"Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed."
One of my favorite courses in seminary was Christian Ethics. Taught by an earnest young Yale PhD, the syllabus dragged our little group of overage misfits in the Nondegree Theological Studies Program through everything from Kant's deontological ethics to Father Berrigan's militant pacificism, to Bentham's utilitarian ethic and half a dozen others over the course of the semester. It was great stuff, requiring deep thought and reflection on the values that underpin not only our individual lives but society as a whole. What a gift to spend an entire semester reading and writing and debating on the nature of good and evil, the nature of man, and how one builds a rubric for living.
One thing that came to the fore fairly quickly was that, no matter what your dimwitted evangelical friends tell you, there's no ready answer in the Bible, that Rorschach Test of scribblings compiled over centuries by writers with a gift for contradicting one another. Whatever you want to do with a given dilemma, I'll find you a verse to justify it. Which is why an ambitious adult Sunday School teacher might cobble together a syllabus on Christian ethics that would blow their minds at 9 a.m. on a Sunday. Too bad that after a couple weeks of grappling with difficult, complicated ethical issues, he or she would likely end up drinking coffee in an empty classrooom.
I thought of those days studying ethics while watching events unfold in Israel and Gaza this week. The images are horrifying, the barbarism of the Hamas terrorists (the right word here--their goal was to sow terror among Israelis, and beyond) simply staggering. Those folks have always had a weakness for murdering and raping civilians, and avoiding anyone who might shoot back--the Arab world hasn't produced a decent soldier since Saladin, and he was a Kurd.
But the response of the Israelis also makes me squirm. You killed our wives and children, so here we come for yours. My fundie friends here would approve of that response. My fundie friends are, however, simpletons.
Another group of simpletons are the idiotic college students holding vigils for Hama and their Palestinian constituents/hostages, blaming Israel simply for existing. Obviously they've stopped teaching ethics in our universities, and obviously you don't need to be terribly smart to attend one.
Not that I have any answers. But I did think at about 4 a.m., watching a tremendous thunderstorm outside the condo while P slept blissfully, that one Christian ethicist might bring us some principles for this moment. I'm thinking of Reinhold Niebuhr.
Niebuhr was a preacher, scholar, and Christian thinker whose realist ethic dominated the Cold War era. If you've ever seen the Serenity Prayer on a coffee mug or heard it invoked at a Twelve-Step meeting, you know him.
He started life with a socialist, utopian bent, but with the coming of the Second World War saw a transformation in his thinking on ethics. That's one thing I've always liked about him--he was willing to weigh the evidence over a lifetime, and change his mind based on what he observed. He saw Christian idealists who preached pacifism as a response to Hitler and Tojo as naiive, thought utopian ideas about the perfectibility of man required closing one's eyes to human nature. Niebuhr was a pessimist, and his realist ethic flowed from notions of original sin straight from Augustine and Calvin.
So how then are we to live in a world where humanity is both made in God's image and debased? Niebuhr preached that we should advance Christian principles in our culture, including eschewing the use of force except when necessary, but not hesitate to use force, even nuclear weapons, to protect our society. This made him pretty popular with U.S. foreign policy leaders from Kennan to Kissinger. This notion of defending ourselves out of necessity had its limits, however--Niebuhr may have created an ethic that made room for a robust defense against Soviet communism, but he was also an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War.
What would Niebuhr have made of this past week? The atrocities perpetrated by Hamas should be called out as such, and Israel has no obligation to turn the other cheek, no matter how one spins the Gospel. To turn their cheek is to cease to exist at some point, given that they're surrounded by countries populated with lots of people who'd just as well Israel be erased from the map.
But to say Israel has a right to defend itself doesn't open the door to eye-for-eye vengeance, which the Gospels also teach leads to an endless cycle of violence (although, in fairness to the Judaic rule to that effect, it was really meant to impose a measure of proportionality to retribution, rather than mandating that one avail one's self of that option), would likely have been seen as repellant by Niebuhr. He warned throughout his life about sins of pride and triumphalism, and saw moments such as this, where a society is forced to wreak violence on a neighbor, as debasing even as it may be necessary.
I doubt Neibuhr would've thought much of this morning's images of Gaza as a pile of rubble and graying corpses. At some point that ceases to look like defense, and starts looking more like pure revenge driven by rage and grief. We're better than that; Israel is better than that. Should it be impossible ever again to cross from Gaza to Israel? Perhaps. Should Israel aggressively prevent offensive weapons from crossing into Gaza, even if it means violating the sovereignty of its neighbors? A closer call, but probably so. If it turns out that, as seems likely, Iran was behind the whole disaster, would Israel be justified in taking military action against that den of vipers? The lawyer in me says "it depends"--again, fighting is sometimes a matter of necessity, and when that necessity is imposed we're bound to apply a proportionality that limits the harm to others, particularly civilians caught in the middle. There may be a way to deal with Iran with ethical violence (I wince at the contradiction, but that contradiction was where Niebuhr spent his intellectual life), but it should be delivered once the blood cools and the old prefrontal cortex can push back against the amygdala. Those women, babies, and young folks at the music festival are dead. We can't do anything for them now. But we can certainly demean ourselves, and play into the bad guys' narrative in the process, by lashing out in anger.
And yes, you Ivy League pinheads, there are in fact "bad guys" in the world. Niebuhr reminded us of that, and of how to respond so we don't end up just like them.
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