Taking Time to Remember Lent

Joseph is practicing the rough art of statecraft, testing the suppliants who have come to him for food.  But he is also toying with his brothers, secretly working revenge on them by keeping them in suspense and letting them experience the danger of being before him.

By contrast, Paul continues his rigorous instructions to the Corinthian Christian community.  He makes a sharp contrast between those inside the church community who are held to a higher moral expectation and those outside the church.  He urges this because of a more radical ethic, the church will do well to maintain its own discipline.

The juxtaposition of these texts poses the difficult question of the relationship between a public ethic that governs both the state and the corporate world, and a more intense ethic that guides the church.  On the other hand, Reinhold Niebuhr has famously allowed that much more latitude is to be recognized in the pubic domain, as public affairs require greater "realism" about issues of justice, unlike the church, with its more insistent requirements of mercy and compassion.  on the other hand Stanley Hauerwas[*] more recently, in a sustained appeal to the "peace church" tradition, refuses such a sharp distinction and expects more in the public sphere.

This is an issue in which Christians must be engaged, especially since our public economy has largely been taken over by an oligarchy of wealth that skews all social relationships and that readily leaves behind those it judges to be disposable.  Paul seems to want an exclusive focus on the church.  In our time we might do well to require more of the state and the world of corporations. 

I take this from Thought Criminal, and because it prompts me to rise up (slightly) in defense of Niebuhr, because it's easy to over simplify someone's work, and thereby distort it.  I'm not as familiar with Hauerwas, but what I am familiar with I'm not as impressed by as Niebuhr's thought.  Take that for what it's worth.

Brueggemann is referencing Moral Man and Immoral Society, but let's not go directly there.  Rather, we'll work back toward it from Niebuhr's later works, like this one:

A further consequence of modern optimism is a philosophy of history expressed in the idea of progress. Either by a force immanent in nature itself, or by the gradual extension of rationality, or by the elimination of specific sources of evil, such as priesthoods, tyrannical government and class divisions in society, modern man [sic] expects to move toward some kind of perfect society. The idea of progress is compounded of many elements. It is particularly important to consider one element of which modern culture is itself completely oblivious. The idea of progress is possible only upon the ground of a Christian culture. It is a secularized version of Biblical apocalypse and of the Hebraic sense of a meaningful history, in contrast to the meaningless history of the Greeks. But since the Christian doctrine of the sinfulness of man [sic] is eliminated, a complicating factor in the Christian philosophy is removed and the way is open for simple interpretations of history, which relate historical process as closely as possible to biological process and which fail to do justice either to the unique freedom of man or to the daemonic misuse which he may make of that freedom.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Intepretation, Vol. I (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press 1996), p. 24

There's quite a bit of room there for engaging the world and acting as a Christian in the "public sphere."  In fact, Niebuhr's argument is that the whole idea of "progress" is a Christian one, so the question of engaging in the public sphere is one of degree, not of engagement v. disengagement.   I would bring in Merton here, too, to argue that even the seeming disengagement of the cloistered is actually an engagement with the world.

The contemplative life is not, and cannot be, a mere withdrawal, a pure negation, a turning of one’s back on the world with its sufferings, its crises, its confusions and its errors … The monastic community is deeply implicated, for better or for worse, in the economic, political, and social structures of the contemporary world. To forget or to ignore this does not absolve the monk from responsibility for participation in events in which his very silence and ‘not knowing’ may constitute a form of complicity.

....

  ‘The monk is essentially someone who takes up a critical attitude toward the world and its structures,’ he remarked, ‘somebody who says, in one way or another, that the claims of the world are fraudulent.’

I'm not picking on Brueggemann, I'm trying to open up the discussion.  You can't disgengage from the world while calling its claims fraudulent (as Brueggemann often does).  But neither can you rest your argument (pace, Walter), on a claim that Niebuhr clove Christian morality from Christian engagement with the world.  Most of Niebuhr's insights, in fact, were, as that quoted passage above indicates, based on understanding the nature of sin in humanity.  He brought the world and religious thought together quite often:

Democracy has a more compelling justification and requires a more realistic vindication than is given it by the liberal culture with which it has been associated in modern history. The excessively optimistic estimates of human nature and history with which the democratic credo is linked are a source of peril to democratic society, for our contemporary experience refutes this optimism and there is danger that it will seem to refute the democratic ideal as well. Modern democracy requires a more realistic philosophical and religious basis.

What Niebuhr taught is called "Christian Realism."  This is a fair summation of what that means:

Niebuhr came to use the name "Christian Realism" for this attentiveness all of the realities at work in social change and conflict. The Christian Realist begins, as Moral Man and Immoral Society suggests, with political realism, identifying the forms of economic and political power at work in history: The majority use the power of numbers to press their claims for a more egalitarian justice against those whose privileged positions rest on the power of wealth. The wealthy respond with their own claims to a just reward for the resources they make available to the whole society. In this, they always claim more reward than strict justice requires, but their adversaries concede them less than they deserve. A realist expects no final resolution to these conflicts, but a stable society must establish a work equilibrium between the claims of liberty and equality, freedom and order, or need and merit.

Robin W. Lovin, Introduction, Nature and Destiny of Man, pp. xii-xiii.

I highlighted two sentences there to focus on the nature of justice, which in the world is always connected with power.  That is a connection Neibuhr would have us always keep in mind.  Consider that passage a prelude to this longer passage from another of Niebuhr's works:

The liberal culture has been informed by similar hopes since the eighteenth century. It has been as impatient as Marxism with the seeming limitations of human wisdom in discerning the total pattern of destiny in which human actions take place, and the failure of human power to bring the total pattern under the dominion of the human will. "If man can predict with almost complete certainty," asked Condorcet, "the phenomena of which he knows the laws, if...from the experience of the past he can forecast with such probability the events of the future, why should one regard it is a chimerical undertaking to trace with some likeness the future destiny of the human species in accordance with the facts of history?" Condorcet was not only certain the future could be known but that he knew it. "Our hopes for the future state of the human species," he continued, "may be reduced to three important points: the destruction of inequality between nations, the progress of equality among the common people, and the growth of man toward perfection" required no more than that "the vast distance which divides the most enlightened people...such as the French and the Anglo-Americans" from those people who are "in servitude to kings" should "gradually disappear."

Obviously the idea of the abolition of the institution of monarchy as the most important strategy for the redemption of mankind was characteristic of the peculiar prejudices of middle-class life as the idea of the abolition of the institution of property was of the unique viewpoint of the propertyless proletariat. In each case they identified all evil with the type of power from which they suffered and which they did not control; and they regarded particular sources of particular social evils as the final source of all evil in history. Neither Condorcet, nor Comte in his subsequent elaborations of similar hopes, placed all their trust in this single strategy. The liberal world has always oscillated between the hope of creating perfect men by eliminating the sources of social evil and the hope of so purifying human "reason" by educational techniques that all social institutions would gradually become the bearers of a universal human will, informed by a universal human mind. These ambiguities, which have saved the Messianic dreams of the liberal culture from breeding the cruelties of communism, must be considered more fully presently. At the moment it is worth recording that the Frenchman, Condorcet, envisaged the French and the "Anglo-Americans" as the Messianic nations. Here we have in embryo what has become the ironic situation of our own day. The French Enlightenment consistently saw the American Revolution and the founding of the new American nation as a harbinger of the perfect world which was in the making. Though Comte, almost a century later, rigorously clung to the idea of French hegemony in the coming utopia and fondly hoped that French would be its universal language, France has fallen by the wayside as a nation with a Messianic consciousness, its present mood being characterized by extreme skepticism rather than apocalyptic hopes.

--Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1952), pp. 66-68.

The highlighted sentence is a point Niebuhr made quite often:  that ethics in the world usually serves power; those who have it, or those who want it.  In doing so, it usually ignores what is being done by the powerful to the powerless; and so ethics is almost always identified with the powerful and their interests.  What I want is right, and I will do right when I have the power to remove evil from the world.  But evil, and my evil?

This is where I would return to the key insight from Moral Man:  that ethics, rather as Sartre would say 30 years later, is a choice; but it is the choice of an individual. I can choose to be ethical for myself; but can I make an ethical decision for others?  If I choose to ethically decide to make myself a martyr for a cause, for example, what choice have I made for my family?  If my choice leaves my family exposed to the vicissitudes of society, perhaps without a source of income, my children without a father, my spouse without a husband, is that an ethical decision, or a selfish one?  After all, death relieves me of a great many responsibilities, and shifts them to others rather decisively.  Is that ethical?  Likewise, can I choose for society how it will conducts its affairs?  I may refuse violence and not defend myself against the violent; should I do the same thing for my family, as a husband, as a father?  Should I do the same thing for the country?  Should a pacifist President refuse to respond to violent attacks on the nation because of his ethical beliefs?  Again, is it ethical to decide for others what their ethic will be?

Niebuhr didn't say "No matter, never mind, nothing we as Christians can do."  He did argue that we first check our arrogance, our self-interest, our self-involvement, because that is ever with us.  It is, I think the lesson of the Scriptures.  Brueggemann references the story of Joseph and the writings of Paul; but context is everything.  Joseph's story takes place among and in the community of the children of Abraham, in the context of the covenant with the God of Abraham to which they are inheritors.  Paul's letter is to Gentiles acting as a "house church," in the very particular context of what we today would call an "extended family," although the house church here would included blood relatives and those made by marriage, as well as slaves serving the family (a radical idea indeed.  Even the rosy life of "Downton Abbey" never went so far.  Servants always knew their place, and it wasn't as equals to the master or the family.).  In both contexts, what is ethical is limited to a circumscribed set of people.  We distort those stories by assuming the world as we know it was the world as they knew it.  Our world is not their world, our culture not their cultures.  Again, self-interest and arrogance lead us to believe we know all we need to know; when humility would be the better approach to any such questions.  Should we, as Christians, be engaged in the world?  How can we not be?  What should be the nature of our engagement?  First, with humility; we are called to be last of all and servants of all.  We speak for ourselves, not as head of the household.  We may bear witness to the sins of the world; but that doesn't excuse our sins.

I am being quite unfair to the work of Stanley Hauerwas, even as I admit what of it I have read does not persuade me to read more.  As I say, I'm really just trying to continue the conversation.  Let it be unto you according to your faith.