Studies in Christian Ethics

http://sce.sagepub.com Armaments and Eschatology

John H. Yoder Studies in Christian Ethics 1988; 1; 43 DOI: 10.1177/095394688800100107 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sce.sagepub.com

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ARMAMENTS AND ESCHATOLOGY

—

John

H. Yoder

materialistic and rationalistic age, we regard the of the apostles times, or of ours, with discourse Apocalyptic embarrassment or amazement. I submit that we need to encounter this scandal head-on, as a transcultural hermeneutic challenge, not to dodge it on grounds of authority or cultural superiority, and that the nuclear drama of our time provides an occasion to do that. A more precise formulation of my theme would be: &dquo;The Arms Race and the Apocalyptic Dimension of Christian Faith&dquo;, or if you will &dquo;Christian Faith and the I Apocalyptic Dimension of the Arms Races Rather than starting from methodological first principles, I propose to let the shape of the subject unfold from the top of the problem; i.e. from the surface of current public debate. This debate is in fact marked by an of
a

nffspring

apocalyptic dimension.

&dquo;TOTAL WAR HAS MADE AN END TO ITSELF&dquo;

Ever since Hiroshima some thinkers have been speaking of the nuclear age as the end of politics as usual, or of military strategy as usual. One of the first and most qualified voices to say that was that of Commander Sir Stephen King-Hall of His Majestys Navy, as early as 1945.~ For experts in military science, the boundary which nuclear weapons overstep is the self-defining limitation of what one can do with weapons. Soon other limits came into view, especially those of the ecosphere. Instead of evaluating preparations for war in traditional terms like the carefully qualifying and quantifying criteria of the just war tradition, many have evoked the prospect of the end of life or of civilization as we know them, seeing this prospect as a new kind of reason for this or that political

choice. It has

traditionally not been wrong, some will say for instance, to kill enemies under certain circumstances. This is the just war tradition. It has further been widely agreed that killing even the innocent is acceptable, orr condition that it is not done intentionally, directly, or
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On the other hand, they say, it would under all circumstances be wrong to destroy the ecological balance or the ozone layer and with it vertebrate life. The stakes are qualitatively different: thus what had been the object of a discriminating, quantifying, and therefore debatable judgment becomes an absolute one. Some have called this approach, dependent on the claim that the stakes have escalated qualitatively beyond the reach of a previous frame of reference, survivalism.~ It is the dominant argument in the recent statement of the bishops of the United Methodist Church of the US, 7 entitled III Defense of Creatioll. Were I to analyze that American Methodist document as a model of magisterial moral theology, I should need to pursue further more than one obvious question. One of them would be the validity in Christian ethics of the ecological turn. (a) Is it evident that it is best to use the term creation as designating the biological substratum for human existence rather than as including human culture and history?8 (b) Is it morally worse to destroy fisheries and forests than cities because creation is of a higher order of value than history? Or is it evil on a deeper causative level because cities and histories will also perish if the forests and fisheries go?9 (c) Are we sure that what a nuclear blast would do to the ecosphere is qualitatively or quantatively worse than the desertification of the Sahara a few millennia ago or of the Sahel today, or what our smokestacks are doing to the forests of the American Northeast or of central Europe? We should also need to ask about the technological turn the conversation has taken. Now that bishops are taking testimony from arms experts and diplomats, what authority have the informed technical judgments to which they come with regard to the likelihood of escalation, the possibility of prevailing in a nuclear war, or the other technical data (including politics as a kind of technique) which the experts they consulted told them should be decisive? Can moral theology say anything while the experts differ? Is it an act of moral discernment for which one can be accountable, or is it purely a matter of whim or self-interest, if I choose between the sovietological wisdom of George Kennan and that of Richard Perle, or between the accuracy projections of an optimistic ballistics engineer and a pessimistic one? There would be more such questions. More basic is the constantinian turn. 10 The Methodist bishops see political decisions regarding armaments from a macro utilitarian perspective. Instead of personal terms, asking as the classical tradition did whether (and if so, when) killing as a choice made by someone in particular (whether sovereign or soldier) is justifiable, it seems to the bishops to be more pastoral, or more objective, to speak only for the whole societys choice. Whereas the standard account of just war accountability said or implied that if a government pursues immoral policies the conscript should refuse to serve and the soldier should refuse to shoot, the only implementation the bishops call for is heightened citizen involvement in national politics.
44

disproportionately.5

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To assume in this way that what we know about the values of the whole national system as political actor has more claims upon us (more evident? more compelling?) than the concrete local neighbours needs and the enemys just war rights, is to carry to the nth degree a reasoning process which has been taken for granted since the constantinian turn taken by mainstream Christians in the fifth century. What concerns me here, however, is not any one or the sum total of all of those questiuns, but rather the mental move that is made when, in the face of all of them, one holds that just one consideration, drawn from another frame of reference, has become decisive. This is what happens in the claim that we have entered a brand new age, where the old continuities and criteria no longer count. The new fact arises out of the business of war-making, but it is said to make war obsolete. It is brought to our attention by the military planners, the politicians, the generals and the munitions makers, but its impact is to demand that the matter be taken out of their hands, being too important to be left to the experts. Developments from within the system bring the system to its limits. For mainline thinkers of our time it apparently seems more profound, more convincingly tragic, to have the absence of choice forced upon us, by a state of things such that the stakes are so great that the semblance of choice is wiped away, than it would have been to be called to choice by the moral demand of a prophetic voice. Obviously there is no other value to outweigh the destruction of the whole world system. Having no choice, being forced by events, is a very secure way to take what sounds verbally like a strong moral position. For the ethicist, one major flaw in this new simplicity is its assuming that the qualitative escalation of the stakes can and should leapfrog discriminating debates about lesser threats and less absolute means. If we grant that making the entire globe unlivable would be absolutely wrong, where does that wrongness begin? Would it be wrong to destroy only ten percent? One percent? The other logical flaw is that when we argue about where an issue goes off the scale of traditional evaluation, it is not self-evident what that binds us to do next. Other bishops (as we shall see) were saying at the same time that, since nuclear war must never happen, therefore deterrent threats of absolutely disproportionate destruction are in order. It is precisely the disproportion - which the classical just war theory would forbid - between the enemys triggering threat and the massive retaliation with which we promise to respond, that guarantees the enemy will never push us to the brink. American-stated nuclear policy is no longer as blunt as the language of former Secretary of State Dulles, but the French doctrine on dex frappe, as restated in the French Catholic bishops letter of 1983,1 is still that the menace may morally be disproportionate or indiscriminate, since it is precisely that potentially immoral quality of the threatened retaliation which assures that it will not need to be carried out. What I have just described, which can be fairly called the NATO view,

the force

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for specifically Christian, in fact conservative Harold O.J. Brown, today Professor of Biblical and evangelical, Systematic Theology and Ethics in Theology in Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, the largest school of its kind in Americas Midwest, still holds to the view he first expressed in a symposium in 1980. He draws his convictions not (as do some American fundamentalists, including Ronald Reagan) from the dispensationalists interpretation of predictions in Ezekiel and Daniel about the battle at Armageddon, but from an evangelical variant of the political wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr. For the sake of the great value of human freedom, as defended by the Anglo-Saxon political order, said Brown, we must be able to run the risk of destroying civilization, including ourselves.
can

be advocated

reasons.

The munstruus evil of totalitarian communism must indeed be frightful ... for us to risk annihilation rather than submit to it. Frankly, I agree with Aleksandr Solzetiltsvn and will risk annihilation for myself and my country to defend our freedom.

What is evangelical about this? It is not that Brown expects the stakes in the final showdown to be directly religious. In 1980 in fact he specified the protection of the energy supply of the West (by which he apparently meant American commercial access to Arab oil) as the line where a showdown might be called for. What is evangelical about this for Brown is the dimension of motivation. It is that the believer knows that neither his own souls salvation nor the spiritual value of civilization is dependent upon thisworldly peace. Therefore he is not afraid to risk thisworldly peace and survival for the sake of a transcendent value, namely the liberties safeguarded by Anglo-Saxon political traditions.2 Belief in the resurrection and in life beyond the grave enables us to risk the grave, for ourselves and everyone else, for the sake of the freedom (of political institutions) with which God has entrusted us.
For this
reason

it is

important

authority, peuple who will Hebrews [2:15] puts it. 13

to have at least some Christians in positions of not be kept in bondage by the fear of death as

The NATO deterrence theory and the Methodists sweeping but vague rejection of the same exemplify the same logic. Each assumes without argument that if the stakes are absolute the validity of our judgment about means is self-evident. Each assumes that a danger held to be infinite takes us off the scale of the more careful forms of moral discourse. That is then our ages form, is it not, of apocalyptic? These two views are polar alternatives, philosophically and politically, (a) in terms of their own self-understanding, b) in the way &dquo;objective&dquo; observers would classify their logic, and c) in their proximate political commitments. Yet they mirror each other. Both differ from business as usual in political
46

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thought by reasoning back from the claim to have reached the limits of the manageable system, so that it appears rational, in the light of an idiosyncratic unappealable self-evidence, to claim that the matter is closed. They cannot talk to each other. There is not common vocabulary, no wider community, no ethos of dialogue which they can share. That, I
submit, is for any age,
stance.
even

for ours, the functional definition of

an

apocalyptic As inadequate as each of these views is, they force us to face facts. It is in fact the case that the plans currently being made in cold blood by superpower arms planners do call for wittingly and willingly letting the
nuclear threat to civilization escalate off the scale of measurable and manageable values, out of the reach of the ordinary disciplines of

reciprocity, proportionality,

or

objectivity.

RETRIEVING THE IDIOM OF APOSTOLIC APOCALYPTIC

By way of introduction, I have let my topic be defined by our contemporaries. We have so to speak been backed into wrestling with the challenge of apocalyptic rhetoric because our contemporaries do in fact speak that way. My thesis is however that we would do well so to wrestle
other grounds, namely because, in truth, the world and the Gospel need to be spoken of that way. The last decades have seen a growing readiness on the part of Scripture scholars to acknowledge that ancient texts are understood more authentically when seen more clearly in the context of the cultural setting in which they arose. This innovation is neither quite as novel nor quite as productive of new wisdom as some of its advocates believe, nor quite as destructive as others fear. It has begun to be accepted and practised within the historical and exegetical disciplines, which are not the level on which I am asked to serve today, more widely than it is within theological ethics, the terrain of our present concern. It cannot be my aim from within the ethicists role to attempt to sort out the intramural debate among the Scripture specialists, each of whom has a slightly different way of defining and disentangling the concepts of prophecy, apocalyptic, and eschatology. Until recently Scripture scholars have usually been concerned, usually quite transparently, to distinguish one mode, which they find palatable, and which they see as representative of the Jewish or Christian text they are reading at the time, from another mode which they can then be free to disavow, or to relegate to
on

Often the difference between what one can use and what one may off was held to be that eschatology (or prophecy) deals with God active in history, whereas apocalypse treats of the end of history. The former we can understand, because we can transpose it credibly into modern terms, whereas the latter is meaningless. Some propose that the apocalyptic strand can be set aside on the

antiduity.
slough

47

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that (1) it wrongly assumed an imminent parousia, thereby itself to being refuted by events in the world, (2) it was the of dramatic first-generation ecstatic experiences, which subsided as the churches settled in sociologically, (3) it was the product of the pressure of persecution, which later abated, (4) it finally issued in the heresy of montanism, (5) it led to social withdrawal and quietism, (6) 5 it approved of a violent fate for Gods enemies If we were to seek to converse with the Scripture specialists within their own guild, we should need to ask methodological questions about whether it is fitting thus to let criteria of modern credibility govern the reading of ancient texts. We should ask archaeological questions about the degree of confidence with which they claim to understand just what were having in a particular decade in a kind of social experience particular corner of the ANE. A more adequate methodology would seem to be one which would let each genre speak for itself, letting the functions of sifting and synthesis, and especially of evaluative judgment, wait until we have before us the whole sweep of the Scriptures and of our history since then. The challenge of honest scholarship is to find ways to let the text have some defence against our bending or screening it to fit our own meanings. Progress in archaeology and in the reading of ancient literature has begun to make us less defensive in the face of the strangeness of modes of expression which do not adjust to our own world-view. As long as Scripture studies were subject to the discipline of scholastic theology, assuming as both norm and fact that what the ancient texts say is the same as what we believe, historical reading of those texts could never be really free to let them say what they originally said. It is thus the emancipation of the study of ancient literatures from the control of scholastic theology which has expanded exponentially the space available for respectful reading.

grounds opening product

peo le

This insight is a commonplace, and self-evident, once articulated; Yet credit Krister Stendahl for stating it first and most scholars keep saying it again, as if the clarification it offers were still needed. &dquo; It is within the context of that emancipation that Ernst K5semann has for a generation been rehabilitating the apocalyptic components of the ancient literature, within and beyond the Hebrew and Christian canons For a long time already, the term apocalyptic has carried taken-forgranted definitions on two levels. One level is the technical one of literary genre or cultural style. An apocalyptic document is one which purports to
some

Simply. 1

to reveal, information not already known or accessible by more ordinary modes of perception. The author of a written text may announce that the text he or she is writing provides such an unveiling More otten the unveiling is reported by the text as having occurred in a vision or an audition which the writer has been given.

unveil,

Another level of classification is that of content. We often call a text or a world-view apocalyptic not so much because the writer claims just now
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to have received a new revelation, but because in its content it sustains a view of the shape of reality which seems to us to be like that of the

documents of an apocalyptic genre, even if the literary or oral format of their presentation is rational, matter-of-fact. Some of the substantive marks of an apocalyptic world-view in this
sense are:
-

spatial dualism between the present world and another world (or heaven); travel to or from heaven or hell; a temporal dualism between the present history and another age; the corruption of the cosmos as a whole, leaving none of its
a

components unsullied;
-

set
-

impossibility of remedy by means of human effort in the terms by the present system; the imminence of cosmic changes combining judgment and
the
the validation of the
events of

salvation;
-

unveiling, its call to faith, being based in already known experience or in the event of the apocalyptic word itself; the call to the listeners/hearers to live in a style not conformed to the
cosmos-shattering
models of the

unique

actors

corrupt cosmos; (angels, beasts) described

as

participating as

it

were

from outside in the historical process; the presence of a (presently small or invisible) community bearing the message, sharing today in suffering and destined to share in the coming fulfilment.

logically that in any setting where several components of complex symbol set can be cited as identifying marks, no one mark alone will suffice. Is one of these marks logically prior to the others? Which are fringe phenomena, dispensable for purposes of definition? Rather than a binary choice there will be a scale of degrees which a given text, or a given communitys view, will correspond to the type. For now we need somehow to deal with the significance of the entire Gestalt, without being able to detail the shadings of definability around the
It is obvious
a

edges. 20

1 do not claim that retrieving the apocalyptic idiom will be by itself a to unlock otherwise lost truths. It is rather that (in a setting where others are already using the apocalyptic mode) to reinstate the apocalyptic component of the Gospel may provide correctives at points where an immanentized hope in Christendom had robbed us of the capacity to discern bad news or to bring good. My having begun with modern neo-apocalyptic witnesses, demonstrating so to speak the vitality of the apocalyptic idiom from the limitexperiences of modern cosmology, should not be understood as granting that apocalyptic as a genre belongs on the edge of the canon. Jesus thought apocalyptically, as no scholar since Schweitzer denies. One of the learnings which arise from considering transdisciplin,1r~J

saving key

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the for another, in the architectonic sense that first of all there must be some kind of closure or synthesis in the one more basic realm before the next one can build upon it. Atomic physics is the basis for physical chemistry. Biochemistry must stand still before we can do genetics on its shoulders. Literary criticism must do its job before we can do exegesis; exegesis must have reached solid conclusions before theology can use the Bible .... As obvious as this architectonic ordering seems, it is a mistake. Each higher level of interpretation must in real community experience go on before the lower levels of work have been concluded, and that not only because they never will be concluded. If, however, that is the case, we must accept that the zvay in which the higher levels can appropriate the underlying materials must always be a risky process of premature selection, rather than waiting for assured results. It is thus without apology that an essay like this must accept the challenge of selectivity, abandoning any notion of completeness or conclusiveness. One has no choice but to evaluate the contribution of apocalyptic to ethics before others have settled on its role in the canon. As a Christian ethicist, I should be asking the question posed to believing communities centuries after the apostles by the presence of indubitably apocalyptic texts in our canon, and therefore in our liturgies and our imagination. What the non-technician in the reading of specialized literatures can seek to bring to the conversation bridging the distance between exegesis and modern political ethics is an awareness of the rules of transdisciplinary dialogue as a discipline in its own right. To ask what believers in the late twentieth century can appropriate of the message of an ancient text is not necessarily subordinate to the historians scepticism about who wrote a given text, or to the unfinished debate about whether specific ideas were original (or distinctive) back

dialogue as itself a quasi-discipline is that we are helped to escape long-dominant assumption that one discipline is foundational

then.2

The axioms underlying our post-enlightenment deprecation of the apocalyptic mode can be critiqued from several directions. My listing of those perspectives cannot be exhaustive. One honest answer, which we do well to look at first, is the one technically called modernist. If it should be satisfactory, we should have simplified things greatly. It as assumes basically adequate a contemporary rationalist and humanistic meaning system. With that as a grid, we can then choose to accredit fragments of wisdom from other worlds of meaning, but none of them would shake us or save us. Apocalypticism as a global frame of reference is then unacceptable by definition. If we should choose to retrieve this or that mythic image from its apocalyptic setting, that is only because it can be purged of unacceptable shades of meaning. One way to test such a view would be to take it consistently. What would be the shape of the thoroughly non-apocalyptic stance held by those who look at apocalypticism from outside? Can we reverse the already itemized marks and attain a formal description of an ordinary or
50

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reasonable modern view of things? Would a normal world-view know for sure that the cosmos is unspoiled? That it is closed, with no intervention from beyond, no radical change in its structures, and no divisions within it being conceivable? That human action can control historys outcome? That a uniform ethos for all kinds of people is possible and desirable? That the language of divine agency is meaningless? To ask the question thus bluntly is almost to have answered it. There is not and has never been within Christianity a single sober, solid, univercontrast with which sally self-evident rational base line a constitutes Some of the marks of departure.&dquo; apocalyptic thought what such a system might be are recognizable within what some call modernity, but some are not. Modernity as a label for something clear seems to be a firm concept mostly in the minds of those who today doubt its adequacy or welcome its passing. We do better, then, not to ask a priori how to play off an apocalyptic cosmology as a whole against reality, in order to study its oddity as we do an exotic culture. We should rather investigate in what setting the apocalyptic vision of things, or specific elements of it, would make sense. There must after all have been some context in which the documents of an apocalyptic genre, including the cosmology they presuppose, communicated coherently. To rephrase after these introductory thoughts the question underlying my present assignment, I suggest that it brings together the following questions of method: - Is it possible to specify certain elements of the apocalyptic world-view which might in their setting be held to be not odd or irrational, but rather appropriate reactions to the way the world really is? Do the contemporary styles we began with fit in such a mould? - Should that be the case, would it be possible, within the acceptance of apocalyptic as one fitting mode of moral discourse, to establish criteria, as the early Christians seem to have done, to distinguish between valid and less valid or false forms of it?23 - Should that be the case, might the present state of the arms race, in which our contemporaries are already speaking apocalyptically, be an appropriate specimen with which to assess a criteriology for the comparative evaluation of apocalyptic stances? What might it then be about the visions of history which made sense for the early witnesses, which we might with proper care appropriate? In saying appropriate I intentionally avoid terms like transpose or translate, images like grid or lens, as if there might be a rather formal

cosmology, in

linguistic operation, a correspondence or replication of some simple quasi-mechanical kind. It is rather that the believing community today participates imaginatively, narratively, in the past history as her own history, thanks to her historians, but also thanks to her poets and prophets. As that story becomes her own story she retrieves the posture of her precursor generations and discovers in her own setting something quite original yet essentially like what the faith had meant before.
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THE REOPENED EDGES OF THE COSMOS - LIVING AN ALTERNATIVE WORLD

Most of the disciplines which challenge our intellect and most of the arts which feed our spirits have today come to the end of the encyclopaedists vision, which thought that all of reality can be encompassed, within any one discipline, with no gaps or leftovers. Even the natural sciences are transcending their fantastically fruitful traditional reliance on mathematical and mechanical models, in favour of uncertainty, when handling the very large, the very small, the very ancient.... The industry of innerworldly apocalyptic, which we call futurology, began a generation ago by very confidently extrapolating recent trends into the next century. Now, however, it attends to the system-immanent ceilings and thresholds beyond which trends cannot possibly continue. The globes water and air no longer can be drawn on as infinite life-giving reservoirs. As the natural sciences had since the Enlightenment served as model for the human sciences, history and the arts as well, now it is the breakdown or the limits of the system-immanent models from which the rest of culture borrows. It is a demonstration of that modern relativizing of system-immanent models when in the two specimens of thought about the nuclear challenge with which we began we see sober ethical statements being made which burst the bonds of system-immanent normalcy. Both NATO fundamentalism in the face of the Soviet threat and liberal survivalism in the face of the nuclear menace are instances of the breakdown of a mode of reasoning which had seemed adequate before. Western intellectuals are impressed by the breakdown of the selfconfidence with which Occidentals have identified our self-esteem with the progress of our entire cultural enterprise. Paul Hanson of Harvard, in his study of Old Testament and intertestamental apocalyptiCS,2 begins and ends with references to the breakdown in our generation of the Western vision of progress. Whether North Atlantic bourgeois culture is either intellectually or physically convincing should have in principle nothing to do with what was going on in the early Christian centuries, but it has much to do with our readiness to comprehend. Romanticism and existentialism have tried before to loosen the lid which rationalistic explanations had tried to fasten on the world of the possible, but they did it in ways affording little substantial help for ethics. I submit now that by juxtaposing the moral challenge of the arms race, the hermeneutic insights of the sociology of knowledge, and the objective presence within the Western cultural canon of apocalyptic modes of communication, we can essay a restatement of how those modes may help us to see things as they really are.z5 Some have suggested that vision or imagination characterizes the unique contribution of the apocalyptic genre, as contrasted to virtue or law governing other moral models. 26 That is evidently true, but it is rather a label for a problem than an explanation. Every effort to character52

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ize the distinctiveness of the genre uses another key phrase. The characterization is made less formal and empty if we ask in each case what difference the genre makes for the place of Caesars sovereignty within Gods purpose. Larry Rasmussen proposes to borrow a term from another field, suggesting that what the apocalyptic perspective enables the believing community to do is to deconstruct the self-evident picture of how things are which those in power use to explain that they cannot but stay that waxy. 27 Rasmussen quotes Paolo Freire:
in order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation they can transform. 28
...

Some superficial liberationism falls into a too simple appropriation of Freires point. It is possible to describe both &dquo;the reality of oppression&dquo; and how the oppressed &dquo;can transform their world&dquo; in naively ideological Marxist terms, thereby being subject to challenge both as realism and as ideal. Yet the point remains valid. A community playing the victim role within a society needs first of all to know not what they would do differently if they were rulers, nor how to seize power, but that the present power constellation which oppresses them is not the last word. The first word in the reaffirmation of the human dignity of the oppressed is thus to constitute in their celebrative life the coming Rule of God and a new construal of the cosmos under God. To sing The Lamb is Worthy to Receive Power, as did the early communities whose hymnody is reflected in the first vision of John, is not mere poetry. It is performative proclamation. It redefines the cosmos in a way prerequisite to the moral independence which it takes to speak truth to power and to persevere in living against the stream when no reward is in sight. Rasmussen gathers the strands of his characterization of what the apocalyptic critique attacks under the heading triumphalism; Douglas John Hall links it with the older Lutheran denunciation of what he calls a theology of glory. Neither of these slogan phrases is derived first of all from the realm of social ethics, but we can move on from what they say to make that connection.

BEFORE CONSTANTINE: AFTER CHRISTENDOM One component of such a deconstruction which the early seers applied to the rulers of Rome and which we can apply to our own Caesars, will be to dismantle the notion that the ruler is the primary agent of divine movement in history.29 Eusebius made Constantine a saviour figure, and ever since then popular piety has been ready to ascribe to the ruler or to the nation a privileged role, reaching beyond their own territory, in
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achieving Gods world purposes. 311 Seldom are those divine purposes so as to include reconciling enemies or empowering victims. The apocalyptic critique, by demythologizing the kings imperial pretensions, calls rulers back to the modesty of the internal ordering assigned to empire by Romans 13.
conceived
us:

A second component will be to doubt the axiom that Caesar is one of i.e. that the linkage between the churchs moral insights and effective historical change must be made through the exercise by baptized believ-

believer.&dquo;
its
must

of the power of the political office which they possess. This assumes either that a monarch, already sovereign, will be converted and will authentically revolutionize his political ethic, or else that believers in the exercise of their democratic rights have the power (both the numbers and the unity) to dictate what the state will do. Social science sobriety suffices to show us that neither of these construals is normally true to the facts. The apocalyptic vision would free us to go on proclaiming the demands of divine righteousness without being stopped by the argument that no-one in office is heeding or teaching, since the reason for the applicability of the demands is not that the rulers are representative
ers

Here the constantinian

logic reveals an internal contradiction.

One of

components is the claim that the moral requirements of officeholders

be realistically adjusted, authorizing to the Christian in office levels of selfishness and violence not otherwise considered good, in order to enable them to discharge the duties of office. Martin Luther said this in one way; Reinhold Niebuhr has said it in another. A second which we saw in the Brown quotation - is the claim that if public offices are not filled by Christians whose regeneration, sanctification, and knowledge of Gods revealed will qualify them to do the work exceptionally well, they will be filled by persons of lesser moral integrity, who will do it worse. Logically these two theses contradict each other. The only way to reconcile them would be to claim, as in the self-image of Americas recent media hero, Colonel North, that God-fearing people have more right to violate the laws, moral and statutory, than do the
heathen.

Thirdly; the apocalyptic consciousness may free us to live without the myth of a complete systemic causal overview of how all that we do will work out for the best, because we see things whole and intervene responsibly. The axiom of systemic causative perspicuity is part of the legacy of the enlightenment in its most sanguine phases. This axiom underlies all proportionate moral reasoning. Whenever otherwise undesirable means are justified on the grounds of the ends they serve, the indispensable prior assumption is that we all understand with relatively high levels of certainty how the causative nexus works. Such deterministic thinking has served us well in the natural sciences, and to some extent in understanding the individual personality in the local family setting. It works in analyzing statistically phenomena like markets, where most of the players act naturally by the same rules. By
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the nature of the

numerous

equipped

case it cannot work as well in larger settings where actors work at cross purposes, and still less when they are to deceive each other. Yet consequential reasoning

depends

for its coherence upon the relative certainty with which it projects alternative outcomes, to make any sense at all of particular choices upon which particular outcomes are held to depend. Predictability of consequences is the presumption subjacent to consequential justification for doing evils (which it is hoped will be lesser) to attain goods (which it is promised will be greater). Any meaning-system which explains events in terms like cause, in order to explain choices in terms like consequences, has to assume that the whole system can be reliably known. Yet by defillitioll no mode of knowing the system can claim infinite applicability. The mechanical models of physics acknowledge iii their OWIl terms thresholds of uncertainty for the very small. The document-bound modes of historiography, the object-bound modes of archaeology, and the grammar-bound modes of literary interpretation are all in agreement today to back away from the visions of encyclopaedic adequacy with which two centuries ago they were hoping to clear things up. The collapse of the epistemological optimism of the encyclopaedist vision thus revokes the closing of the cosmos with which modernity began. Yet if the cosmos is not closed, the pragmatic case for war as the lesser evil falls. 32 The challenge addressed here to the kind of pragmatic politics which often calls itself realistic is not a sweeping denial of consequential modes of reasoning. There would be good arguments to that effect&dquo; quite independently of the present theme. The present point is a more modest argument: it is that the consequential mode of moral evaluation is appropriate to a setting where the agents dispose of considerable power over events and far-reaching knowledge of the pertinent causal connections. The internal rationality of consequential reasoning is destroyed when immense multi-actor systems render deceptive any justifications of actions on the grounds of expected results. This unpredictability is not a fluke nor an information gap soon to be filled. It is part of the structure of historical existence. Such considerations have led sages like Hannah Arende4 and George Kennan15 to call for an ethos of means. If the systemic determinism whereby the bomb-rattlers propose to control all of history is not convincing, because the approximation to omniscience which their projections presuppose is wrong both as to facts and as to mechanism, we shall perceive more readily and invent more creatively the alternative means of conflict management capable of healing those relationships which reciprocal menaces tend to destroy. I have identified four facets of our cultures way of reasoning morally, without stopping to challenge them all with equal fullness: a) that Caesar is the privileged mover of history; b) that Caesar is a Christian to whose professional needs the otherwise valid Christian moral rules should be adjusted;
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c)

that the global social process can be known, as a causal nexus, with certainty adequate to base upon it consequential judgments which justify casuistically doing specific harm to

d)

of Christians is represented with sufficient cultural force and numbers that there will be no deep clash between Christian moral commitments and what all people of Good Will can discern to be good, so that Christian moral insight can be transposed without remainder into binding guidance for everyone.

specific adversaries; that the value-system

Here I have stated these axioms quite formally. Their applicability to the justifications given for the nuclear threat is obvious, as is their contradicting the conditions in which apocalyptic arose. In pure logic and in simple fact, they do not obtain any more in the twentieth century than they did in the second. Why then has it been so easy to take them for granted for generations? This, I submit, is the logical outworking of the posture of establishment, which since the fourth century trained Christian teachers to think with rulers more than with ViCtiMS.31 What an apocalyptic vision will contribute is not that we substitute (as fundamentalism does) a literal reading of the scheme of Ezekiel, or of Mark 13 or of John of Patmos, for the scenarios of the Pentagon. It is not that we will overdramatize the church/world clash in a time when or in places where in fact that clash has been mitigated in some respects by favourable cultural changes. 37 It is that the hymnic vision of a cosmos smaller than the God who made it and sent His son and us to redeem it will relativize both the gloomy and the confident determinisms to which we have been captive. The paradoxical testimony that the cross, not the crown, is the key not only to some kind of ahistorical salvation but to JHWHs righteousness in the world is what frees us from the cult of Caesars old and new, from the bondage of modernitys myths, in both their despairing and their presumptuous forms, as well as from unthinking reaction to them. If Caesar is not the only mover of history, we shall place more hope in non-imperial strategies and tactics: voluntary associations, churches, militant non-co-operation, and the models of community maintenance which have kept Jews and Baptists and authentic Orthodox believers in the Soviet Union morally more powerful than the party, or which have enabled Christian communities in China to outlive Mao and the Red Guards, and the blacks in South Africa to survive under the Boers. 38 If Caesar is not the most celebrated member of the believing community, as he was not in the first century, and is not today, we shall not filter the moral guidelines derived from the faith through the grid of

whether someone committed to satisfying an electorate and administering the state can live up to them all, whether that grid be advocated under the rubric of creation, of history, of redemption, or of hope If the church is not (or is no longer) established, either by dominating
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as she was not in not feel filter the moral shall to obligated century, implications of belief through the question of whether they demand more saintliness or moral heroism than can be asked of ordinary people. If the assigned question had been what is wrong with the arms race? there would have been many other perspectives to include. If on the other hand we ask how might war or the threat of war be justified? there is not one sober way to argue an affirmative answer; namely to claim that we are responsible to govern history, in the light of our adequate knowledge of how history works, by doing lesser evils to prevent greater evils. That presumption that there is in history a degree of perspecuity sufficient to warrant our becoming the judges between our neighbours interests and our own, is part of what the apocalyptic vision strikes down. The particular challenge I address here to the lesser evil argument is not a demand for ahistorical purity which would (e.g.) eschew electoral participation, parliamentary politicking or lobbying, in settings where those recourses obtain. What I challenge here is action taken against the stated principles of ones system for the sake (allegedly) of a greater good: a colonel lying to the President and Congress in order to defend democracy, taking innocent metropolitan populations hostage to nuclear terror in the name of the rule of law. The debate is as old as Caiaphas reason for delivering Jesus. What increases its weight and its dubiety, thereby escalating the argument into an apocalyptic mode, is that the calculation of the trade-off is done in cold blood, months and years ahead of any projected deployment 39 and when the greater good one claims to serve is so absolutized that there is not a sacrifice one would not make in

society numerically or by possessing privileged status,

the first
we

its

name.

BUT CAN WE ASK PEOPLE TO BELIEVE THAT?

Our experience has taught us to assume that the assent of others, or at least their respect, or at least our submitting to their mode of validation, is a precondition to our own right to hold to what we believe. Physical claims must be validated by the experimental method, historical claims by documents, matters of high culture by the experts and of popular culture by the media marketplace. This notion of possible universal validation by common consent is the legacy of a time when either ethnic and linguistic homogeneity or the dominance of a specific 61ite made it possible to go on thinking that can we expect everyone to agree? is a normal way to phrase the truth question. 40 From the fact that in these ways the believing community distinguishes between the values which guide discipleship and those which may find effective implementation in the civil community it does not by any means follow that believers are unconcerned from the civil realm, that they have nothing to say to it or that they withdraw from it.
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community thinking in apocalyptic They have accepted only as facts but as their epistemological condition. They are unembarrassed by the fact that the ideas they hold would not convince others, for whom Christ is not sitting at the Right Hand. A remaining segment of our task in interpreting the apocalyptic mode is then to ask how validation must look when the consensus of all reasonable people may not be appealed to. Why did the first hearers or readers of the messages of Ezekiel or Daniel listen? Why did the first readers of Johns apocalypse respect it? Because it resonated, in a literary genre different from the other apostolic writings but in an an old and familiar vocabulary, with the identity commitments which the early messianic synagogues were already most sure about. It resonated with their Jewish monotheism confessing only one ultimate mover of history; with their messianic trust that the way of the cross had ultimately to be the way for the world; and with their pentecostal conviction that the meaning of the Father and the Son would continue to be actualized in their own worship and mission. What accredits a prophetic word is not its demonstrable control of events but its coherence with the already known story. The point that apocalyptic makes is not only that people who wear crowns and who claim to foster justice by the swords are not as strong as they think - true as that is: we still sing, 0 where are Kings and Empires now of old that went and came? It is that people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe. One does not come to that belief by reducing social process to mechanical and statistical models, nor by winning some of ones battles for the control of ones own corner of the fallen world. One comes to it by sharing the life of those who sing about
a

By definition,

the members of

terms do not thus count on everyones agreement. their minority status and their powerlessness not

the Resurrection of the slain Lamb.

September 1987. I thank the Rt Rev. Richard Harries, respondent, for points needing clarification. The originally assigned topic was Armaments and Eschatology; I thank the Society for the freedom to narrow it in the way that seemed most provocative. 2 Ernest W. Lefever (ed.), The Apocalyptic Premise, Washington, Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1982, represents those who reject in principle any challenge to routine realistic modes of thought. 3 Stephen King-Hall, Defence in the Nuclear Age, K.-H. Services Ltd, 1958, American edition Nyack NY, Fellowship. King-Halls first statement to the effect that "Total war has abolished itself" was written in the 16 August 1945 issue (No. 475) of his King-Hall
Hall, Oxford, 19

1 Paper presented by invitation to the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics, at Wycliffe
some

indicating

of the

Newsletter.

4 "It is more and more agreed that the concept of a just war is an anachronism": editorial entitled On "Absolute" Morality, WorldView, June 1959, p. 2. The first prominent statement of the idea that the just war tradition (JWT) is outmoded may well have been that of the 1948 Amsterdam First Assembly of the World Council of Churches: "In these circumstances the tradition of a just war ... is now challenged." Report of Section IV in W.A. Visser t Hoof (ed.), The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches, New York,

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Harper, 1949,
can

p. 89; also p. 40 in Donald

Durnbaugh (ed.),
a

On Earth Pence,

Elgin,

Brethren

Press, 1978. The

possible meanings

of such

meet the criteria of the JWT but war may still be justified as politically inevitable although sinful; (c) that there are some questions concerning which the JWT and pacifism need not disagree; (d) that we must find some other as yet unknown better way of thinking. 5 This is the gist of the double effect theory of the modern Catholic pastoral tradition, most fully discussed in Richard McCormick and Paul Ramsey (eds.), Doing Evil to Achieve Good, Chicago, Loyola University Press, 1978. Its adequacy as a new and qualitatively more decisive angle has been doubted by Methodists Stanley Hauerwas (132-168 in his Against the Nations ) and William Williamson ("The people who believe the bomb is our only hope and the people who believe that doing away with the bomb is our only hope have much in common"; in The Things That Make for Peace, The Christian Century, 6 May 1986, p. 453). Survivalism is also used as a term of reproach by George Weigel, in his Tranquillitas Ordinis, 1987, New York, Oxford, the fullest conservative criticism of where the American Catholic bishops thought on peace is going. 7 In Defense of Creation: The Nuclear Crisis and a Just Peace, Nashville, Graded Press, 1986. Cf. the critical response of Paul Ramsey and Stanley Hauerwas, Speak up for Just War or Pacifism!, London and University Village, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. The primary impetus for this centring on the biological threat was Jonathan Schells bestseller,
6

morally, logically valid but no modern war

statement are several: (a) that the JWT is can live up to its requirements; (b) that no war

The Fate of the Earth, New York, Avon, 1982. 8 The use of creation as code term for the ecological agenda has been reinforced by the current World Council of Churches study process, in which the integrity of creation is to stand in complementary tension with justice and peace. thought " Richard John Neuhaus wrote in 1971 a pamphlet In Defense of People, New York, Macmillan, attacking nature romantics and malthusians. He did not, however, argue that the nuclear issue should not be seen ecologically. He would have, had it been a lively theme at the time. That demonstrates how recent is the prominence of this perspective. 10 Cf. The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics in my The Priestly Kingdom, UND Press, Notre Dame, 1985, pp. 135ff. The Methodist bishops do not argue the truth of these assumptions; they simply take them for granted. The more biblical alternative to such establishment assumptions would be not social withdrawal but a more critically discernform of prophetic presence. ing 11 Winning the Peace, Joint Pastoral Letter of the French Bishops, ET edited by James V. Schall, S.J., San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1984 pp. 101-120. 12 It seems not to need to be argued how/why Anglo-Saxon democratic freedom is less a value than is peace. thisworldly 13 Eternity, June 1980 pp. 16ff. The evangelical editors of the monthly Eternity, if they had would hardly have agreed with Brown that the fear of death which kept given it the Hebrews in bondage in Egypt was their scruples about destroying civilization. 14 For a picture of the new wave of writings seeking to interpret apocalyptic, cf. below note. 26. 15 It is of course possible for fanatics to use apocalyptic as an excuse for violence: cf. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, London, Secker and Warburg, 1957. Susceptibility to such abuse is, however, not peculiar to that genre. The same can be done from the base of contemplative spirituality (Bernard preaching the crusades), or with the language of Niebuhrian realism. The planning for nuclear holocaust is being done by realists. What justifies violence is the substance communicated, not the genre. An apocalyptic who believes that the Lamb is Lord will not glorify violence. It is noteworthy that the critics of the apocalyptic mode blame it for both social passivity and for massacre, most people guilty of perpetrating both are non-apocalyptic. although 16 People like Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity, Philadelphia Fortress, 1982, are sure one can be quite clear about the details of the early churches setting. Wayne Meeks in his The First Urban Christians, New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1983, is more careful but is guided by much the same vision of what being sure would mean or what it would take.

a thought,

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Krister Stendahl, article, Biblical Theology, Contemporary, in Interpreters Bible Vol. I, Nashville, Abingdon, 1962, pp. 418-432. Dictionary, 18 Wayne Meeks in his Understanding New Testament Ethics, Journal of Biblical Literature,

17

105, 1986, pp. 3-11, restates the distinction as if it were self-evident. It is self-evident on one level, but as Benjamin Ollenburger shows What Krister Stendahl "meant" — A Normative Critique of "Descriptive Biblical Theology" , in Horizons in Biblical Theology, Vol. 8/1, June 1986, pp. 61-98. It conceals semantic problems that are not immediately evident nor easily resolved. 19 "Apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian Theology": Ernst Käsemann, The Beginnings of Christian Theology, in New Testament Questions of Today, London/Philadelphia, SCM/Fortress, 1969, p. 102. 20 Semanticists speak of bounded sets as those in which all members are defined by the same marks; of fuzzy sets where multiplicity of marks prevents firm outside borders, yet still permits a central definition: cf. Zadeh, L.H., Fuzzy Sets, Information and Control, 8, 1965, pp. 338-353; Cohen, P.J. and Hersch R., Non-Cantorian Set Theory, Scientific American 217, 1967, pp. 104-106; Kaufmann, A., Introduction to the Theory of Fuzzy Subsets, New York, Academic Press, 1975. 21 One very careful contribution to the understanding of apocalyptic in the Jewish experience is that of Paul Hanson in his The Birth of Apocalypse.I applaud Hansons impatience (p. 7) with the mode of simply listing as definition of apocalypse a number of notions found in such literature, his dissatisfaction with borrowing (over against sources within Judaism) as an explanation, and his respect for the genre in its own right. His work does not answer our questions, however. His categories of vision versus reality, and of myth are so broadly used as not to provide much guidance to one who would ask about the ethical appropriation of apocalyptic in the late twentieth century. He validates apocalyptic as not a crazy way to think, for people with a certain background in a certain kind of situation, but he does not help us to find what might count as the truth of such a word. I must leave to his professional peers to evaluate his high level of trust in the utility of liturgical modes of analysis and in the formative impact of Deutero-Isaiah. 22 My doubting that modernism will work globally does not mean rejecting any of the specific points at which the meaningfulness of ancient texts must face challenges in postBiblical cultures, including our own. What I cannot admit is that a decision against the ancient genre be made a priori without first encountering the texts empathetically. 23 The way my exposition began with a contemporary dilemma may have seemed to grant that having to admit the claims of another genre, especially one which challenges our mental habits, is a concession, a setback, a loss of substance. The opposite is the case. The standard account of moral reasoning says that one must choose between (or combine) an ethic of principles (claiming timeless validity rooted in the nature of things, a notion losing credibility with change) and one of prudence (assuming full knowledge of causal connections and the possession of power). I do not claim that either of those modes can be dispensed with; yet there is much to gain, an enrichment rather than a loss, by asking what they leave out that belongs (a) to the canon and (b) to the real world. 24 Op. cit. revised edition 1979, Philadelphia, Fortress. 25 I shall be drawing without detailed acknowledgement upon recent work of colleagues, especially Jacques Ellul, Larry Rasmussen, Roy Branson, and Douglas John Hall.I have not attempted to document here the learnings from a growing flood of syntheses by Scripture scholars pointing in the same direction. Some are listed by Branson (next note). 26 Roy Branson, Apocalypse and the Moral Imagination, in James Walters (ed.), Justice and High Tech Medicine, Loma Linda, Ca, 1987, Loma Linda University Press. 27 Larry Rasmussen, Bonhoeffer and the Public Vocation of an Eschatological Community, unpublished, presented to Bonhoeffer section of the American Academy of Religion, Atlanta, 23 November 1986, cited by permission. 28 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 34. I reported at the outset that one way to disqualify apocalypse (which one rejects, in contrast to eschatology or prophecy, which one accepts) has been to say that it portrays not history but the end thereof. That is true only literally. When tyranny seems to dominate the world, the only way the victim can see the end of tyranny is as the end of the world as it is, and any survival beyond that as a

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resurrection, with both the end and the beginning demanding divine intervention. That should hardly make its social message untranslatable. 29 To deny that Caesar is Guds preferred instrument is not to relegate him or his world to the devil. Cf. my Christian Witness to the State, North Newton, Faith and Life Press, 1974. Neither the early Christians nor minority Christians since then have simply identified
with Satan. government Recent interpreters of violence
in the interest of justice speak of it as last resort or That is not the vision with which the mediaeval synthesis was inaugurated. Constantine was a saviour figure, inaugurating a new age, not a mere peacekeeper. 31 Jomes Smylie, The Christian Church and National Ethos, in Paul Peachey (ed.), Biblical Realism Confronts the Nation, Nyack and Scottdale, Fellowship Publications, 1963, pp. 33-44. 32 in What Would You Do?, Scottdate, Herald Press, 1983, pp. 14ff., I stated in a popular vein the dependence of the case for violence upon a debateable consequentialism. 33 There are metaethical arguments challenging the implicit deontologies behind consequentialism, and Christian arguments challenging its disregard for notions of divine sovereignty or command. Cf. pp. 159ff, Instead of Efficacy,in my The Original Revolution, Scottdale, Herald, 1972. On Violence, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1969, pp. 4ff., also in her Crises of the Republic, 34 New York, Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1969, pp. 105ff. 35 George Kennan, Foreign Policy and Christian Conscience, Atlantic Mouthly, Vo. 203, No. 5, May1959, pp. 44-49. Cf. note 10 above. 37 Well-known over-simple statements of the dualism are those of William Stringfellow and Vernard Eller. To take seriously the basic validity of the apocalyptic stance need not imply disrespect for the concrete values attained by democratic government in (e.g.) the defence of religious liberty, limited government, the franchise, etc. Such a systemic dualism as would refuse the vote or reject public social services need not follow. Nonetheless the fundamental dualism remains valid at other points where neither moral nor institutiunal progress can be claimed; cf. Walter Winks forthcoming work Engaging the Powers, Fortress, 1989? 38 The above paragraphs moke clear that the apocalyptic vision does not mean a denial of political rationality, as modernity would assume. To take account of the limits of ones information, or of the thresholds beyond which ones sense-making instruments do not work is not abdication but a higher level of rationality. The first systematic statement of the limits of what nuclear weapons can do was made as we saw by a hardnosed military scientist (note 2above). 39 The just war tradition calls for last resort as one of its standard criteria. The of readiness with modern technology mocks that criterion. institutionalizing 40 The appeal to general agreement has several meanings, overlapping but distinct Sometimes it means the universal consensus of all cultures (what the ancients called jus the ); sometimes the intrinsic meaning of a concept as a linguistic claim, sometimes gentium the inherent mechanism of a social structure as a sociological claim, sometimeswhat most people would agree with if asked. Each definition calls for a different kind of argument. Nature is one of the frequent code words for the entire approach.

emergency.

36

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