Peace Messenger

The Myth of American Diplomacy

The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy
by Walter L. Hixson
Yale University Press / 2008

Review/Comment

In The Myth of American Diplomacy, Walter Hixson, a professor of history at the University of Akron, puts forth the disturbing thesis that we Americans are so violent because we presume ourselves to be virtuous. He argues that the roots of our current situation can be traced back to America's Puritan beginnings and are sustained through a national narrative that glorifies violence as an instrument of moral purification and divine providence. The potent and deadly mix of self-interest and religious rationalization has created an American citizenry that turns to violence quickly, naturally and with a deep sense of entitlement. Violence has become enmeshed in the very notion of who we are as a nation.

--Timothy Renick, Christian Century, May 6, 2008

Politics, Prophecy and Peace

Politics and Prophecy: The Battle for Religious Liberty and the Authentic Gospel
Christa and Alan J. Reinach, editor
Pacific Press / 2008

In this new book from Pacific Press, nine Adventist authors collaborate to address current issues of religious liberty, building on "the conviction that there is more to modern culture-war battles than can be understood merely through policy analysis or moral discourse -- a conviction that prophetic perspective is essential." The book seeks to chart a way forward, writes co-editor Alan Reinach, that avoids the pitfalls of both "pietism and power politics," instead helping the church "to fulfill a prophetic function: to speak truth to power" (8).

Authors include John Graz, director of the Department of Public Affairs and Religious Liberty for the General Conference, and James Standish, director of legislative affairs for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, along with several others among the church's leading advocates of religious liberty: Barry Bussey, Jonathan Gallagher, Nicholas Miller, Michael Peabody, and Timothy Standish.

Merely in passing, of course, and with a humility worthy of Stephen Colbert, I also note that the book includes a chapter by the editor of this blog and the Peace Messenger electronic newsletter, described as follows by editor Reinach:

Douglas Morgan, an historian who teaches at Columbia Union College, provides a stirring warning about the abuse of American power in his chapter: “Marching to the Call of History.” He reviews the Adventist understanding of the role of the United States in prophecy, and recovers the Adventist imperative to be patriotic critics of the expansion of American power, and the erosion of republican principles.

More on Politics and Prophecy at the Liberty Blog!

The Military-Entertainment Complex

The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives
by Nick Turse
Metropolitan Books/2008

Hollywood and the Pentagon have been in an intricate dance of support and cross-promotion for almost a century, from a time when the Department of Defense was still quaintly -- if more accurately -- known as the War Department. Today, however, without leaving Hollywood behind, the Pentagon has branched out into the larger universe of entertainment. Video games, TV, NASCAR racing, social networking, professional bull riding, toys, professional wrestling, you name it and the military-entertainment complex has a hand in it -- and don't forget about the Pentagon's links to Starbucks, Apple Computer, Oakley sunglasses, and well, gosh… in one way or another, directly or indirectly, just about everything that looks civilian in (or out of) your house.

In fact, there's a remarkable new book that looks into all of this, while doing the best job around of updating the old military-industrial complex, a term whose hard-edged simplicity an ever-expanding Pentagon long ago left in the dust. Whatever you do, don't miss Nick Turse's The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. It's an eye-opener on the degree to which we are, without realizing it, a militarized society; it is, as well, the latest spin-off book from Tomdispatch.com, where some of its parts were initially tested out. But let me just quote Chalmers Johnson on The Complex: "Americans who still think they can free themselves from the clutches of the military-industrial complex need to read this book. The gimmicks the Pentagon uses to deceive, entrap, and enlist gullible 18 to 24 year olds make signing up anything but voluntary. Nick Turse has produced a brilliant exposé of the Pentagon's pervasive influence in our lives."

--Tom Englehardt, "Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon Goes Hollywood," March 20, 2008.

Available at 32% discount in Peace Pursuits, the APF online store.

Daydream Believers

Michiko Kakutani's review of a new book by Fred Kaplan, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, provides a succinct retrospective on the consequences of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, launched five years ago today.  Joseph Tobing, computer science professor at Columbia Union College, forwarded this review, "Global Strategy or Grand Illusion?" (New York Times, March 18, 2008).

American troops bogged down in Iraq, a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, an overstretched military and National Guard, simmering tensions with Iran and North Korea, and growing hostility toward the United States around the world: these are just some of the consequences of Bush administration foreign policy over the last seven years. To the Slate columnist Fred Kaplan, these woes all stem from two grand misconceptions held by the White House and its top advisers: that the world fundamentally changed after 9/11, when in fact “the way the world works — the nature of power, warfare and politics among nations — remained essentially the same”; and that in a post-cold-war era, the United States “had the power to set the terms of the new world order” and could therefore act unilaterally, without entangling alliances and without compromising “with competing concepts or interests.” ...

[Kaplan] underscores the crucial role the speechwriter Michael Gerson, a self-described evangelical, played in linking the president’s religious and moral imperatives with his expansionist foreign policy. And he argues that Elliott Abrams, a member of Mr. Bush’s National Security Council (and a former Reagan administration official who was involved in the Iran-contra scandal), “embodied both factions behind the administration’s new policies — the moral crusaders and the power-centric nationalists.” ...

President Bush’s strategies, Mr. Kaplan writes near the end of this incisive book, failed “because they did not fit the realities of his era”: “They were based not on a grasp of technology, history or foreign cultures but rather on fantasy, faith and willful indifference toward those affected by their consequences.”

Failing to acknowledge the limits of American power, he writes, President Bush and his aides ended up trumpeting the country’s “reduced powers — and, as a result, they weakened their nation further.” They “set forth a new way of fighting battles — but withheld the tools for winning wars. They aimed to topple rogue regimes — with scant knowledge of the local culture and no plan for what to do after the tyrant fell. They dreamed of spreading democracy around the world — but did nothing to help build the democratic institutions without which mere elections were moot or worse. In their best-intentioned moments, they put forth ideas without strategies, policies without process, wishes without means.”

Colossians Remixed - 3: Discerning Empire

“I know that her story and mine couldn’t both be true. Either Caesar had brought forgiveness of our sins, fruitfulness and peace through the great victories he had wrought, or Jesus had brought forgiveness of our sins, fruitfulness and peace through his paradoxical victory on a Roman cross.”

Nympha, we learn from Colossians 4:15, was the leader of a Christian congregation in nearby Laodicea. Walsh and Keesmaat imagine Nympha reflecting on the good news about Jesus from another prominent, wealthy woman, Lydia of Thyatira. Through this device, grounded in extensive scholarship, the authors bring us into the historical context of the letter to the Colossians, the first-century world of the Pax Romana. And they draw attention to striking parallels with our twenty-first century context:

In Colossians Paul is telling a story that is an alternative to the mythology of empire. Mythology is always about salvation, peace and prosperity. Rome found salvation in the universal peace of the age after Augustus. The “American Empire” finds salvation in economic progress and global control. Paul tells a story about a salvation rooted in Christ, historical sovereignty located in a victim of the empire, and prosperity that bears fruit in the whole world (62-63).

Please “post a comment” on what strikes you most about this “placing” of Colossians in its historical context, and what that might mean for how we read the text today.

Colossians Remixed - 2: Colossians and Disquieted Globalization

Context Remixed: Colossians and Empire - B / 2008 Book Discussion Series, Week 2

Walsh and Keesmaat use the rabbinic interpretive exercise called targum – an extended paraphrase putting an ancient text into contemporary idiom – to help us discern how Colossians connects with our post-9/11/01 context of “global disquiet.” As an example, here’s part of their targum’s take on the hope Paul writes about in 1:5-6:

You didn’t get this hope from cable television, and you didn’t find it on the Net. This hope walked into your life, hollering itself hoarse out on the streets, in the classroom, down at the pub and in the public square, when you first heard the good news of whole life restoration in Christ. This gospel is the Word of truth – it is the life-giving, creation-calling, covenant-making, always faithful servant Word that takes flesh in Jesus, who is the truth….Now the Word of truth is producing the fruit of radical discipleship, demonstrated in passion for justice, evocative art and drama, restorative stewardship of our ecological home, education for faithful living, integral evangelism, and liturgy that shapes an imagination in alternative to the empire’s.

“Uh, excuse me, but your translation seemed to add an awful lot to the text.” Thus begins a dialog in which the authors’ defend their targum to a moderately skeptical reader, citing overtones of several powerful passages from the Hebrew scriptures in Colossians 1:1-14, such as: Psalm 85:10-11; Hosea 4:1-3, and Isaiah 11:1-9.

“Post a comment” below on Colossians Remixed, Chapter 2. After reading this chapter, for example, what are your thoughts about authors’ advice to “hear the New Testament with Old Testament ears”?

Coming Soon...Colossians Remixed!

Join the discussion online as the Columbia Union College Department of Religion and Adventist Peace Fellowship collaborate for the seventh annual Spring discussion series.

This year’s reading – Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire by Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat (InterVarsity Press, 2004). Here’s what people who know their stuff are saying about this innovative book:

“This book is a Molotov cocktail lobbed into the midst of contemporary biblical studies and the American empire.” (J. Richard Middleton, Roberts Wesleyan College).

“Whereas Colossians usually sits innocently at the edge of the New Testament, this book shows how it becomes front and center for readers amid an empire that manages all of globalization.” (Walter Brueggeman, Columbia Theological Seminary).

“Paul recognized that living under a global empire posed particular challenges for Christians in the first century. This book compels us to engage with the equivalent questions we face in the twenty-first.” (N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham).

“Not exactly a commentary, this book is much better. Colossians Remixed is an explosive tract for out times. Take up and read.” (Steven Bouma-Prediger, Hope College)

Watch for postings beginning the week of January 28, and add your comments. And, if you live in the Washington, D.C. area, join us Wednesday evenings from 6:45 to 8:00 beginning January 30, in Richards Hall on the campus of Columbia Union College, Takoma Park, Maryland.

You can get a copy of Colossians Remixed at a 32% discount through Peace Pursuits – APF’s Amazon.com “aStore.” A small portion of each Amazon purchase initiated through Peace Pursuits goes to the support of Adventist Peace Fellowship.

Our Place in the Biblical Story

The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story
by Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen
Baker Academic/2004

Comment by Doug Morgan

Prepared with the introductory college Bible course in mind, this book is an excellent devotional resource for individuals or groups. The following quote both sums the book's central point and reflects its penetrating clarity:

...[A]ll human communities, including our own, live out of some comprehensive story that suggests the meaning and goal of history and that gives shape and direction to human life. We may neglect the biblical story, God's comprehensive account of the shape and direction of cosmic history and the meaning of all that he as done in our world. If we do so, the fragments of the Bible that we do preserve are in danger of being absorbed piecemeal into the dominant culture story of our modern European and North American democracies. And the dominant story of modern culture is rooted in idolatry: an ultimate confidence in humanity to achieve its own salvation. Thus, instead of allowing the Bible to shape us, we may in fact be allowing our culture to shape the Bible for us. Our view of the world and even our faith will be molded by one or the other: either the biblical story is our foundation, or the Bible itself becomes subsumed within the modern story of the secular Western world. If our lives are to be shaped and formed by Scripture, we need to know the biblical story well, to feel it in our bones. To do this, we must also know our place within in -- where we are in the story (196-197).

The biblical story thus becomes our "framing story," as Brian McLaren terms it in his recent book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. That is the starting point and orientation for Christian peacemaking.

History of a Dangerous Idea

Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea
by Mark Kurlansky
Foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
The Modern Library / 2006

Review by Charles Scriven

This excellent overview was written for a general audience and recently won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize (at an event where Elie Wiesel was honored for lifetime achievement as a peace activist).

Mark Kurlansky underlines from start to finish his conviction that nonviolence is a form of activism.  It is both a “means of persuasion” and a “recipe for prevailing.”  He fully understands that Jesus was the “first prominent example” of a rebel who rejected “violence in all its forms.”  He also understands, however, that when Constantine “empowered the Church as an instrument of statecraft,” the result was disastrous.  Christianity is thus at once a key influence for good and a key betrayer of that good.  And as Jesus is the key champion of that good, Pope Urban II, with his call to holy war against Islam in 1095, is the key betrayer, or one of them.  His speech at Clermont contained, Kurlansky says, “all the traditional lies by which people are convinced to die and kill.”

Kurlansky’s account considers all the most prominent world religions, and in the end he makes clear his conviction that the connection between states and religious communities is deeply compromising for religion in general.  All the great religions, he argues, have been “defiled and disgraced in the hands of nation-states.”

Kurlansky’s story covers both nonviolence and the religious sanctioning of violence.  Along the way many stories illuminate the larger points.  To take just one, he writes about how Bayard Rustin, the young black Quaker,  co-founder of CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) and mentor to Martin Luther King, marched against the Korean War in 1951.  During that march he “was attacked with a stick by an angry spectator.  Rustin handed him a second stick and asked him if he wanted to use both.  The attacker threw both sticks down.”

Kurlansky, like Christian theologians in the Walter Wink or John Howard Yoder mold, would dismiss the idea that Jesus’ admonition to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39) is worthless passivity.  The Rustin story is well nigh perfect for illustrating the point.

In all, the author suggests, as his subtitle says, 25 lessons from the history of nonviolence.  Some reflect, for example, the heroic witness of Mahatma Gandhi, whom he greatly admires.   So this is not a work of exclusive Christian theology.  But it is, certainly, a work of hope.

Kurlansky notes well the continuing allure of violence.  But if the twentieth century saw the most die in war of any century, it also saw the most successes for nonviolent activism.  He looks at several of the 1989 bloodless revolutions in Eastern Europe.  He remarks on how the Vietnam War, for leaving Americans too ashamed to celebrate what they had done, opened the door to more truthful reflection on war’s reality and impact.  So even though Kurlansky does not write (as far as I can tell) from an explicitly Christian perspective, he nevertheless makes a telling case for the radical perspective on Christian peacemaking.

And these days, of course, no case is more important.

--Charles Scriven is President of the Kettering College of Medical Arts near Dayton, Ohio, and an Adventist Peace Fellowship advisor.

Peacemaking Remnant Reminds Adventists of "Countercultural Roots"

The Fall 2007 issue of Andrews University Seminary Studies includes a generous review by Trevor O'Reggio of The Peacemaking Remnant: Essays and Historical Documents, published by the Adventist Peace Fellowship. O'Reggio, a church history professor at the Seminary, writes that the book reminds

Adventists of their countercultural roots and abhorrence of any form of violence, state-sanctioned or not, and their bold proclamation to be a peacemaking remnant. Adventists were not afraid to be different. While not disrespectful of government, they also did not applaud government in its war-making enterprises....

...[T]he essays make for exciting reading. They carry an urgent call for Adventist believers to become active agents for peace and justice in their communities rather than joining the governmental bandwagon for war. Because of the nature of the work, it was difficult to maintain coherency throughout the book. At times, ideas appear disjointed and disconnected, and it is obvious that the essays were pulled from different places and quickly assembled together. However, the passion and urgency of these writers resonates in the style and content of their writings. This is a small book, but it carries a powerful punch and is needed in the Adventist faith community.

Copies of The Peacemaking Remnant may be obtained in more than one way.

• Click here for information on ordering directly from Adventist Peace Fellowship and links to order through Google Checkout or amazon.com
• Or using the APF online bookstore, Peace Pursuits, to order through amazon.com, nets APF a few more pennies and contributes to the development of this aspect of our work.