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    Jesus v. Abortion: They Know Not What They Do
    Jesus v. Abortion: They Know Not What They Do
    Jesus v. Abortion: They Know Not What They Do
    Ebook566 pages5 hours

    Jesus v. Abortion: They Know Not What They Do

    By Charles K. Bellinger

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    There are three main positions that people adopt within the abortion debate: pro-life, muddled middle, and pro-choice. Jesus v. Abortion critiques the pro-choice and muddled middle positions, employing several unusual angles:

    (1) The question "What would Jesus say about abortion if he were here today?" is given very substantial treatment.

    (2) The abortion debate is usually conducted using moral and metaphysical arguments; this book adds in anthropological insights regarding the function of violence in human culture.

    (3) Rights language is employed by both sides of the debate, to opposite ends; this book leads the reader to ask deep questions about the concept of "rights."

    (4) The use of historical analogies in the abortion debate goes both directions, in the sense that both sides accuse the other of being similar to the defenders of slavery; this book contains what is probably the most sophisticated and sustained analysis of the meaning and legitimacy of such analogies.

    (5) Many important thinkers are brought into this conversation, such as Soren Kierkegaard, Eric Voegelin, Julien Benda, Simone Weil, Kenneth Burke, Richard Weaver, Rene Girard, Philip Rieff, Giorgio Agamben, Chantal Delsol, Paul Kahn, and David Bentley Hart.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCascade Books
    Release dateJun 16, 2016
    ISBN9781498235068
    Jesus v. Abortion: They Know Not What They Do
    Author

    Charles K. Bellinger

    Charles K. Bellinger is professor of theology and ethics at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University. He is the author of The Genealogy of Violence (2001), The Trinitarian Self (2008), and Othering: The Original Sin of Humanity (2020).

    Read more from Charles K. Bellinger

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      Jesus v. Abortion - Charles K. Bellinger

      Table of Contents

      Acknowledgments

      Introduction: The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him

      Part One: Understanding Violence (and Human Rights)

      Chapter 1: Why Are Human Beings Violent?

      Chapter 2: They hated me without a cause

      Chapter 3: If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself

      Chapter 4: You shall love God . . . and your neighbor as yourself

      Part Two: Arguments: Superficial and Deep

      Chapter 5: Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor?

      Chapter 6: Those who want to save their life will lose it

      Chapter 7: Whoever welcomes one such child

      Chapter 8: Will he find faith on the earth?

      Chapter 9: I desire mercy, not sacrifice

      Chapter 10: Why do you not notice the log in your own eye?

      Part Three: Historical Reenactments

      Chapter 11: The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them

      Chapter 12: I have the power to crucify you

      Chapter 13: Many gave false testimony

      Chapter 14: All who do evil hate the light

      Chapter 15: You are descendants of those who murdered the prophets

      Chapter 16: We would not have taken part with them

      Chapter 17: The blood of all the prophets will be charged against this generation

      Chapter 18: Whoever is not against us is for us

      Part Four: The Way Forward

      Chapter 19: There was a man who had two sons

      Chapter 20: You must be born again

      Chapter 21: Be wise as serpents, but gentle as doves

      Bibliography

      9781498235051.kindle.jpg

      Theopolitical Visions

      series editors:

      Thomas Heilke

      D. Stephen Long

      and C. C. Pecknold

      Theopolitical Visions seeks to open up new vistas on public life, hosting fresh conversations between theology and political theory. This series assembles writers who wish to revive theopolitical imagination for the sake of our common good.

      Theopolitical Visions hopes to re-source modern imaginations with those ancient traditions in which political theorists were often also theologians. Whether it was Jeremiah’s prophetic vision of exiles seeking the peace of the city, Plato’s illuminations on piety and the civic virtues in the Republic, St. Paul’s call to a common life worthy of the Gospel, St. Augustine’s beatific vision of the City of God, or the gothic heights of medieval political theology, much of Western thought has found it necessary to think theologically about politics, and to think politically about theology. This series is founded in the hope that the renewal of such mutual illumination might make a genuine contribution to the peace of our cities.

      forthcoming volumes:

      David Deane

      The Matter of the Spirit: How Soteriology Shapes the Moral Life

      Jesus v. Abortion

      They Know Not What They Do

      Charles K. Bellinger
      24728.png

      JESUS V. ABORTION

      They Know Not What They Do

      Theopolitical Visions

      19

      Copyright ©

      2016

      Charles K. Bellinger. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      , Eugene, OR

      97401

      .

      Cascade Books

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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      8

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      paperback isbn 13: 978-1-4982-3505-1

      hardcover isbn 13: 978-1-4982-3507-5

      ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-3506-8

      Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

      Names: Bellinger, Charles K.,

      1962–

      Title: Jesus v. abortion : they know not what they do / Charles K. Bellinger.

      Description: Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications,

      2016

      | Series: Theopolitical Visions | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers:

      isbn 978-1-4982-3505-1 (

      paperback

      ) | isbn 978-1-4982-3507-5 (

      hardcover

      ) | isbn 978-1-4982-3506-8 (

      ebook

      )

      Subjects: LCSH: Abortion—Religious aspects. | Theological anthropology—Christianity.

      Classification:

      HQ767.5.U5 B47 2016

      (print)

      | HQ767.5.U5

      (ebook)

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      All Bible quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version ©

      1989

      , Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.

      Photograph on page

      297

      is taken from Won by Love, by Norma McCorvey Copyright ©

      1997

      by Norma McCorvey. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson. www.thomasnelson.com. All rights reserved.

      For my nieces and nephews: Eric and Emily, Caitlin, Aalin, and Aidan

      God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

      —John 3:17

      Does the idea of the unconscious belong to the Gospels? . . . The sentence that defines the unconscious persecutor lies at the very heart of the Passion story in the Gospel of Luke: Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing (Luke

      23

      :

      34

      ). . . . In this passage we are given the first definition of the unconscious in human history, that from which all the others originate and develop in weaker form.

      —René Girard, The Scapegoat, 110–11

      This is our first task, caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how as a society we will be judged.

      —President Barack Obama, commenting on the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting

      Acknowledgments

      The following persons provided helpful feedback during the writing of this book: Joshua Whitfield, Bernadette Waterman Ward, Timothy Perkins, Scott Cowdell, Frank Beckwith, Richard Weikart, Richard Enos, Ann George, John Harris, and Thomas Heilke. This should not be interpreted to mean that these persons endorse each of the arguments contained herein, nor that they are responsible for the many deficiencies that remain. My colleagues in the University Faculty for Life group have provided insightful feedback on my conference papers. I also thank my students at Brite Divinity School and Texas Christian University, who have encountered some of these ideas in various settings and offered helpful responses.

      Introduction

      The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him

      When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.

      —Luke 4:16–22

      If one surveys the literature on the abortion debate that has been published over roughly the last fifty years, one does not find that the eyes of all are fixed on him. Jesus of Nazareth is not looked to as a source of moral guidance on this contentious problem. Pro-choice advocates, as one would expect, are the least likely to connect religious ideas or figures with the abortion debate. The standard philosophical books arguing for the pro-choice position make no reference to Jesus. Scotty McLennan’s Jesus Was a Liberal contains a chapter on abortion, which might seem to be a break with this pattern. However, the chapter makes its pro-choice case without the slightest attempt to connect the argument with the teachings of Jesus.¹ Richard Hays’s major work The Moral Vision of the New Testament has a chapter on abortion, which is pro-life in its leaning, though it also works with the assumption that abortion is not addressed explicitly by any New Testament texts at all.² Muddled middle voices, who say I personally believe that abortion is morally wrong, but I think it should be legal, may have a notion that their personal beliefs draw on the Bible, but their views on the morality and legality of abortion typically leave any connection with Jesus unarticulated. Pro-life advocates are often conservative Christians, but the most highly educated and philosophically inclined among them usually avoid making religious arguments, just as pro-choice advocates do. These pro-life advocates seek to make strictly secular arguments that will hopefully persuade pro-choice advocates to abandon their position, using only the tools of rational discourse. Francis Beckwith’s Defending Life and Christopher Kaczor’s The Ethics of Abortion both make pro-life arguments while avoiding the employment of religious ideas.³ In his attempt to find common ground in the debate, Charles Camosy articulates a moderate pro-life position, saying that the Bible is silent on abortion and that his argument is capable (at least in principle) of convincing those of any faith or no faith.⁴ Andrew Fiala sums up this agreement across ideological divides when he says that the most important aspect of the abortion debate is the ontological and moral status of the fetus. But Jesus really has nothing to tell us about this issue, which is why we need to go beyond Jesus and use reason to think critically about this complicated issue.⁵

      Abortion is a global phenomenon, and the debate takes different forms in different societies. In the American context, with which I am most familiar, this tacit agreement to avoid referring to the Bible can, at least in a vague sense, be traced back to the aftermath of the American Civil War, which produced what historian Mark Noll has described as an implicit national agreement not to base public policy of any consequence on interpretation of Scripture.⁶ The fact that both abolitionists and defenders of slavery quoted Scripture to make their case led to the discrediting of the Bible as a voice in public debates.

      Shifting gears somewhat, while remaining in the mode of broad generalizations, we can note that the question—Why are human beings violent?—when it is asked, is also answered without attention to Jesus of Nazareth. Various scholars have presented their theories on this question, such as Ernest Becker’s claim that the fear of death is the mainspring of human behavior, or Alice Miller’s assertion that bad parenting practices are at the root of violence, or Carl Jung’s account of shadow projection.⁷ I believe, as my reader will have guessed, that we ought to ask about the roots of violent behavior and we ought to think about the abortion debate while looking to Jesus as a moral teacher. I can imagine a pro-choice reader responding to this by objecting most strenuously to the idea that the practice of abortion should be viewed as a form of violence. Such a reader, however, will have to respond not just to me but also to Lloyd Steffen, a pro-choice philosopher, and Dr. Lisa Harris, who performs abortions. Steffen says, Abortion involves a direct and willful killing of a developing form of human life.⁸ Harris says, In general feminism is a peaceful movement. It does not condone violent problem-solving, and opposes war and capital punishment. But abortion is a version of violence. What do we do with that contradiction?⁹ Further, pro-choice authors, such as Steffen and Chloe Breyer, have quite directly argued that the practice of abortion should be philosophically defended using the tools of just war theory.¹⁰ Naomi Wolf provided a notably ambiguous defense of abortion, as a moral tragedy that calls for rituals of atonement, in her widely read essay Our Bodies, Our Souls. Sallie Tisdale, a pro-choice nurse, writes, Done as well as it can be, [abortion] is still violence—merciful violence, like putting a suffering animal to death.¹¹ This acknowledgment that abortion is a form of violence because it is the intentional ending of human lives forces pro-choice advocates into a corner in which they must argue that it is justified violence. It is an evil, but a lesser evil than the perceived alternatives available in a particular situation. My argument in this book is that if we take Jesus seriously, then our thinking about the justifications offered for violence will change—quite radically.

      My contention, that we should think about abortion in relation to the teachings and life of Jesus of Nazareth, has a strong cultural wind blowing against it. It is common for people to say that in a modern, pluralistic society (which carves out the maximum possible liberty for individuals to live their lives according to their own consciences) those who have a spiritual worldview should accept a regime of privatized religion. It is perfectly acceptable, this line of thought holds, for people to be Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hare Krishnas, or whatever they prefer, and it is even acceptable for them to proselytize, seeking converts. What is not acceptable, however, is any attempt to argue that a certain action, such as abortion, should be illegal because it is against the will of God, or is in opposition to the official teachings of a particular religious body. Political philosopher John Rawls argues this case with particular force; in doing so he brings into articulation a widely held opinion in the modern West, that there needs to be a wall of separation between religion and politics.¹²

      In this book I explain why I try not to let myself be buffeted by this cultural wind, along two main lines of response that work on the conscious and the subconscious levels. On the conscious level, I argue that there is a deep contradiction in the privatization of religion regime. In the name of pluralism, pluralism is negated. The demand that all must secularize themselves in order to be admitted to the field of public discussion is, ironically, a (soft totalitarian) imposition of one privileged philosophical idea. To enter into public debate on an issue such as abortion, religious persons are forced to bracket to one side their religious beliefs, as if those beliefs were a hat that they can put on and take off at will. This does not recognize that people’s religious beliefs are the deepest core of their interpretation of reality and the source of their moral guidance for inhabiting the world and interacting with others. On the subconscious level, the pushback against the prohibition of religious arguments becomes even stronger. By subconscious I mean that one can apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to the pro-choice way of thinking. In the wake of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, it is a commonly accepted practice to probe beneath the behaviors of human beings to find hidden, suppressed, or unarticulated motives at work. Why couldn’t one do the same thing from a point of view shaped by the Bible? What if Jesus reveals to us our true motives?

      A hermeneutic of suspicion allows us to speculate that when people say that their way of thinking is secular they may be mistaken. Secular persons may zealously use, for example, the language of rights and victimization, and claim to be on the correct side of moral progress in history, without realizing that sensitivity to victimage, rights language, and ideas of progress show the impact of biblical ideas on Western culture. Their deepest philosophical motives thus come from a source that they are unaware of, a source that is theological. When we distinguish, however, between the ideas that a person employs as rhetorical tools and the motives that lead to lethal actions that end human lives, then the inquiry turns much darker. When we focus our attention on the pervasive violence of the ancient world, and note the prophetic strand of the Bible that critiques idolatry and human sacrifice, then actions that are considered normal in modern culture can be interpreted as a (religious) revival of the ancient practice of child sacrifice. Thus, when people today claim to be secular they are not speaking truthfully; secularity is an optical illusion. We moderns are just as religious as people in the ancient world were; the only difference is that they were consciously aware that their actions had a spiritual dimension. We, however, are not so aware; we suffer from a kind of amnesia. The titanic contest within the modern world is thus inaccurately described as a struggle between religion and secularity, when in fact it is a struggle between differing forms of religiosity.

      We can summarize these two aspects of critique, the conscious and the subconscious, by saying that John Rawls and the other thinkers who similarly seek to privatize religion are not only articulating bad political philosophy; they are also lacking a social scientific perspective. They do not understand human motives at the depth that is required for genuine comprehension. I argue, echoing René Girard, that Jesus’ prayer of Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do opens up the possibility of depth psychology; the fruits of Jesus’ social science still lie in the future, because the human race, for the last two thousand years, has been resisting the possibility that we come to see reality more clearly when we reflect on the lynching of Jesus. We do not understand victimage, and we continue to create more victims, because we have not learned what we should have learned from the Bible.

      Ӷ

      The preface or introduction to a book should say enough about the contents of the book that it gives readers a sense of what they will encounter if they continue reading, without giving away the whole argument, which would render such continued reading unnecessary. That is my goal here, though I have a fear that I have already said too much in that my (ideal) intended audience, pro-choice advocates, will have already been repulsed by what they have read and will not continue. All I can do is to make a plea for continued reading by referring to the traditional rule of debate, that one should be able to summarize the views of the opposition in a way that the opposition would acknowledge as accurate. In my experience of reading a large quantity of pro-choice articles and books, it is my considered judgment that pro-choice authors are not following this rule closely. Generally speaking, they do not have a coherent conception of how pro-life advocates think because the worldviews of the two camps are rooted in such deeply divergent metaphysical and moral assumptions about reality. I concur with Paul Hinlicky’s description of the situation: "The question of when one must be recognized by others as a citizen of the world depends after all on what sort of world it is that we inhabit. It is this matter of worlds—contending worlds—that ought, I believe, to attract our attention."¹³ The pro-choice reader who can summarize the present book accurately will take major strides toward following this rule of debate.

      Another possible enticement to continue reading is that many people assume that the abortion debate is sterile and predictable because all of the arguments that can be made have already been made, and they are simply being recycled over and over. This is true, but not of necessity; it is due to a lack of imagination and fresh thinking. I seek to present ideas and angles that are uncommon. Connecting the abortion debate with reflections on the question of why human beings are violent is one example; discussions of thinkers not normally associated with the debate is another. In this book I draw on Søren Kierkegaard, René Girard, Eric Voegelin, Giorgio Agamben, Chantal Delsol, Richard Weaver, Simone Weil, David Bentley Hart, and many others—names that one does not typically find in the indexes of books about abortion. One does not find the word abortion in the indexes of their books either (with the exception of Hart, whose perceptive comments on abortion will be noted).

      I hope that muddled-middle readers will continue, paying particular attention to my comments on the history and philosophy of rights language. This is another aspect of the book that I hope will bring a fresh perspective, because the literature of the abortion debate is saturated with rights language, but 99 percent of the time such language is unreflective. Rights language is employed to make either a pro-choice or pro-life case, but those who use it, whatever their position, are not asking these fundamental questions: What are rights? Where do they come from? What is the history of rights language and how is it relevant to our current debates? Because these sorts of questions are not asked, we are stuck in a cul-de-sac in which the opposing sides both use rights language, but to exactly opposite ends. In my view, this should not lead us to abandon rights language altogether, as some have proposed, but rather to think about it more carefully. I mention this with a particular connection to the muddled-middle position, because I think that position has been made plausible, and indeed inevitable, precisely because late-modern Western culture lacks a coherent and competent understanding of human rights.

      Ӷ

      The question Who is the audience of this book? has no easy answer, aside from saying: anyone who has an interest in the abortion debate. There are three main positions that people adopt on this question: pro-choice, pro-life, and muddled middle (I’m personally opposed, but . . .; or, I’m both pro-life and pro-choice). I have tried to imagine how all three types of readers would respond to all of the sections of the book, but to tailor the message accordingly is obviously a difficult task for a writer. It would have been easier to write three different books, or three treatises within one volume, directed to each audience, but that is not the route I have taken. Ideally, I hope that a pro-choice reader will pick up this book and be immediately converted by it to an enthusiastic support of the pro-life cause. I realize, however, that most of the book’s readers will probably be pro-life. If the muddledness of the moderate results from a genuine open-mindedness, then such a person should also be able to read this book profitably.

      Ӷ

      Richard Weaver has argued that there are five main types of arguments that people use in attempts at persuasion: arguments of (1) definition, (2) analogy, (3) consequences, (4) circumstances, and (5) authority.¹⁴ In this book I do spend some time addressing arguments of definition, focusing on human rights and the personhood of the inhabitant of the womb. My core argument extended throughout the whole book concerns the definition of the human person existing in time, understood as a synthesis of physical, spiritual, social, psychological, historical, and moral dimensions. I critique the pro-choice position for its defectiveness in terms of this synthesis. The primary aspect of my argument that is likely to stir up readers, however, is analogy. I make the case that pro-choice advocates have not learned the lessons that ought to have been learned from history, which means that the historical analogies they favor are faulty. The historical analogies favored by pro-life advocates are truthful, but when they are articulated they cause anger and resentment. These emotions cannot be avoided whenever there is a frank airing of the competing worldviews in the abortion debate. Arguments of consequences, such as women will die in back alleys if abortion is made illegal once more, or the legalization of abortion encourages young men to be irresponsible, are not the focus of this book, because attempts to specify the consequences of policies and laws are problematic efforts to pin down the shifting sands of human culture and history. Arguments of circumstances, such as the times they are a-changin’; get in step! are attempts to apply peer pressure that are philosophically close to worthless. This is Weaver’s view, and I concur. Arguments of authority are important, and I am obviously employing that approach by drawing on Jesus’ encounters, parables, and teachings. I am not a New Testament scholar; I make no claim to have the ability to discuss the details of biblical exegesis and hermeneutics as such a scholar would. I am a reasonably well-educated Christian layperson, however, and it is as such that I seek to read the Bible, always with the expectation that it speaks words of truth not just to believers, but to the whole world.

      Ӷ

      The passage from the Gospel of Luke quoted at the head of this chapter continues thus, with a foreshadowing of the crucifixion:

      All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, Is not this Joseph’s son? He said to them, Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’ And he said, Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian. When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. (Luke

      4

      :

      22

      –

      30

      )

      We human beings respect Jesus; we are amazed at his gracious words and actions. We call him a great moral teacher. (Even Richard Dawkins says that he wants to wear a T-shirt that says Atheists for Jesus!)¹⁵ Yet we also want to expel him from our community. We shout Hosanna! one day, and Crucify him! a few days later. What we do not want, what we utterly reject, is the possibility that we could be changed by him. He passes through the midst of us and goes on his way. Will we follow him? In this book I seek to accomplish for the abortion debate something similar to what John Howard Yoder accomplished for the just war debate, namely, to critique the traditional avoidance of taking Jesus seriously.¹⁶

      If the great moral teachers of history—Socrates, the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, the Anabaptists, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.—have a marked tendency to be killed, perhaps we should pay more attention to what they say if we want to make the world a less violent place. This book is an effort to articulate the idea—heretical as it is in the eyes of contemporary political correctness—that seeing the abortion debate in the light of Jesus is not only beneficial—it is essential. Without that light, we are trapped in a murk of incomprehension. We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers, as Nietzsche, the master of suspicion, said.¹⁷

      1. McLennan, Jesus Was a Liberal, ch.

      1

      . McLennan is a campus minister at Stanford University, where both René Girard and Eric Voegelin taught in the past.

      2. Hays, Moral Vision of the New Testament,

      445

      .

      3. "I do not argue for the pro-life position by appealing to theological reasoning or the authoritative writings of any particular religious tradition. The main thrust of this book is philosophical and jurisprudential. Hence, if my arguments are sound, an atheist, agnostic, or humanist is intellectually obligated to become pro-life." Beckwith, Defending Life, xiv.

      4. Camosy, Beyond the Abortion Wars,

      7

      .

      5. Fiala, What Would Jesus Really Do?,

      73

      .

      6. Noll, Civil War as a Theological Crisis,

      161

      .

      7. Becker, Escape from Evil; Miller, For Your Own Good; Jung, The Undiscovered Self.

      8. Steffen, Life/Choice,

      70

      .

      9. Harris, Second Trimester Abortion Provision,

      77

      .

      10. Breyer, Women, Childbearing, and Justice; Steffen, Life/Choice.

      11. Tisdale, We Do Abortions Here,

      70

      .

      12. A thorough discussion of Rawls, public reason, and abortion is found in George and Wolfe, Natural Law and Public Reason.

      13. Hinlicky, War of Worlds,

      189

      .

      14. Weaver, Language Is Sermonic,

      21

      –

      24

      ; Weaver, A Responsible Rhetoric.

      15. Dawkins, Atheists for Jesus.

      16. See Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster. The Latin subtitle means: Our lamb has conquered (him let us follow). The reader should not assume, however, that I am a pacifist; I am not.

      17. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality,

      3

      .

      Part One

      Understanding Violence (and Human Rights)

      The central elements of Part One:

      • Violence is a prominent feature of our contemporary world, but it is a poorly understood phenomenon.

      • A theory of violence needs to understand the deep roots of the impulse toward violence in the human psyche; that level is usually unconscious. People rarely have an articulate awareness of their own motives.

      • The theory also needs to grasp how conscious-level myths and ideologies shape and direct violence.

      • Rights language is an attempt to contain and overcome violence, but it is weak because it works on the conscious level and cannot reach the deeper unconscious level.

      • The confusion in our culture regarding how to understand violence is related to the confusion regarding the employment of rights language.

      • The central goal of Part One is to present a clear and compelling account of the anthropological roots of violence, and to outline a constructive account of how the concept of rights should be understood.

      1

      Why Are Human Beings Violent?

      Examining the Question and Some Answers

      Violent acts by human beings are in the news every day. In any given year, we hear reports of murders, terrorist bombings and beheadings, mass shootings by deranged gunmen, suicides, the police killing unarmed suspects, the police being shot and killed, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and so on, and so forth. Violence is a shape-shifting phenomenon, in the sense that it takes different forms in different contexts. Sometimes it is a crowd phenomenon, as when a mob lynches someone; sometimes it is an individual phenomenon, as when a disturbed person kills schoolchildren or parishioners at a Bible study; sometimes it is directed by the highest levels of the state, as in Nazism and Stalinism; sometimes it expresses itself as one ethnic tribe or religious denomination attacking another, such as Sunnis and Shiites attacking each other in the Middle East, Hutus killing Tutsis in Rwanda, Buddhists attacking Muslims in Burma, or Protestants and Catholics killing each other in Northern Ireland.¹⁸

      Given that violence takes so many forms, we face a question as soon as we begin to ask the question, Why are human beings violent? The question that is raised by the question is this: Is there one answer that is sufficiently general as to encompass all of these forms of violence, or not? In other words, is Why are human beings violent? an unanswerable question because the different forms of violence require different answers? Or, is there a common root that feeds the differing forms of violence? Are the forms of violence like a cluster of houses, separated from each other, with each having its own architecture, or are the differing forms like the rooms in one big house, which would enable us to inquire into the nature of the foundation under the house?

      I am a theologian, and I favor the latter answer; I believe that the forms of violence are like rooms in one large house, and we can inquire into the nature of the foundation. But there isn’t anything about being a theologian that would necessarily entail that approach. It is entirely plausible that another theologian might favor the notion that the forms of violence need to be understood separately; likewise, a person could be a nonreligious philosopher, social scientist, or historian, and go either way in response to this dichotomy. It all depends on what sort of theory the person finds to be most convincing as a way of understanding the phenomena that he or she is wrestling with.

      Over the course of Part One I will lay out the theoretical understanding of human violence that I find to be most compelling and helpful. My task in this chapter is to stress the seriousness and difficulty of this line of inquiry by summarizing the attempts of various authors to articulate answers to this basic question: Why are human beings violent?

      Ӷ

      Philosopher and literary critic Kenneth Burke provides one framework for interpreting violence. Burke argues that all children are shaped into social beings through their parents’ use of the word no. We are moralized by the negative. Our parents say to us: Stay out of the street! Don’t hit your classmates! Don’t speak to me in that tone of voice! Don’t make a mess! Burke is not critiquing parents for using the word no; he is simply reporting that they do. It is an unavoidable aspect of the human condition. On a higher level of cultural reflection, the Ten Commandments, with their Thou shalt nots, show that human beings are moralized by the negative. The difficulty that is created, however, is that we human beings cannot possibly live in accordance with all of the laws and moral teachings that we are presented with. We will always fail in various ways to be fully moral, fully just, fully respectful of others. We will thus have guilt feelings, which we deal with in one of two ways. If we turn inward, we are in a psychological state that Burke calls mortification, intense self-condemnation. If we turn outward, then we will seek to find a cathartic release of our guilt feelings by attacking others, whom we treat as scapegoats. Because the problem of guilt feelings is universal, and because turning outward is so much more common than mortification, human culture in general is a continuing process of seeking out scapegoats; culture is a scapegoat mechanism, a phrase that Burke coined in the 1930s.¹⁹ We can see this dramatic process at work in phenomena such as American racism and German Nazism.

      Richard Weaver’s book Ideas Have Consequences also makes a contribution to reflection on violence, though his approach is more philosophical than psychological. This book was published in 1948, arising out of Weaver’s attempt to make sense of the catastrophe of World War II. As Weaver searches for the root of the human malaise, he reaches back into Western history, pointing to a late medieval philosophical school known as nominalism. The competing school, realism, taught that reality has principles and laws built into it by God, which human reason is capable of comprehending with a fair degree of competence. Nominalism taught that reality is not graspable by reason; therefore, we human beings must come up with interpretive schemes and then impose those schemes onto reality. We say what things are; we define reality. This contest of visions, between realism and nominalism, was slowly but surely won by nominalism over many centuries from the late medieval era to our own time. World War II was the fruit of that process of gradually leaving behind a respect for creation as it comes from the hand of God, and putting in its place a Promethean assertion of human will. If reality is not an order within which we find our place, but is instead like clay to be molded, then society and human nature become malleable. Hence, the competing visions of the Nazis and the Russian Communists, who were enacting in their own ways the concept of nominalism. Weaver’s book is a lament for the lost world of realism, where respect for the wisdom of tradition, for nature, for other human beings, and for God the Creator formed a coherent vision within which violence could be held in check through the concept of justice. In our modern world, violence becomes chaotic and without limits, because the human ego exists in a state of belligerence toward anything outside itself that does not fit into the plans that it dreams up and seeks to impose on reality.²⁰

      Carl Jung spoke of the different components of the human psyche as the ego, the persona, and the personal and collective unconscious. It is in the unconscious where the shadow side is found. The shadow consists of feelings of imperfection, guilt, finitude, shame, and so forth. We human beings typically repress the shadow side and then project it outward onto others. We don’t want to consciously acknowledge our guilt and inadequacy, so we label others as evil and ourselves as good. We project the shadow onto others as the Nazis did to the Jews, or as Stalin did with anyone he wanted to label as a counter-revolutionary. The Allies saw the Nazis and the Communists as incarnations of different forms of demonic evil, while thinking of themselves as the Children of Light. Everyone sees evil as external to themselves because they refuse to recognize their own shadow side and integrate it into their consciousness. The story of the woman caught in adultery in the New Testament speaks to this concept powerfully; Jesus reveals the self-righteousness of the lynch mob and forces them to face their own sinfulness. Jung’s focus on a lack of integration within the psyche was an attempt to improve on the theory of Sigmund Freud, whose comments on the aggressive instinct in human beings were suggestive, but which were never developed thoroughly by Freud himself.

      Ernest Becker, an anthropologist who wrote several books in the 1960s and 1970s, attempted to synthesize the best insights into human behavior that had been articulated by authors such as Freud, Jung, Burke, Otto Rank, and Søren Kierkegaard. Becker forcefully argued in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death that the mainspring of human behavior is our fear of physical death.²¹ We are conscious of our mortality and we hate it because it will bring an end to our basic narcissism as self-aware biological beings. We want to go on living forever, but we cannot; this is the existential dilemma at the root of the human condition. What Becker calls the basic lie that human beings tell themselves is that they can transcend death somehow. We invent various death-denial strategies as attempts to avoid being honest about our mortality. One such strategy directly employs violence. We kill other human beings, treating them as scapegoats, with the implicit belief that they will die, we will not. The Jews will be killed off; the Nazis will establish a Thousand Year Reich. Even though it must be acknowledged that individuals will die, if they invest themselves in a symbolic entity larger than themselves, such as a nation-state, then they can pretend that they have somehow cheated death. Becker’s theory of death-denial has supporters in the academic world up to the present day.²²

      I turn next to psychologist Alice Miller, whose theory is significantly different from the other approaches we have been examining thus far. For Miller, the key to understanding violence is bad parenting.²³ Parents oppress their children, harming the developing psyches of the younger generation. Harm takes the form of physical abuse and psychological manipulation and shaming. When children who have been oppressed grow up, they become abusers of the next generation, and they have a framework for interpreting reality that leads to various forms of political violence, such as we witnessed in the twentieth century. Miller herself had been born into a Jewish family in Poland and she narrowly avoided becoming a victim of the Shoah;²⁴ as an adult she struggled to understand how that event was possible. Her research focused on serial killers, who are usually victims of horrific child abuse, and also on Adolf Hitler, who was beaten as a child, as was the case with almost all German children during that era. Miller calls child abuse poisonous pedagogy and blames it for the ills of humanity. Our only hope for becoming less violent

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