Jesus = Humanity Otherwise Than War

The world today is Christianized but not necessarily in a good sense. When I was doing my Ph.D. in religion professors and students used to talk about the imperialism of Christianity. What they meant was that from its base in the West Christian culture determined the terms of discussion of other religions and just about everything else in the world. The problem was that even as they protested this imperialism my colleagues invoked essentially Christian values to do so, i.e. recognition and respect for the stranger, the victim, the enemy. The reason the protest has any kind of effect was because it demanded basically a form of Christian repentance. So even as Christian imperialism is critiqued the Christian mindset is affirmed. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan echoes unacknowledged in the halls of academe.

However, this is only at a high abstract level of reflection. In the meantime what I see as the truly universal effect of Christianity is not at the level of academic principle but at the level of freedom and desire. And in this area the effects are acutely dangerous, including, yes, redoubling violence. In fact what you’re dealing with is a kind of cultural mutation, a genetic distortion of Christianity missing one or two essential bits of Jesus DNA. To understand this we have first to glance at the overall historical impact of Christianity.

The relentless rise of the individual, democracy and human desire has Christianity in its engine. The assumption that we somehow got democracy from the Greeks—from Athens—is as uncritical as it is prevalent. The barons who wrote the Magna Carta in England and first shared out the power of the king were not listening to the history of Athens when they came together on a regular basis to get a dose of human meaning. They were listening to the gospels, to Jesus who said, “Blessed are the poor, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice… ,” to Jesus who “calls his sheep by name and leads them...” In other words those precisely left out of the system are the ones who will be given status, and each individual has (at least potentially) a unique personal standing in the world. Moreover the barons already had a four-hundred-year-old presence of Benedictine monasticism at the heart of their culture, where the monks elected the abbot and together made up a council to guide the abbot in important matters. All the spiritual and human prompting necessary for democracy, therefore, was already present in medieval Christian culture. It goes without saying the barons were just as self-interested and ruthless as the king but—precisely—we’re not talking about personal morality but structural values and structural change.

Jesus also said things like, “If God so clothes [more splendid than Solomon] the grass of the field...will he not much more provide for you...?" He is suggesting that the things of this earth are both beautiful and available to all under the Father’s care. Oscar Wilde said Jesus was the first romantic because he made the ugly beautiful. The intense blessing communicated to this world by the Galilean is continually underestimated in the production of Western desire. Genesis already said everything in the world was “good:” Jesus proved it absolutely by healing human brokenness, feeding the hungry with multiplied bread, and forgiving human sin and alienation. Looked at over the long run this could not help produce a concrete culture where the material world becomes more and more secured in value, its objects of desire affirmed and multiplied, and our personal relation to them essentially celebrated and assured. Hence both capitalism and romanticism.

It is absurd to think that the vigor of Western democracy, capitalism and romanticism has nothing to do with the spiritual universe at the core of its culture. To say this is, on the one hand, a way for certain intellectuals and writers to claim they invented human progress out of their divine little heads, and on the other for the dark side of all this (which is increasingly dark) to hide itself from the radicalism of love that could make it all actually work. For of course—and this is where I’ve been driving—the release of freedom and desire in the world left to its own devices has nowhere to go except the destruction of resources and redoubled violence toward the other. Freedom and desire without service and love are a cultural mutation out of a gospel environment which is driving us a hundred miles an hour down a dead-end street. It is the paradox of Christianized freedom and desire—left to themselves they become relentless war.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that as the crisis continues to swell in the cancerous forms of freedom and desire the authentic gospel solution remains at its source and becomes itself steadily more apparent. The welcome of all to his single table is one of the most assured facts of Jesus’ historical ministry and its concrete human effect was a transformation of a mindset of sin into one of life and love. (This is the point of the wedding garment parable.) Then, at the term of his ministry, the sign of Jesus’ cross and resurrection becomes the transcendent anthropological instrument which challenges for all time the effects of violence with life-filled peace and peace-filled life. This radical solution is now culturally more and more apparent, standing behind Christianity’s historical mutation like a ghost of Christmas present seeking to replace the ghost of Christmas past. And if a mutated Christianity cannot see it then unprejudiced human minds can, demonstrating that the gospel of Jesus produces a cultural shift in and of itself. Here is just one from a continually growing casebook of examples.

On Killing, The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Back Bay Books, 2009) is a book by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. He is a former soldier who no longer dresses up war in some sort of heroic necessity or morality but calls it simply killing. He argues that apart from a few actual psychopaths ordinary men and women involved in war have to be brutally conditioned to overcome the natural aversion to taking another human life. The consequences of this murderous training are profound spiritual damage. “The dead soldier takes his misery with him, but the man who killed him must ever live and die with him. The lesson becomes increasingly clear: Killing is what war is all about, and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt.” At the same time, Grossman points out, we’re applying the same perverse teaching to the whole civilian population through violent movies, violent video games and violent role models. So on the one hand killing is traumatic and on the other we continually traumatize ourselves.

Now whether we agree with the particulars of his argument, or whether he has worked out all their implications, doesn’t matter. What is important is the way he is breaking down the boundary distinctions, between “justified” killing in war and killing pure and simple, between the neutral “job” of the soldier and traumatic psychic harm, and between the soldier and the civilian, between war and peace. This means, of course, an enormous crisis in the business of war and killing, in fact its progressive untenability as a human course of action. But from where can this genuinely anthropological crisis be derived? After all human beings have been in the business of killing since year one. Why should a professional soldier suddenly decide that his very business is humanly impossible? Grossman doesn’t mention Christ but he doesn’t have to. The only decisive anthropological intervention declaring our enemy to be our brother and his killing not to be a matter of fate but of persecutory human violence is the Risen Crucified. On this basis, therefore, we can see that subtly and implicitly, yet powerfully and irreversibly, the gospel of Jesus is provoking a crisis in cultural values and hand-in-hand proposing its true radical solution, that of forgiveness, nonviolence and love.

The gospel is the genuine alternative to the crisis the gospel itself has produced. The mutated cultural uptake of the gospel is untrammeled freedom and desire. But limitless war is their necessary consequence. Yet the gospel does not rest, and just as it revealed the possibility of freedom and desire it now discloses the human intolerability of violence. The initial cultural reaction to the gospel was largely a cancerous form, but the very volume of the cancer in the contemporary world turns our attention to the true regeneration at its source. What we are assisting at today is anthropological shift of unparalleled significance. And so progressively we have the choice of a dangerously half-Christianized world, a world at war, or a humanly Jesus-centered one, a world of forgiveness, peace and life.

Tony