sections on forms of policies are adapted from Oliver O’Donovan, The Just War Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge State Press, 2003), 35, 44, 52. 129

This sin “is not just an error or the doing of certain prohibited actions, but…[the] attempt to overreach our power as creators. It is manifested in our pride and [self-autonomy], but its fundamental form is selfdeception.” See Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer on Christian Ethics, 2nd ed. (London: SCM Press, 2003), 46. 130

“In the history of God’s dealings with the world, which culminate in Christ, God is seeking in evermore perfect ways to communicate to what is not God the fullness of gift relations that constitutes the perfection of God’s own intra-Trinitarian life.” See Kathryn Tanner, “Economies of Grace,” in Schweiker and Mathewes, 361, 370-1.

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eignty over the Body of Christ. Instead economic capital must be viewed as only a one form of capital for building Christian communities; for establishing relationality with God, with neighbor, and with creation, which is the objective. If, as Christians, we succumb to the temptation of treating economic capital as sovereign, as an end in itself, we give up our ability to serve “the world by giving the world the means to see itself truthfully.”131 For economic capital alone is not a rational view of the telos (goal) of human agency, much less human relationality “that reflects the character of God’s own giving.”132 As Christians, we cannot “surrender [this] claim” to the kingdom of God and “simply be about the way the world is, which includes what we have learned to call” the economical.133 Economic analysis has a roll to play in all decision-making concerning sustainable policies. What is important is to not lose an “attitude of [Christian] love, hope, reverence, and thankfulness” where trust in God is evident.134 For economic analysis is not only merely a tool. It is also “a fundamental statement about morality” in that “factors that cannot be quantified are, in practice, simply often not included in the analysis.”135 Thus, what must precede the use of the tools of economic analysis is addressing the moral questions: is this a policies worthy of a State that values its reputation and one that wishes to model healthy as opposed to toxic leadership? Does this project create victims or liberate persons to be in relation with God? Does this project engender greater relationality with our neighbors? Does this project open up the possibilities for greater relationality with creation? Is this policies sustainable in that it creates real net wealth for the community by increasing economic, social, cultural, and natural capital? If not, this project is

131

Christians “must learn time and time again that [our] task is not to make the world the kingdom, but to be faithful to the kingdom by showing to the world what it means to be a community” that remembers Christ’s cross and resurrection (Hauerwas 2003, 101-3). 132

Tanner, “Trinity,” 371.

133

Cavanaugh, 4.

134

Instead of the question being what do I need or what can I get out of this non-sustainable policies or what profits can my organization achieve, the central question shifts. “The question becomes what do my neighbors need?... How may I honor and sustain rather than destroy other people and this creation of which I am a part?” How can we create real wealth for the entire community we are a part? What we need is sustainable policies. See David H. Smith and Timothy Sedwick, “Theological Perspectives” in David H. Smith and Cynthia B. Cohen, eds., A Christian Response to the New Genetics: Religious, Ethical and Social Issues (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2003), 5. 135

Graedel and Allenby, 86-7.

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probably immoral; it is not appropriately Christian to entertain this project, irrespective of potential for monetary gain. As a sustainable economy of grace, the State’s mission is to make decisions that are both Christian and sustainable. Our job as members of the State’s sustainable economy of grace is to promote sustainable policies that creates real wealth for the entire community; wealth that is measured not just in economic terms but also in our relationality with God, with neighbor, and with creation; policies that promotes Christian community; policies that reflects the State as a sustainable economy of grace. At the very least, those of us who count ourselves as members of the community comprising the State’s sustainable economy of grace, we are called to question and reject non-sustainable policies based on an embedded non-Christian theology of utilitarianism where economics displaces rational discourse about what is right and moral and Christian and consideration of effects on social, cultural, and natural capital. For graced sustainable policies has the potential to create real net wealth for the community without destroying the God-given natural capital and social and cultural capital persons need to sustain a good life. Just as “distortion, slanting of facts, misrepresentation of issues” are all “forms of deception that are prohibited” by Christian ethics because it breaks the bonds of relationship with God, with our neighbor and with God’s very good creation, “the community is reminded that [policies] is not by any right at all but by God’s gift and God’s providence.”136 To be Christian, to be in relation with God, with neighbor, and with creation is to develop God’s very good creation in sustainable ways within an economy of grace. It is to be hoped that this discussion has provided some food-for-thought concerning how sustainable policies may be approached when the State is thought of as an economy of grace that creates real wealth for the community rather than fleeting one time monetary gains that turn out to be dis-economic. My hope is to generate dialogue about a range of creative ideas for protecting and building the State’s reputation for leadership through encouraging sustainable policies that is conducive to enhancing the living experience for all members of the State community and engender truly inclusive and respectful dialogue with all members of the State community in any decision-making process the State engages in related to policies necessary for it to carryon its primary mission of educating for Christian leadership for a 21st century world.

136

Often “those ‘goods’ that one believes one has some claim over,” actually have “become the primary center of meaning and value in life, the ultimate value and thus the claim that has the force of” a false god. See Patrick D. Miller, “Property and Possession in Light of the Ten Commandments” in Schweiker and Mathewes, 27, 39.

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