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Written by bill tammeus
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Sunday, 21 February 2010 17:25 |
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Since President Barack Obama gave his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in December, I’ve been thinking about its many and profound implications.
I finally concluded that we who are disciples of the Prince of Peace must be careful not to make peace yet another of our idols.
The First Commandment is first because all sin ultimately is idolatry — putting something ahead of God. But we get fooled about this when we make an idol of something we think no right-minded person could oppose. And who can be against peace, right?
Well, sometimes peace is not the immediate answer. Obama got it right when he said this: “There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”
And why is that so? Because of what he said next, drawing on the thinking of his favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr: “For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”
And yet some people still preach the gospel of peace at any price — exactly the same philosophy that gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler and encouraged him to take Poland and seek the rest of Europe. In the end — the Holocaust.
Evil appeased is evil empowered, history teaches us. This is what Obama was trying to say to people who continue to hold what Niebuhr called “perfectionist illusions.”
Human history is a long, long series of proofs that — this side of heaven — people are not, in fact, perfectible.
In some ways that’s why Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans was so explosive when it was published soon after the end of World War I, which the poet Ezra Pound lamented had been uselessly fought for a world he called “an old bitch gone in the teeth. … a botched civilization.” Barth understood that the perfectibility of humanity that some branches of Christianity envisioned was fool’s gold, and he called all of us back to the idea that the reason we need a savior is precisely because we aren’t and never will be perfectible.
It’s not easy to follow Jesus, who gives us peace, though not peace as the world gives it. Following Jesus requires us to abandon our perfectionist illusions — first about ourselves, then about others — even as we work and hope and pray so that peace will fill the earth.
But the peace for which we work, hope, and pray must not be our idol. If it we make it such, we risk losing our moral compass. We drop God into at least second place in pursuit of the false god of peace, which inevitably will disappoint us because it cannot offer what God offers us — the promise of a redeemed creation.
I know there are preachers who avoid talking about politics from the pulpit, even though in some sense almost everything that happens is political. And I know that it can sound heretical to suggest that a world without war should not be our highest ideal, in effect becoming a god.
But to avoid talking about this from the pulpit is to abandon the responsibility our preachers have to warn us against idolatry. And, as I say, idolatry is at the root of everything we do that separates us from God and God’s promise of redemption.
Years ago I wrote a longish analysis describing Ronald Reagan as a public theologian and detailing how he got so much of it wrong. I don’t know if Obama as a public theologian will continue to get it right, but I’m guessing not. A Nobel Peace Prize winner is not perfectible either.
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As a mother, I know that sometimes we have to intervene, possibly even forcibly, when one child is unfairly treating the other. I guess the difference is that I love and am closely-bonded with both my children, whereas, sadly, sometimes people of different cultures and belief systems see one another as the enemy -- and don't see how we are all one family.
I admire Abraham Lincoln, because I believe that he never lost sight of our common humanity, both North and South.