CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY IN AN AGE OF TERROR

Peter C. Hodgson

Presented as the Armstrong Lectures at Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, Michigan, October 21-22, 2004. The author is an emeritus professor of theology in the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University.

[1-17-05]

Part I: A Theological Critique of the War on Terror

The New Millennium: Not What We Expected

The new millennium began with high expectations. The Cold War had ended, the United States was the world's only remaining superpower, and Americans were experiencing an unprecedented boom of prosperity fueled by new technologies and rising stock values. The chief worry, as I recall, in the winter of 1999-2000 was the Y2K computer problem, which never materialized. Danger signs were on the horizon but mostly ignored. My own agenda for the first years of the new millennium focused on challenges posed by ecological and cosmological awareness, the struggle for justice, and cultural and religious pluralism. The problem of terrorism was not on my radar screen.

All that changed dramatically on September 11, 2001. Before we knew it, the Cold War had been replaced by a Holy War--not only a holy war directed against us by Osama bin Laden and his Islamic jihad, but also, as it turns out, a holy war in response. It is called the war on terror. Despite President Bush's insistence that the U.S. is not waging war on Islam, there are indications to the contrary. One of his relatives is quoted as saying that the President sees the war on terror "as a religious war." "He doesn't have a politically correct view of this war. His view of it is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know."

Many excellent books and articles have been published since 9/11 on terrorism, the war on terror, and the cultural conflict between the Arabic and Western worlds by political analysts and advisers, sociologists, psychologists, and historians. Not much has been heard from theologians. The religious voice that has been heard has come from conservatives and evangelicals in support of the war policies. The mainstream academic and church theologians have been mostly silent. A prophetic public theology such as that represented by Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr and Paul Tillich during and after the Second World War, or by Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement, is not to be found today. It is for this reason that I decided to speak out.

The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror

The first thing to note is that "violent ideas and images are not the monopoly of any single religion. Virtually every major religious tradition--Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist--has served as a resource for violent actors." Mark Juergensmeyer wrote these words in a book called Terror in the Mind of God, and he goes on to remark that acts of religious terrorism are "symbolic statements aimed at providing a sense of empowerment to desperate communities."

These are words worth pondering as we reflect on Islam, which is the religion that provides legitimation for the terrorism that is mostly threatening us today. Bernard Lewis, a distinguished Mideast scholar, recently published The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. Modern and postmodern Islam is certainly in a state of crisis for a complex set of cultural, historical, and religious reasons. Lewis remarks that Islam as such is not an enemy of the West, but a growing number of Muslims are hostile and dangerous, and have come to see the United States as an irreconcilable enemy of Islam. They have taken up the idea, which is found not only in the Qur'an but also in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (and elsewhere in antiquity), that God has enemies and needs human help to identify and dispose of them. This is the idea that lies behind the doctrine of holy war or jihad. Strictly, "jihad" means "struggle"--not only the struggle to do God's will but also to spread Islam and defend it from attack. Although jihad is not supposed to include aggressive warfare, it has come to mean just that for many Muslims. But restrictions apply that are rather similar to the just war theory of Western politics. Lewis remarks that "at no point do the basic texts of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder. At no point . . . do they even consider the random slaughter of uninvolved bystanders."

The problem is that the idea of holy war can slip over rather easily into a legitimation of unholy terror on the part of Muslim extremists and fundamentalists. Unfortunately fundamentalism has carried the day with the collapse of efforts to reform Islam politically, socially, and intellectually in the 20^th century. Obviously most Muslims are not terrorists, but they lack the resources or the will to refute the terrorist distortions of Islamic theology and law. The West bears significant responsibility for this situation, as Rashid Khalidi points out in his recently published Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East. Western imperialism in the 18^th and 19^th centuries brought a humiliating end to the great medieval and early modern Islamic civilization that challenged Europe until the end of the 17^th century. Despite determined resistance, by the early 20^th century almost the entire Muslim world had been incorporated into the four European empires of Britain, France, Russia, and the Netherlands. With the collapse of these empires, the Middle East was left in a condition of poverty and tyranny. Devastating statistics show how far the Muslim countries have slipped behind not only the West but the Asian rim socioeconomically. With the failure of political reform and earlier democratic experiments, the Arab world has (with the exception of Turkey) been dominated by corrupt tyrannies. A high birth rate has produced a growing population of unemployed, uneducated, and frustrated young men and women--desperate communities seeking empowerment.

The American Empire: The Only Remaining Superpower

After the European powers abandoned their colonies and the Soviet empire collapsed, the United States became the dominant power in the world, "the only remaining superpower." In the 1990s the New American Century Foundation called for a Pax Americana, a global economic and military empire modeled on Roman and British imperialism that would focus on the Middle East. The ideology of empire is fairly simple, says theologian John Cobb: "It expresses the desire to add to one's wealth and to dominate over others. . . . The ideology assumes that if one's group is able to assert its will over others, then it is superior to them and has the right to exploit them." In other words, might makes right. History shows that empires go through stages of innocence, consolidation, over-extension, and collapse. Ultimately they all collapse.

The United States until recently has been in the stage of innocence and consolidation. Reinhold Niebuhr in his now-classic book, The Irony of American History, published in 1952 at the height of the Cold War, pointed out that the American delusion of innocence, the belief that we are pursuing noble and divinely-sanctioned purposes, has blinded us to the temptations of power. Absolute power has been treated not as absolute corruption or even temptation but as blessing. Messianic idealism sabotages the development of political wisdom. Such idealism suffuses the language of President Bush, even as a more cynical use of power undergirds his actions. In a prophetic passage, Niebuhr warned that our belief in the possibility of mastering the forces of history "could tempt us to lose patience with the tortuous course of history. . . . We might be tempted to bring the whole of modern history to a tragic conclusion by one final and mighty effort to overcome its frustrations. The political term for such an effort is 'preventive war.' It is not an immediate temptation; but it could become so in the next decade or two. A democracy can not of course, engage in an explicit preventive war."

The Doctrine of Preemption: Imperial Arrogance

But we have. The doctrine of preemption, used to justify the invasion of Iraq, is preventive war. With it we have crossed a fateful Rubicon and moved into the stage of imperial over-extension and arrogance. We have assumed that a superpower does not need approval or support from the community of nations for its actions: we decide what is right because our knowledge and our might make it so. A senior CIA official describes it as "imperial hubris." Such hubris justifies the use of deception for its legitimation: Iraq had no connection with terrorist attacks on the U.S. and no weapons of mass destruction; the fall-back rationale, that we are liberating an oppressed people, has been undercut by the brutality and consequences of war. The real reason for the invasion was principally to demonstrate American power and command of world events, and Iraq was chosen as a target because it was relatively weak and defenseless (as compared with Iran or North Korea). Another reason was purely political: Karl Rove told Republicans in Congress that war with Iraq "will be good for us politically," and Bush's campaign was certainly based on that premise. Control of the world's second largest oil reserves, the promotion of market capitalism, and the establishment of a permanent military presence in the region also played a role.

We must ask, What gives the United States a unilateral right to impose a system of government on another nation? It is a presumptuous illusion to suppose that democracy can be imposed by force, and that the world can be remade in the image of America. A century of experience shows the enormous difficulty of creating democracy in the Middle East. It can be accomplished only in gradual stages and by drawing upon resources within the Islamic/Arabic heritage, which means that it will have a different character than the American version. The conditions of possibility for democracy must be nurtured: education, economic stability, political leadership, religious support.

In addition, of course, is the folly of invading an Arabic state by force of arms, which recalls to the minds of Muslims the Crusades and the European colonization. Richard Clarke in his now-famous book, Against All Enemies, writes: "Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda . . . a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country. Nothing else could have . . . so closed Muslim eyes and ears to our . . . calls for reform in their region. It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting, 'invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq'." Clarke also points to the diversion of military resources from the real war on terror, and the squandering of financial resources that could be put to better use in a peace initiative toward the Arabic world.

I am not suggesting that we should not defend ourselves against terrorist attacks. The defense includes tracking and dismantling terrorist cells by force of arms. Such a defense does not, in my view, require a doctrine of preemption, and it is better, for reasons I will indicate, not to call it a "war" on terror. Even if one does characterize it as "preemptive war," it is crucial to recognize, as Michael Ignatieff does (in a recent book on political ethics in an age of terror), that such a war is "a lesser evil." It is an evil because it entails the use of violence, but it is a lesser evil because it is designed to prevent a greater evil, bloody terrorist attacks on civilian targets. "Pre-emptive war can be justified only when the danger that must be pre-empted is imminent, when peaceful means of averting the danger have been tried and have failed and when democratic institutions ratify the decision to do so." The Iraq war, he says, failed to meet all three of these tests. Ignatieff's principal point is that without ethical rules and constraints the constant temptation of a war on terror is to descend to the logic of terror itself--an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, taking the vengeance of the Lord into our own hands. A terrorist's best hope of success is to taunt us until we "let slip the dogs of war." Our goal must be to preserve the identity of democratic society and prevent it from becoming what terrorists believe it to be.

To this end we need not only a defensive military strategy but an offensive political strategy. Clarke sets forth an alternative scenario to the invasion of Iraq. In addition to eliminating our vulnerabilities to terrorism at home, we should "have launched a concerted effort globally to counter the ideology of al Qaeda and the larger Islamic terrorist movement with a partnership to promote the real Islam, to win support for common American and Islamic values, and to shape an alternative to the popular fundamentalist approach." We should have been active in key countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan to strengthen open governments, encourage their reform, and make it possible for them to go after the roots of terrorism in social and economic grievances and fundamentalist indoctrination. Enormous economic resources would be needed to do these things, but they are not available because they were devoted to Iraq. Suppose we had taken the $300 to 500 billion that this war is likely to cost, and suppose that Europe and Asia could add another $500 billion: such resources might begin to make a difference in righting the age-old injustices suffered by the Arabic world. If we could empower desperate communities, they would no longer turn to terror.

Yitzhak Rabin, the martyred Prime Minister of Israel, once said to former Secretary of Defense William Perry that the remarkable thing about the United States was its restraint in the exercise of its great power. In restraint lies true strength. But no more. The dogs of war have been unleashed.

Theological Critique of the War on Terror: No Other Gods

I come now to the more explicitly theological part of my argument, namely a theological critique of the war on terror. For Jews and Christians, the critique is grounded in the first and second commandments: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth" (Exodus 20:2-4). A similar injunction is found in one of the five pillars of Islam: "There is no God but the God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God."

Unfortunately, these statements are subject to a dangerous misinterpretation. Interpreted ideologically, they can be used to justify intolerance and aggression against infidels. Our God is the only God, and we are God's true messengers and agents; our God has enemies, and we are justified in striking them down. The same book of Exodus that gives the commandments puts these words on the lips of God: "I will be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes. . . . I will send my terror in front of you, and will throw into confusion all the people against whom you shall come" (Exodus 23:22, 27). Terror seems to reside in the mind of God, and it becomes a tool against the enemies of Israel. A similar ideology appears in Islam, and it is not surprising that today there are terrorists who claim to know the mind of God, to know that God wills the violent destruction of fellow human beings. Their delusion is very empowering, and extremely dangerous. Interpreted critically, however, the Hebrew commandments and the Muslim profession of faith mean that God alone is God, that no human doctrine or action can claim divine legitimation, that nothing in heaven above or on earth below is to be made into an idol. They mean that we are liberated from slavery to earthly lords and are required to think critically and prophetically, wary of all human presumption, our own and that of others. What distinguishes the critical from the ideological interpretation? The intrinsic pluralism of the India-born religions is perhaps better equipped to guard against idolatry than the monotheism of the Israel-born religions. The latter religions need some sort of internal critical principle to protect against the first and most destructive form of sin, which is idolatry. Idolatry takes mundane and finite things, even if mighty and powerful, and worships them as divine and infinite.

Paul Tillich calls the critical principle the "Protestant principle," even though it transcends Protestantism and is present in all the great religions of humankind. This principle, he writes, "contains the divine and human protest against any absolute claim made for a relative reality, even if this claim is made by a Protestant church. . . . It is the guardian against the attempts of the finite and conditioned to usurp the place of the unconditional in thinking and acting. It is the prophetic judgment against religious pride, ecclesiastical arrogance, and secular self-sufficiency and their destructive consequences."

The critical principle is also the prophetic principle, and indeed prophecy is one of the ways that the Israelite tradition guards against the ideological interpretation of the first commandment. The Hebrew prophets chastise the pretensions of Israel and the arrogance of its kings; prophecy plays an important but lesser role in Islam and Christianity. Mysticism is another instrument of criticism, and it too is found in all the Abrahamic religions but outside the mainstream: the Jewish Cabbala, Islamic Sufism, and the Christian mystics. A third defense appears in the form of gospel, which seems to be unique to Christianity--the gospel proclaimed and lived by Jesus, whose cross, Tillich suggests, is the religious symbol that cancels all religious symbols, negates all idolatrous claims.

John Cobb points to the de-centering effect of the teaching of Jesus as it appears in the form of parables, beatitudes, and prayer. His radicalization of the commandments and his pronouncement of woes relativizes all human pretensions of virtue and brings about a reversal of values. Cobb highlights the anti-imperial elements of Jesus' proclamation of the basileia of God, which is the central theme of his ministry. The Greek word basileia is generally translated as "kingdom," but this is not a good translation because Jesus is talking about God's grace and compassion, not God's sovereign control. Cobb suggests that a better translation is "commonwealth," meaning a realm that is organized for the common good. Jesus depicts a community in which there are no ranks and privileges, where the logic of grace prevails over that of ordinary consequences, where the needs of others take priority over personal desires, where God's will is done and God's purposes fulfilled in the form of healing, release from servitude and debt, sharing of wealth, forgiveness of sin, care of neighbor, love of enemies. God does not do these things through human puppets; rather it is up to us to assume responsibility, to act in accord with the basileia vision, to challenge oppressive rulers, to work for the creation of a better society, one that is not in the service of wealth and global domination. Despite all the odds against it, Jesus' gospel of the commonwealth of God keeps breaking through, says Cobb; it is the deep ground for envisioning a just society, for resisting idolatry, for challenging empires and their wars. This is the way God acts in history--not by controlling what happens or designating enemies, but by luring humans through a vision of better possibilities.

War, it seems to me, is a form of idolatry, a false god, a divine destroyer. It can so easily become a totalizing rhetoric or practice that absorbs and justifies all actions, puts everything in its service, uses and abuses human beings, tears down in an instant what was built up through generations. Proponents of the war on terror want us to think that we are at war in order to foster patriotism, maintain secrecy, suppress opposition, and legitimate any actions deemed "necessary." Terrorists for their part claim to be involved in a great cosmic conflict between good and evil that justifies horrible atrocities. Cheap war-talk obscures the fact that its costs are always enormous and that war is justified only in extreme circumstances when all else has failed. Antoine Audouard, a French novelist, compares the experience of the French in Indochina with that of the Americans in Iraq. "Can the echoes of the valley of Dien Bien Phu be heard in the streets of Falluja, at the prison of Abu Ghraib? Forty years ago, French friends of America tried to warn Washington about the pitfalls of Vietnam. The French themselves repeated their mistakes in Algeria. In Iraq every day even the best of intentions are cruelly put to test by the miseries and sorrows of war. As the promoters of a modern, 'clean' war would have it, torture, humiliation, rapes, the killing of innocents, useless destruction are now avoidable. But to go to war is to go to the bottom of the pit: what if those tragedies are not 'collateral damage' but war itself, the essence of war?"

The war has itself become a kind of terror, terror waged against terror, terror breeding more terror. It is the worst kind of war--a war of occupation against an insurgency. Both continue despite the transfer of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government. Al Qaeda is stronger now than before the invasion, having gained support and recruits as a result of it. The insurgency has widened and deepened and will continue as long as American troops are present, as might have been anticipated from familiarity with the history of Arabic resistance to Western occupation. I foresee no good outcome to the present morass.