Jesus and the Powers

 

N.T. Wright, a retired Bishop of the Church of England, is an eminent and well-known scripture scholar and theologian. In this latest book, Jesus and the Poers: Christian Political Wirness in a Age of Totalitarian Terror and and Dysfunctional Democracies (2024), he and his co-author, Australian theologian Michael Bird, seek to address in straightforward, non-technical language the perennial question of the Christian commitment to politics and government, a question that has acquired increased salience in a post-Christendom world, in which the once widely acclaimed alternative of liberal democracy has become increasingly problematic. Indeed, for these authors, this presetn decade may "be the most precarious and perilous time in human history since the 1930s."

The authors stress something that many modern progressives insouciantly seem to be increasingly eager to forget, namely that both the Latin West and the Greek East were and have continued to be "shaped by a Christian vision of God's love for the world and the place of Christian virtues in societies where few restraints on evil and exploitation existed." This is an inescapable historical fact, but it is also much more than that. It is of the very nature of Jesus' kingdom, which, while completely unlike the kingdoms of this world, "is still for this world, for the benefit and blessing of this world, for the redemption and rescue of this world."

The theological claim is that "the Creator intends his world to be run through obedient human beings." God, the authors insist, "intends that humans should share in running his world, and should be held accountable." Thus, "because we believe that Jesus is King and his kingly power is operative among us," Christians "cannot retreat to the attic of spiritual affairs, not when there is a gospel to proclaim and ahurting world crying out for healing and hope."

In this post-Christendom context, the author's preference is clearly for a form of liberal democracy, a form of political arrangement which seems to have lost a lot of its former luster and appears increasingly threatened. The authors aregue that "in a world with a human propensity for evil, greed and injustice, liberal democracy stands as the least worst option for human governance." It is, they stress, "neither a necessary not a sufficient conditon for a just society, but it can be an enabling condition for a just society."

In a world in which no political axiom can any longer be taken for granted, the authors offer a valuable religious argument for invigorating liberal democracy. This is especially timely when the ideas that have underpinned liberal democracies find themselves challenged not just by populist authoritarianism but by explicitly religious versions such as messianic imperialism (e.g, Russia) and a revived Catholic integralism.

Wonders Never Cease

This weekend, I have been attending a conference on overcoming toxic political polarization, "Bridging the Divide, Seeking Reconciliation," organized by the Paulist Fathers. Perhaps that is what is disposing me to be more charitable to someone I would normally be less inclined say a kind word about, namely the present (perhaps temporary) Speaker of the House, MAGA right-winger Mike Johnson. But the main reason must be that, for whatever reason or reasons, the Speaker suddenly seems to be sounding like an old-fashioned politician, like (dare I say?) a 20th-century "Reagan Republican." Perhaps the Speaker's rediscovery of reality reflects, as some pundits have suggested, the fact that he now has access to high-level Intelligence about the international situation. Whatever the reason, having weirdly and pointlessly delayed needed aid to Ukraine for months since President Biden requested it. the Speaker now endorses such aid and is taking the necessary steps to move that aid forward through the absurd and arcane procedures of the House. To advance the legislation to its final (hopefully successful) outcome, the Speaker has needed - and has received - the votes of  Democrats in the House.

In our ailing, if not terminally ill, political culture, this may be one of the rare occasions when democracy wins, when the will of the majority of elected representatives (reflecting a majority in the country at large) get to pass something necessary and good, despite the usually successful obstruction by a minority of the members. Adjusting the gender to the present House membership, this has up until now been a clear case of what Woodrow Wilson lamented in 1917, when he spoke of "A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, [who] have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”

Of course, in this case, today's "little group of willful men" and women primarily represent the isolationist and self-serving opinion of one person, the MAGA Republican former (and would-be future) President Donald Trump. There has, alas, always been an isolationist tendency in American culture. There have always been Americans who, for whatever reason, fall for destructive rhetoric like Trump's persistent complaint that our European allies have not spent enough of their money on Ukraine and that, therefore, the U.S. is being taken advantage of. 

So democracy wins also - and maybe even more importantly - in Ukraine, where that beleaguered country may yet be able to hold back the advancing forces of imperialist Russian tyranny. A Ukrainian collapse would move the front-line for civilization's defense dangerously to the border of Poland, to the very border of NATO.

Back to America, it still remains to be seen what this may portend for congressional ability to function, as it was once intended to function, now in these waning months of this present congressional term.

That said, it is good for the country that Democrats are rewarding the Speaker for his rediscovery of reality and his unexpectedly responsible behavior. The prophet Ezekiel famously said: if a wicked man turns from all his sins which he has committed, and does what is lawful and right, he shall surely live. None of the transgressions which he has committed shall be remembered against him; because of the righteousness which he has done, he shall live. Whether the Speaker still keeps his gavel despite the MAGA minority's inevitable fulminations and motions to vacate the Chair, still remains to be seen. At the moment, however, this seems like a win for democratic governance at home and democratic survival in Ukraine. That deserves to be celebrated - as does the surprising Speaker of the House himself.

Orestes Brownson

 

"Heartily, deeply did I ever reciprocate Dr. Brownson's affection, and the long and eventful years have but strengthened more and more my love for him and my admiration for his genius - convictions and emotions which have drawn from me in these articles my feeble attempt to estimate his providential mission and to introduce my countrymen to the study of his works" [Isaac Hecker, "Dr. Brownson and Catholicity," Catholic World, 46, (1887), p. 235].

Largely forgotten among contemporary American Catholics, but someone whoi deserves to be remembered and appreciated even still, Orestes Brownson was born in 1803 and died on this date in 1876. He had already established himself as a leading American intellectual, a philosopher, and a social theorist, as well as Unitarian clergyman, well before his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1844, after which he became perhaps the most prominent lay Catholic voice in the United States Church. He contributed to the Transcendentalist critique of Unitarian empiricism, articulating an alternative idealist philosophical perspective that would continue to inform his mature thought as a Catholic. Although he would later vote for Lincoln, Brownson began as a Jacksonian Democrat, with genuinely radical social and economic theories Both religiously and politically, Brownson was an important early influence on the young Isaac Hecker (1819-1888). At the end of his life, Hecker remained supportive of Brownson's earlier social and political ideas. "The ominous outlook of popular politics at the present moment plainly shows that legislation such as we then proposed, and such as was then within he easy reach of State and national authority would have forestalled difficulties whose settlement at this day threatens a dangerous disturbance of pubic order." ["Dr. Brownson and the Workingman's Party Fifty Years Ago," Catholic World, 45, (1887), pp. 207-208.]

Concerning Brownson's religious conversion to Catholicism, Hecker in that same article [p. 207] wrote "it was a glory and a triumph for the Catholic Church to obtain the conversion of such a man and to hold that free soul in most contented allegiance till the hour of death."

The youthful and then life-long friendship between Brownson and Hecker was of great significance for both of them in their respective spiritual journeys and, by extension, for the 19th-century American Catholic Church. Brownson met the Hecker Brothers in New York City in 1841 and quickly became a kind of mentor to the young Isaac Hecker, eventually steering him to Brook Farm, the contemporary communal experiment Brownson valued most highly.  The younger and less well educated of the two, Hecker at the outset of their friendship was definitely a disciple of Brownson. As Brownson's biographer has highlighted, however, "the disciple had something to teach the master, and Brownson knew it. Reading his correspondence with Hecker during this period gives one the impression that it was Hecker who brought the personal to the fore in Brownson. Brownson was drawn to that which he criticized in Hecker and knew, instinctively, that Hecker possessed something that he did not. Brownson was attracted to the difference.” [Patrick W. Carey, Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), p. 138.]

Indeed, Isaac Hecker's first book, Questions of the Soul, written as a Redemptorist missionary priest in 1855, which attempted to demonstrate the positive aspects of Catholicism as the response to the deepest questions and desires of the human soul, seemed to liberate Brownson from his immediate post-conversion commitment to a more polemical approach to apologetics. To quote Carey again: Brownson’s review of Hecker’s book “demonstrated a thoroughly positive assessment of Hecker’s achievement, and an acknowledgment that his own previous polemical style of apologetics was neither effective nor what the times demanded. … Hecker’s book clearly awakened Brownson to the defects in his own previous approach.”

Brownson's writings during that period represented an attempt to craft a genuinely Catholic conception of politics and society, in contrast to the perennial tendency to accommodate to American reality by treating politics as largely autonomous. That concern perdured as a priority for Brownson, who in October 1870 wrote: “Even our Republic goes the way of all the earth, and our Catholic population hardly seem aware of their mission as Catholics. Outside of the Sanctuary they are hardly distinguishable in their social and political action from non-Catholics.” 

Ultimately, he understood that mission as being "to Catholicize America, not Americanize Catholicity.” On the other hand, his intense ultramontanism did not turn into integralism. Rather, he understood that European political conservatism was likely a losing cause with which the Church should not be identified. In particular, Brownson recognized that those who supported the absolute continuation of the Papal States against Italian national aspirations, which were inexorably leading to the unification of Italy, were wrongly identifying a particular political goal with the Church’s fundamental interests. 

Both Brownson and Hecker had been influenced by the 19th-century German Catholic theologian Johann Adam Moehler (1796-1838) who had emphasized the Church as the continuation of Christ's incarnation in a visible structure. Both believed that neither Calvinism, Unitarianism, nor Transcendentalism could appeal long-term to the more moderate American mentality, although of the two Brownson was more sensitive to the demographic realities of American Protestantism  and demonstrated a far greater appreciation of non-New England-based religion (e.g., Evangelicalism and Methodism) than Hecker did.

Although Hecker and Brownson began to diverge somewhat in their views in their later years, they remained friends, and Hecker never ceased to admire Brownson's accomplishments. Hecker considered Brownson's primary work of political theory, The American Republic (1865), to be "the greatest work yet written in America on general politics." ["Dr. Brownson in Boston," Catholic World, 45 (1887), p. 466.]

A decade after Brownson's death, Hecker expressed his support for a movement to erect a monument to Brownson in New York's Central Park, but added: "The best monument to Dr. Brownson's greatness is his works. ... They ought to be in every American library of any character." ["Dr. Brownson and the Workingman's Party Fifty Years Ago," Catholic World, 45, (1887), p. 200.]

Photo: Orestes Brownson, Portrait by G.P.A. Healy, 1863. 

A bust of Brownson was in fact commissioned in the 1890s by the Catholic Club of New York for its building on Central Park South. When that building was demolished, Brownson's bust was moved to Riverside Drive and 104th Street. In the 1930s, however, it was overturned by vandals and put in storage. In 1941 Father Robert Gannon, SJ, the President for Fordham University (1936-1949), acquired the bust from the Parks Department for its placement on the Fordham campus in the Bronx, where it remains atop a high granite pedestal. (Brownson was awarded Fordham's first honorary degree in 1856.).

Witnesses of These Things

 

We set out to find His friends to tell them.
We went to Jerusalem to tell them;
and with joy we told them, “We have seen the Lord!”
And as we were speaking there, He stood among us, blessed us, said to us,
“Now my peace I leave with you.” We saw Him!
Suddenly our eyes were opened, and we knew He was alive!

 

Some of the old-timers here may recognize those lines from the second verse of the hymn, In the Breaking of the Bread,* which we used to sing here at Saint Paul’s every Easter season. It recalls some of the highlights from Emmaus to Pentecost, among them the event recounted in today's Gospel, as the Risen Lord revealed himself to his disciples and transformed them into his Church.

 

Typically, in these gospel stories of the Risen Lord’s appearances to his disciples, there is the sense that, while this is certainly the same Jesus the disciples had followed in life and who had died on the Cross, something about him is now different. Hence, the startlement and terror before the dramatic moment when Jesus is fully recognized.

 

Jesus’ resurrection was a real event (every bit as real as his crucifixion), but one which no one witnessed first-hand. What was witnessed initially was an empty tomb – a necessary condition for the resurrection to be true, but insufficient evidence in itself. Something more had to happen, and something more did happen – a series of encounters which captured the novelty and uniqueness of the resurrection,  encounters with the glorified body of the Risen Christ in which the Risen Lord demonstrated to his disciples that he was the same Jesus who had lived and died (hence the wounds in his hands and his feet), fully alive now in a unexpectedly new and wonderful way. 

Unlike hallucinations or mystical experiences, these were authentic encounters with someone who had lived and died but was now beyond the reach of death, embodied in a completely new way.

 

The events described in today’s Gospel took place on that same eventful Sunday in Jerusalem, to which the two disciples had rushed back from their exciting encounter with the Risen Lord in the breaking of bread. Perhaps this was the same room where some of them had so recently eaten the Last Supper and where an already growing group of them would gather again after the ascension to await the coming of the Holy Spirit. Since apostolic times (long before it ever became a day off from work), Sunday has been the special day, the irreplaceably privileged day, when Christians assemble in churches to encounter Christ, the Risen Lord, present in the sacramental celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist.

 

To repeat the same news over and over again is one way to bear witness to its importance. To hear the proclamation of the resurrection, over and over, during these Easter Sundays strengthens our faith by the witness of others’ faith. That is why one of the most noticeable features that distinguishes Easter in our Catholic liturgical calendar is the daily reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Through our journey through the book of Acts, we identify ourselves with that first generation of Christians in their experience of the Risen Christ, becoming like them a community which witnesses to the presence and action of the Risen Lord in his Church, a community which expresses its new life in its worship.

 

And, so, we celebrate Easter not for one day or one week but for seven weeks, during which we relive the experience of those first Christians, transformed forever by the presence and power of the Risen Lord, experienced in the here and now in his word and sacraments. We see how eager they were to share that experience with everyone around them – an eagerness we need to learn from, for each of us is being propelled by the power of the Easter story to trust in its power to transform the world. 

Some of you here may also remember how the hymn which I began with concludes.

 

We ran out into the street to tell them,
everyone that we could meet, to tell them,
“God has raised Him up and we have seen the Lord!”
We took bread as He had done and then we blessed it, broke it, offered it.
In the breaking of the bread, we saw Him!
Suddenly our eyes were opened.
There within our midst was Jesus, and we knew He was alive.
In the breaking of the bread, He is here with us again,
and we know He is alive.

Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, April 14, 2024.

* Hymn by Michael Ward, © 1989.

 

Civil War (The Movie)

 

The actual American Civil War officially began on this date in 1861, with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. Most of us have grown up with casual cultural assumptions about American democracy's exceptionalism that have made it easy for us to normalize such conflicts in failed or failing states elsewhere but have made it comparably difficult for us to imagine that another such conflict could ever again occur in the United States. We instinctively assume that our stable political culture (and our antiquated constitution) could somehow protect us from intensifying democratic failure. Yet the fact that a real civil war did actually happen here once before should, however, disabuse us of such complacency. 

Coincidentally, British filmmaker Alex Garland's new film Civil War opens in theaters this week. Civil War, which premiered at South by Southwest last month, is set in a frightening, sometime future, failed-state U.S., as experienced on screen by a group of journalists covering the conflict (for Reuters) as civil war and seemingly random violence tear an increasingly dystopian U.S. apart. We seem intended to experience the conflict through the morally constricted world of journalism. The journalists in the film seem like otherwise normal people. However, one might suggest that, with civilization literally collapsing all around them, there might be more important priorities than getting a story and taking good pictures, but that seems somehow to elude them. Or perhaps it doesn't, for they too are not immune from war's personal toll.

Early on, we experience the confusion of a socially devastated New York, although the city's infrastructure - or at least its skyline (necessary one supposes for on-screen recognition) - still seems somewhat intact. As in some real 20th-century wars, the journalists are based in a still somewhat functioning hotel, from which they set out with professional determination to Washington, DC. The conflict has apparently been underway for some unspecified amount of time, long enough to do obvious damage. Along the way, there are several dangerous encounters, but exactly with whom is not always quite clear. There are also amazing pockets of normalcy. Indeed, we are casually informed that the two female photojournalists have parents living complacently on farms in Missouri and Colorado respectively. And Canadian money is willingly accepted, which suggests that things may still be just fine north of the border. Meanwhile, the journalists eventually reach what appears to be the military frontline in Charlottesville VA, as the rebels prepare to advance on Washington, DC. 

It remains unclear what the actual originating causes of the conflict were, when or why the war started, or even exactly who started it. The film's emphasis is more on the ever-increasing violence, which is the consequence of political collapse. For context, however, we do discover that, what remains of the federal government (led by a suggestively somewhat Trump-like, authoritarian third-term president, who has disbanded the FBI) is apparently at war with two breakaway states, California and Texas, the so-called "Western Forces." So there is both seemingly random (domestic terrorist?) violence all along the way, and then there is a full-scale military force ready to do battle against whatever is left of the United States. Shaken by what they have experienced and by their personal losses, but with a certain journalistic insouciance, the press crew attaches itself to the Western Forces for the final assault on the White House. (One of the traditional arguments against the possibility of an old-fashioned "civil war" happening again in the U.S. was that the federal government has such an overwhelming monopoly of military power. Yet, one of the unexplained oddities of this film is the almost complete absence of massive military power on the federal side and the impressive display of massive military hardware in the part of the secessionists!)

Most people probably find the idea of a California-Texas alliance somewhat implausible, as indeed most Americans must find the idea of an actual armed conflict or "civil war" among Americans itself implausible. But the film seems to want to take us sufficiently out of our immediate present in order to capture the character of a potentially looming American breakup, without necessarily identifying too closely or clearly with contemporary political divisions. The allegory is there for all to see, but general enough to be appreciated beyond the narrow confines of our contemporary tribal affiliations. The through-line, if you will, that connects our present epidemic of extreme polarization and the America depicted in the film may not be any particular political positions or ideologies as much as what seems to be the extreme mutual desire of each side to obliterate the other, the phenomenon known as "negative polarization."

The allegory works, however, precisely because it is just plausible enough. Underlying the dramatic depictions of a violent, failed state is the specter of actual American democracy's real potential for failure, as it appears to follow the classical trajectory into dysfunctional tyranny. "One of the most striking facts about the political world of the third millennium," Sheldon Wolin observed twenty years ago, "is the near universal acclaim accorded democracy" and democracy's novel status as "a transhistorical and universal value." [Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded ed. (2004) p. 585]. Obviously, modern democracy is not the same as the earlier democracies consistently condemned and feared by classical and early modern political theorists, from Plato and Aristotle to the American founders. Yet, it resembles its ancient namesake enough to suffer from similar disabilities, despite our era's distorted image of democracy's possibilities and liabilities, with the result that those ancient and early modern warnings remain relevant even in the third millennium.