Armaments and Eschatology

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Studies in Christian Ethics

DOI: 10.1177/0953946888001001071988; 1; 43Studies in Christian Ethics

John H. YoderArmaments and Eschatology

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ARMAMENTSANDESCHATOLOGY

John H. Yoder

nffspring of a materialistic and rationalistic age, we regard theApocalyptic discourse of the apostles times, or of ours, withembarrassment or amazement. I submit that we need to encounter this

scandal head-on, as a transcultural hermeneutic challenge, not to dodgeit on grounds of authority or cultural superiority, and that the nucleardrama of our time provides an occasion to do that.A more preciseformulation of my theme would be: &dquo;TheArms Race and theApocalypticDimension of Christian Faith&dquo;, or if you will &dquo;Christian Faith and the

Apocalyptic Dimension of theArms RacesI

Rather than starting from methodological first principles, I propose tolet the shape of the subject unfold from the top of the problem; i.e. fromthe surface of current public debate. This debate is in fact marked by anapocalyptic dimension.

2

&dquo;TOTAL WAR HAS MADEAN END TO ITSELF&dquo;

Ever since Hiroshima some thinkers have been speaking of the nuclearage as the end of politics as usual, or of military strategy as usual. One ofthe 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 inmilitary science, the boundary which nuclear weapons overstep is theself-defining limitation of what one can do with weapons. Soon otherlimits came into view, especially those of the ecosphere. Instead ofevaluating preparations for war in traditional terms like the carefullyqualifying and quantifying criteria of the just war tradition, many haveevoked 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 politicalchoice.

It has traditionally not been wrong, some will say for instance, to killenemies 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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disproportionately.5On the other hand, they say, it would under all

circumstances be wrong to destroy the ecological balance or the ozonelayer and with it vertebrate life. The stakes are qualitatively different:thus what had been the object of a discriminating, quantifying, andtherefore debatable judgment becomes an absolute one.

Some have called this approach, dependent on the claim that thestakes have escalated qualitatively beyond the reach of a previous frameof reference, survivalism.~ It is the dominant argument in the recentstatement of the bishops of the United Methodist Church of the US,entitled III Defense of Creatioll.

7

Were I to analyze thatAmerican Methodist document as a model ofmagisterial moral theology, I should need to pursue further more thanone obvious question. One of them would be the validity in Christianethics of the ecological turn. (a) Is it evident that it is best to use the termcreation as designating the biological substratum for human existencerather than as including human culture and history?8 (b) Is it morallyworse to destroy fisheries and forests than cities because creation is of ahigher order of value than history? Or is it evil on a deeper causative levelbecause cities and histories will also perish if the forests and fisheriesgo?9 (c)Are we sure that what a nuclear blast would do to the ecosphere isqualitatively or quantatively worse than the desertification of the Saharaa few millennia ago or of the Sahel today, or what our smokestacks aredoing to the forests of theAmerican 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 fromarms experts and diplomats, what authority have the informed technical

judgments to which they come with regard to the likelihood ofescalation, the possibility of prevailing in a nuclear war, or the othertechnical data (including politics as a kind of technique) which theexperts they consulted told them should be decisive? Can moral theologysay anything while the experts differ? Is it an act of moral discernment forwhich one can be accountable, or is it purely a matter of whim orself-interest, if I choose between the sovietological wisdom of GeorgeKennan and that of Richard Perle, or between the accuracy projections ofan optimistic ballistics engineer and a pessimistic one? There would bemore such questions.

More basic is the constantinian turn. 10 The Methodist bishops seepolitical decisions regarding armaments from a macro utilitarianperspective. Instead of personal terms, asking as the classical traditiondid whether (and if so, when) killing as a choice made by someone inparticular (whether sovereign or soldier) is justifiable, it seems to thebishops to be more pastoral, or more objective, to speak only for thewhole societys choice. Whereas the standard account of just waraccountability said or implied that if a government pursues immoralpolicies the conscript should refuse to serve and the soldier should refuse

to shoot, the only implementation the bishops call for is heightenedcitizen involvement in national politics.



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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 (moreevident? more compelling?) than the concrete local neighbours needsand the enemys just war rights, is to carry to the nth degree a reasoningprocess which has been taken for granted since the constantinian turntaken by mainstream Christians in the fifth century.

What concerns me here, however, is not any one or the sum total of allof those questiuns, but rather the mental move that is made when, in theface of all of them, one holds that just one consideration, drawn fromanother frame of reference, has become decisive. This is what happens inthe claim that we have entered a brand new age, where the oldcontinuities 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 broughtto our attention by the military planners, the politicians, the generals andthe munitions makers, but its impact is to demand that the matter betaken out of their hands, being too important to be left to the experts.Developments from within the system bring the system to its limits. Formainline thinkers of our time it apparently seems more profound, moreconvincingly tragic, to have the absence of choice forced upon us, by astate of things such that the stakes are so great that the semblance ofchoice is wiped away, than it would have been to be called to choice bythe moral demand of a prophetic voice. Obviously there is no other valueto outweigh the destruction of the whole world system. Having no

choice, being forced by events, is a very secure way to take what soundsverbally 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 leapfrogdiscriminating debates about lesser threats and less absolute means. Ifwe grant that making the entire globe unlivable would be absolutelywrong, where does that wrongness begin? Would it be wrong to destroyonly ten percent? One percent?

The other logical flaw is that when we argue about where an issue goesoff the scale of traditional evaluation, it is not self-evident what thatbinds us to do next. Other bishops (as we shall see) were saying at the

same time that, since nuclearwar

must never happen, therefore deterrentthreats of absolutely disproportionate destruction are in order. It isprecisely the disproportion - which the classical just war theory wouldforbid - between the enemys triggering threat and the massive retal-iation with which we promise to respond, that guarantees the enemywill 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 the force dexfrappe, as restated in the French Catholic bishops letter of 1983,1 is stillthat the menace may morally be disproportionate or indiscriminate,since it is precisely that potentially immoral quality of the threatenedretaliation which assures that it will not need to be carried out.

What I have just described, which can be fairly called the NATO view,



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can be advocated for specifically Christian, in fact conservative

evangelical, reasons. Harold O.J. Brown, today Professor of Biblical andSystematic Theology and Ethics in Theology in Trinity EvangelicalDivinity School, the largest school of its kind inAmericas Midwest, stillholds to the view he first expressed in a symposium in 1980. He draws hisconvictions not (as do some American fundamentalists, includingRonald Reagan) from the dispensationalists interpretation ofpredictions in Ezekiel and Daniel about the battle atArmageddon, butfrom 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 riskof destroying civilization, including ourselves.

The munstruus evil of totalitarian communism must indeed be frightful ... forus to risk annihilation rather than submit to it. Frankly, I agree withAleksandrSolzetiltsvn and will risk annihilation for myselfand my country to defend ourfreedom.

What is evangelical about this? It is not that Brown expects the stakes inthe final showdown to be directly religious. In 1980 in fact he specifiedthe protection of the energy supply of the West (by which he apparentlymeantAmerican commercial access toArab oil) as the line where ashowdown might be called for.

What is evangelical about this for Brown is the dimension ofmotivation. It is that the believer knows that neither his own soulssalvation nor the spiritual value of civilization is dependent uponthisworldly peace. Therefore he is not afraid to risk thisworldly peaceand survival for the sake of a transcendent value, namely the libertiessafeguarded by Anglo-Saxon political traditions.2 Belief in theresurrection and in life beyond the grave enables us to risk the grave, forourselves and everyone else, for the sake of the freedom (of politicalinstitutions) with which God has entrusted us.

For this reason it is important to have at least some Christians in positions of

authority, peuple who will not be kept in bondage by the fear of death asHebrews [2:15] puts it.

13

The NATO deterrence theory and the Methodists sweeping but vaguerejection of the same exemplify the same logic. Each assumes withoutargument that if the stakes are absolute the validity of our judgmentabout means is self-evident. Each assumes that a danger held to beinfinite 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 arepolar alternatives, philosophically and politically, (a) in terms of theirown self-understanding, b) in the way &dquo;objective&dquo; observers would

classify their logic, and c) in their proximate political commitments. Yetthey mirror each other. Both differ from business as usual in political



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thought by reasoningback from the claim to have reached the limits of

the manageable system, so that it appears rational, in the light of anidiosyncratic unappealable self-evidence, to claim that the matter isclosed. They cannot talk to each other. There is not common vocabulary,no wider community, no ethos of dialogue which they can share. That, Isubmit, is for any age, even for ours, the functional definition of an

apocalyptic stance.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 bysuperpower arms planners do call for wittingly and willingly letting thenuclear threat to civilization escalate off the scale of measurable and

manageablevalues, out of the reach of the

ordinary disciplinesof

reciprocity, proportionality, or objectivity.

RETRIEVING THE IDIOM OFAPOSTOLICAPOCALYPTIC

By way of introduction, I have let my topic be defined by our contem-poraries. We have so to speak been backed into wrestling with the

challenge of apocalyptic rhetoric because our contemporaries do in factspeak that way. My thesis is however that we would do well so to wrestleon other grounds, namely because, in truth, the world and the Gospelneed to be

spokenof that way.

The last decades have seen a growing readiness on the part of Scrip-ture scholars to acknowledge that ancient texts are understood moreauthentically when seen more clearly in the context of the cultural settingin 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 asdestructive as others fear. It has begun to be accepted and practisedwithin the historical and exegetical disciplines, which are not the level onwhich I am asked to serve today, more widely than it is within theologicalethics, the terrain of our present concern.

It cannot be my aim from within the ethicists role to attempt to sortout the intramural debate among the Scripture specialists, each of whomhas a slightly different way of defining and disentangling the concepts ofprophecy, apocalyptic, and eschatology. Until recently Scripture scholarshave usually been concerned, usually quite transparently, to distinguishone mode, which they find palatable, and which they see as representa-tive of the Jewish or Christian text they are reading at the time, fromanother mode which they can then be free to disavow, or to relegate toantiduity.

z

Often the difference between what one can use and what one mayslough off was held to be that eschatology (or prophecy) deals withGod 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



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grounds that (1) it wrongly assumedan

imminent parousia, therebyopening itself to being refuted by events in the world, (2) it was theproduct of dramatic first-generation ecstatic experiences, whichsubsided as the churches settled in sociologically, (3) it was the productof the pressure of persecution, which later abated, (4) it finally issued inthe heresy of montanism, (5) it led to social withdrawal and quietism, (6)it approved of a violent fate for Gods enemies

5

If we were to seek to converse with the Scripture specialists withintheir own guild, we should need to ask methodological questions aboutwhether it is fitting thus to let criteria of modern credibility govern the

reading of ancient texts. We should ask archaeological questions aboutthe

degreeof confidence with which

theyclaim to understand

justwhat

kind of social experience peo le were having in a particular decade in aparticular corner of theANE.

A more adequate methodology would seem to be one which would leteach genre speak for itself, letting the functions of sifting and synthesis,and especially of evaluative judgment, wait until we have before us thewhole sweep of the Scriptures and of our history since then. The

challenge of honest scholarship is to find ways to let the text have somedefence 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

expressionwhich do not

adjustto our own world-view.As

longas

Scripture studies were subject to the discipline of scholastic theology,assuming as both norm and fact that what the ancient texts say is thesame 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 ofscholastic theology which has expanded exponentially the spaceavailable for respectful reading.

This insight is a commonplace, and self-evident, once articulated;some credit Krister Stendahl for stating it first and most Simply. 1 Yetscholars keep saying it again, as if the clarification it offers were stillneeded. &dquo; It is within the context of that

emancipationthat Ernst

K5semann has for a generation been rehabilitating the apocalypticcomponents of the ancient literature, within and beyond the Hebrew andChristian canons

For a long time already, the term apocalyptic has carried taken-for-granted definitions on two levels. One level is the technical one of literarygenre or cultural style.An apocalypticdocument is one which purports tounveil, to reveal, information not already known or accessible by moreordinary modes of perception. The author of a written text may announcethat the text he or she is writing provides such an unveiling Moreotten the unveiling is reported by the text as having occurred in a visionor an audition which the writer has been given.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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tohave

received a newrevelation,

but because in its content itsustains

a

view of the shape of reality which seems to us to be like that of thedocuments of an apocalyptic genre, even if the literary or oral format oftheir presentation is rational, matter-of-fact.

Some of the substantive marks of an apocalyptic world-view in thissense are:

- a spatial dualism between the present world and another world (orheaven); 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 itscomponents unsullied;

- the

impossibilityof

remedy bymeans of human effort in the terms

set by the present system;- the imminence of cosmic changes combining judgment and

salvation;- the validation of the unveiling, its call to faith, being based incosmos-shattering events of already known experience or in theevent of the apocalyptic word itself;

- the call to the listeners/hearers to live in a style not conformed to themodels of the corrupt cosmos;

- unique actors (angels, beasts) described as participating as it werefrom outside in the historical process;

- the

presence

of a

(presentlysmall or invisible)

community bearingthe message, sharing today in suffering and destined to share in thecoming fulfilment.

It is obvious logically that in any setting where several components ofa complex symbol set can be cited as identifying marks, no one markalone 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 giventext, or a given communitys view, will correspond to the type. For nowwe need somehow to deal with the significance of the entire Gestalt,without being able to detail the shadings of definability around the

edges. 201 do not claim that retrieving the apocalyptic idiom will be by itself a

saving key to unlock otherwise lost truths. It is rather that (in a settingwhere others are already using the apocalyptic mode) to reinstate theapocalyptic component of the Gospel may provide correctives at pointswhere an immanentized hope in Christendom had robbed us of thecapacity to discern bad news or to bring good.My having begun with modern neo-apocalyptic witnesses, demon-

strating so to speak the vitality of the apocalyptic idiom from the limit-experiences of modern cosmology, should not be understood as grantingthat 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



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dialogue as itselfa

quasi-discipline is thatwe are

helped to escape thelong-dominant assumption that one discipline is foundational foranother, in the architectonic sense that first of all there must be some kindof closure or synthesis in the one more basic realm before the next onecan 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; exegesismust have reached solid conclusions before theology can use the Bible.... As obvious as this architectonic ordering seems, it is a mistake. Eachhigher level of interpretation must in real community experience go onbefore the lower levels of work have been concluded, and that not only

because theynever 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 prematureselection, 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 nochoice but to evaluate the contribution of apocalyptic to ethics beforeothers have settled on its role in the canon.

As a Christian ethicist, I should be asking the question posed tobelieving communities centuries after the apostles by the presence ofindubitably apocalyptic texts in our canon, and therefore in our liturgiesand our

imagination.What the non-technician in the

readingof

special-ized literatures can seek to bring to the conversation bridging thedistance between exegesis and modern political ethics is an awareness ofthe rules of transdisciplinary dialogue as a discipline in its own right. Toask what believers in the late twentieth century can appropriate of the

message of an ancient text is not necessarily subordinate to the histor-ians scepticism about who wrote a given text, or to the unfinisheddebate about whether specific ideas were original (or distinctive) backthen.2

The axioms underlying our post-enlightenment deprecation of theapocalyptic mode can be critiqued from several directions. My listing ofthose

perspectivescannot be exhaustive. One honest answer, which we

do well to look at first, is the one technically called modernist. If itshould be satisfactory, we should have simplified things greatly. Itassumes as basically adequate a contemporary rationalist andhumanistic meaning system. With that as a grid, we can then choose toaccredit fragments of wisdom from other worlds of meaning, but none ofthem would shake us or save us. Apocalypticism as a global frame ofreference is then unacceptable by definition. If we should choose toretrieve this or that mythic image from its apocalyptic setting, that is onlybecause it can be purged of unacceptable shades of meaning.

One way to test such a view would be to take it consistently. Whatwould be the shape of the thoroughly non-apocalyptic stance held bythose who look at apocalypticism from outside? Can we reverse thealready itemized marks and attain a formal description of an ordinary or



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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 nointervention from beyond, no radical change in its structures, and nodivisions within it being conceivable? That human action can controlhistorys outcome? That a uniform ethos for all kinds of people is possibleand desirable? That the language of divine agency is meaningless?

To ask the question thus bluntly is almost to have answered it. There isnot and has never been within Christianity a single sober, solid, univer-sally self-evident rational base line cosmology, in contrast with whichapocalyptic thought constitutes a departure.&dquo; Some of the marks ofwhat such a system might be are recognizable within what some call

modernity,but some are not.

Modernityas a label for

somethingclear

seems to be a firm concept mostly in the minds of those who today doubtits 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 wedo an exotic culture. We should rather investigate in what setting theapocalyptic vision of things, or specific elements of it, would makesense. There must after all have been some context in which the

documents of an apocalyptic genre, including the cosmology theypresuppose, communicated coherently.

To rephrase after these introductory thoughts the question under-lying 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, butrather appropriate reactions to the way the world really is? Do thecontemporary styles we began with fit in such a mould?

- Should that be the case, would it be possible, within the acceptance ofapocalyptic as one fitting mode of moral discourse, to establishcriteria, as the early Christians seem to have done, to distinguishbetween valid and less valid or false forms of it?23

- Should that be the case, might the present state of the arms race, inwhich our contemporaries are already speaking apocalyptically, bean appropriate specimen with which to assess a criteriology for thecomparative evaluation of apocalyptic stances?

What might it then be about the visions of history which made sensefor the early witnesses, which we might with proper care appropriate? Insaying appropriate I intentionally avoid terms like transpose or trans-late, images like grid or lens, as if there might be a rather formallinguistic operation, a correspondence or replication of some simplequasi-mechanical kind. It is rather that the believing community todayparticipates imaginatively, narratively, in the past history as her ownhistory, thanks to her historians, but also thanks to her poets and

prophets.As that story becomes her own story she retrieves the postureof her precursor generations and discovers in her own setting somethingquite original yet essentially like what the faith had meant before.



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THE REOPENED EDGES OF THE COSMOS - LIVINGANALTERNATIVE WORLD

Most of the disciplines which challenge our intellect and most of the artswhich feed our spirits have today come to the end of the encyclopaedistsvision, which thought that all of reality can be encompassed, within anyone discipline, with no gaps or leftovers. Even the natural sciences aretranscending their fantastically fruitful traditional reliance onmathematical and mechanical models, in favour of uncertainty, when

handling the very large, the very small, the very ancient.... The industryof innerworldly apocalyptic, which we call futurology, began a gener-ation

ago by very confidently extrapolatingrecent trends into

thenext

century. Now, however, it attends to the system-immanent ceilings andthresholds beyond which trends cannot possibly continue. The globeswater and air no longer can be drawn on as infinite life-giving reservoirs.As the natural sciences had since the Enlightenment served as model forthe human sciences, history and the arts as well, now it is the breakdownor the limits of the system-immanent models from which the rest ofculture borrows.

It is a demonstration of that modern relativizing of system-immanentmodels when in the two specimens of thought about the nuclearchallenge with which we began we see sober ethical statements beingmade which burst the bonds of

system-immanent normalcy.Both NATO

fundamentalism in the face of the Soviet threat and liberal survivalism inthe face of the nuclear menace are instances of the breakdown of a modeof reasoning which had seemed adequate before.

Western intellectuals are impressed by the breakdown of the self-confidence with which Occidentals have identified our self-esteem withthe progress of our entire cultural enterprise. Paul Hanson of Harvard, inhis study of Old Testament and intertestamental apocalyptiCS,2 beginsand ends with references to the breakdown in our generation of theWestern vision of progress. Whether NorthAtlantic bourgeois culture iseither intellectually or physically convincing should have in principle

nothingto do with what was

goingon in the

earlyChristian centuries,

but it has much to do with our readiness to comprehend. Romanticismand existentialism have tried before to loosen the lid which rationalistic

explanations had tried to fasten on the world of the possible, but they didit in ways affording little substantial help for ethics. I submit now that byjuxtaposing the moral challenge of the arms race, the hermeneuticinsights of the sociology of knowledge, and the objective presencewithin the Western cultural canon of apocalyptic modes of communi-cation, we can essay a restatement of how those modes may help us to seethings as they really are.z5

Some have suggested that vision or imagination characterizes theunique contribution of the

apocalypticgenre, as contrasted to virtue or

law governing other moral models. 26 That is evidently true, but it israther a label for a problem than an explanation. Every effort to character-



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ize the distinctiveness of the genre uses another key phrase. The char-acterization is made less formal and empty if we ask in each case whatdifference the genre makes for the place of Caesars sovereignty withinGods purpose.

Larry Rasmussen proposes to borrow a term from another field, sug-gesting that what the apocalyptic perspective enables the believingcommunity to do is to deconstruct the self-evident picture of howthings are which those in power use to explain that they cannot but staythat waxy. 27 Rasmussen quotes Paolo Freire:

... in order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for liberation,

theymust

perceivethe

realityof

oppressionnot 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 ofFreires 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 ideolo-gical Marxist terms, thereby being subject to challenge both as realismand as ideal.

Yet the point remains valid.A community playing the victim rolewithin a society needs first of all to know not what they would dodifferently if they were rulers, nor how to seize power, but that thepresent 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 ofGod and a new construal of the cosmos under God. To sing The Lamb isWorthy to Receive Power, as did the early communities whose hymnodyis reflected in the first vision of John, is not mere poetry. It is performativeproclamation. It redefines the cosmos in a way prerequisite to the moral

independence which it takes to speak truth to power and to persevere inliving 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; DouglasJohn 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 allfrom the realm of social ethics, but we can move on from what they say tomake that connection.

BEFORE CONSTANTINE:AFTER CHRISTENDOM

One component of such a deconstruction which the early seers appliedto the rulers of Rome and which we can apply to our own Caesars, will beto dismantle the notion that the ruler is the primary agent of divinemovement in history.29 Eusebius made Constantine a saviour figure, andever since then popular piety has been ready to ascribe to the ruler or tothe nation a privileged role, reaching beyond their own territory, in



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achieving Gods world purposes. 311 Seldomare those

divine purposesso

conceived as to include reconciling enemies or empowering victims. Theapocalyptic critique, by demythologizing the kings imperial preten-sions, calls rulers back to the modesty of the internal ordering assigned toempire by Romans 13.A second component will be to doubt the axiom that Caesar is one of

us: i.e. that the linkage between the churchs moral insights and effectivehistorical change must be made through the exercise by baptized believ-ers of the power of the political office which they possess. This assumeseither that a monarch, already sovereign, will be converted and will

authentically revolutionize his political ethic, or else that believers inthe exercise of their democratic

rightshave the

power (boththe numbers

and the unity) to dictate what the state will do. Social science sobrietysuffices to show us that neither of these construals is normally true to thefacts. The apocalyptic vision would free us to go on proclaiming thedemands of divine righteousness without being stopped by the argu-ment that no-one in office is heeding or teaching, since the reason for theapplicability of the demands is not that the rulers are representativebeliever.&dquo;

Here the constantinian logic reveals an internal contradiction. One ofits components is the claim that the moral requirements of officeholdersmust be realistically adjusted, authorizing to the Christian in officelevels of selfishness and violence not otherwise considered

good,in

order to enable them to discharge the duties of office. Martin Luther saidthis 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 officesare not filled by Christians whose regeneration, sanctification, andknowledge of Gods revealed will qualify them to do the work exception-ally well, they will be filled by persons of lesser moral integrity, who willdo it worse. Logically these two theses contradict each other. The onlyway to reconcile them would be to claim, as in the self-image ofAmericas recent media hero, Colonel North, that God-fearing peoplehave more right to violate the laws, moral and statutory, than do theheathen.

Thirdly; the apocalyptic consciousness may free us to live without themyth of a complete systemic causal overview of how all that we do willwork out for the best, because we see things whole and intervene

responsibly. The axiom of systemic causative perspicuity is part of thelegacy of the enlightenment in its most sanguine phases. This axiomunderlies all proportionate moral reasoning. Whenever otherwiseundesirable means are justified on the grounds of the ends they serve,the indispensable prior assumption is that we all understand with rela-tively high levels of certainty how the causative nexus works. Suchdeterministic thinking has served us well in the natural sciences, and tosome extent in understanding the individual personality in the local

family setting. It works in analyzing statistically phenomena likemarkets, where most of the players act naturally by the same rules. By



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the nature of the case it cannot work as well in

larger settingswhere

numerous actors work at cross purposes, and still less when they are

equipped to deceive each other. Yet consequential reasoning dependsfor its coherence upon the relative certainty with which it projects alter-native outcomes, to make any sense at all of particular choices uponwhich particular outcomes are held to depend. Predictability of con-sequences is the presumption subjacent to consequential justification fordoing evils (which it is hoped will be lesser) to attain goods (which it ispromised will be greater). Any meaning-system which explainsevents in terms like cause, in order to explain choices in terms like

consequences, has to assume that the whole system can be reliablyknown. Yet

by defillitiollno mode of

knowingthe

systemcan claim

infinite applicability. The mechanical models of physics acknowledge iiitheir OWIl terms thresholds of uncertainty for the very small. Thedocument-bound modes of historiography, the object-bound modes ofarchaeology, and the grammar-bound modes of literary interpretationare all in agreement today to back away from the visions of encyclopaedicadequacy with which two centuries ago they were hoping to clear thingsup. The collapse of the epistemological optimism of the encyclopaedistvision thus revokes the closing of the cosmos with which modernitybegan. Yet if the cosmos is not closed, the pragmatic case for war as thelesser evil falls. 32

The

challengeaddressed here to the kind of

pragmatic politicswhich

often calls itself realistic is not a sweeping denial of consequentialmodes of reasoning. There would be good arguments to that effect&dquo;quite independently of the present theme. The present point is a moremodest argument: it is that the consequential mode of moral evaluationis appropriate to a setting where the agents dispose of considerablepower over events and far-reaching knowledge of the pertinent causalconnections. The internal rationality of consequential reasoning isdestroyed when immense multi-actor systems render deceptive anyjustifications of actions on the grounds of expected results. Thisunpredictability is not a fluke nor an information gap soon to be filled. Itis part of the structure of historical existence. Such considerations have

led sages like HannahArende4 and George Kennan15 to call for an ethosof means.

If the systemic determinism whereby the bomb-rattlers propose tocontrol all of history is not convincing, because the approximation toomniscience which their projections presuppose is wrong both as to factsand as to mechanism, we shall perceive more readily and invent morecreatively the alternative means of conflict management capable ofhealing 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 consequentialjudgments which justify casuistically doing specific harm tospecific adversaries;

d) that the value-system of Christians is represented with suf-ficient cultural force and numbers that there will be no deepclash between Christian moral commitments and what all

people of Good Will can discern to be good, so that Christianmoral insight can be transposed without remainder intobinding guidance for everyone.

Here I have stated these axioms quite formally. Their applicability to thejustifications given for the nuclear threat is obvious, as is theircontradicting the conditions in which apocalyptic arose. In pure logicand in simple fact, they do not obtain any more in the twentieth centurythan they did in the second. Why then has it been so easy to take them forgranted for generations? This, I submit, is the logical outworking of theposture of establishment, which since the fourth century trainedChristian teachers to think with rulers more than with ViCtiMS.31

What an apocalyptic vision will contribute is not that we substitute (asfundamentalism does) a literal reading of the scheme of Ezekiel, or ofMark 13 or of John of Patmos, for the scenarios of the Pentagon. It is not

thatwe

will overdramatize the church/world clash in a time when or inplaces where in fact that clash has been mitigated in some respects byfavourable cultural changes. 37 It is that the hymnic vision of a cosmossmaller than the God who made it and sent His son and us to redeem itwill relativize both the gloomy and the confident determinisms to whichwe have been captive. The paradoxical testimony that the cross, not thecrown, is the key not only to some kind of ahistorical salvation but toJHWHs righteousness in the world is what frees us from the cult ofCaesars old and new, from the bondage of modernitys myths, in boththeir despairing and their presumptuous forms, as well as fromunthinking reaction to them.

If Caesar is not the

onlymover of

history,we shall

placemore

hopein

non-imperial strategies and tactics: voluntary associations, churches,militant non-co-operation, and the models of community maintenancewhich have kept Jews and Baptists and authentic Orthodox believers inthe Soviet Union morally more powerful than the party, or which haveenabled Christian communities in China to outlive Mao and the Red

Guards, and the blacks in SouthAfrica to survive under the Boers. 38If Caesar is not the most celebrated member of the believing

community, as he was not in the first century, and is not today, we shallnot filter the moral guidelines derived from the faith through the grid ofwhether someone committed to satisfying an electorate and administer-

ingthe state can live

upto them

all,whether that

gridbe advocated under

the rubric of creation, of history, of redemption, or of hopeIf the church is not (or is no longer) established, either by dominating



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society numericallyor

by possessing privileged status,as

shewas not in

the first century, we shall not feel obligated to filter the moralimplications of belief through the question of whether they demandmore 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 theother hand we ask how might war or the threat of war be justified? thereis not one sober way to argue an affirmative answer; namely to claim thatwe are responsible to govern history, in the light of our adequate know-ledge of how history works, by doing lesser evils to prevent greaterevils. That presumption that there is in history a degree of perspecuitysufficient to warrant our

becomingthe

judgesbetween our

neighboursinterests and our own, is part of what the apocalyptic vision strikesdown.

The particular challenge I address here to the lesser evil argument isnot a demand for ahistorical purity which would (e.g.) eschew electoralparticipation, parliamentary politicking or lobbying, in settings wherethose recourses obtain. What I challenge here is action taken against thestated principles of ones system for the sake (allegedly) of a greater good:a colonel lying to the President and Congress in order to defenddemocracy, taking innocent metropolitan populations hostage to nuclearterror in the name of the rule of law. The debate is as old as Caiaphasreason for

deliveringJesus. What increases its

weightand its

dubiety,thereby escalating the argument into an apocalyptic mode, is that thecalculation of the trade-off is done in cold blood, months and years aheadof any projected deployment 39 and when the greater good one claims toserve is so absolutized that there is not a sacrifice one would not make inits name.

BUT CAN WEASK PEOPLE TO BELIEVE THAT?

Our experience has taught us to assume that the assent of others, or atleast 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. Physicalclaims must be validated by the experimental method, historical claimsby documents, matters of high culture by the experts and of popularculture by the media marketplace. This notion of possible universalvalidation by common consent is the legacy of a time when either ethnicand linguistic homogeneity or the dominance of a specific 61ite made itpossible to go on thinking that can we expect everyone to agree? is anormal way to phrase the truth question. 40

From the fact that in these ways the believing communitydistinguishes between the values which guide discipleship and thosewhich may find effective implementation in the civil community it doesnot by any means follow that believers are unconcerned from the civilrealm, that they have nothing to say to it or that they withdraw from it.



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By definition, the members of a community thinking in apocalypticterms do not thus count on everyones agreement. They have acceptedtheir minority status and their powerlessness not only as facts but astheir epistemological condition. They are unembarrassed by the fact thatthe ideas they hold would not convince others, for whom Christ is notsitting at the Right Hand.A remaining segment of our task in interpret-ing the apocalyptic mode is then to ask how validation must look whenthe 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 inan an

old and familiar vocabulary, with the identitycommitments which the early messianic synagogues were already mostsure about. It resonated with their Jewish monotheism confessing onlyone ultimate mover of history; with their messianic trust that the way ofthe cross had ultimately to be the way for the world; and with theirpentecostal conviction that the meaning of the Father and the Son wouldcontinue to be actualized in their own worship and mission. Whataccredits a prophetic word is not its demonstrable control of events butits coherence with the already known story.

The point that apocalyptic makes is not only that people who wearcrowns and who claim to foster justice by the swords are not as strong as

theythink - true as that is: we still

sing,0 where are

Kingsand

Empiresnow of old that went and came? It is that people who bear crosses areworking with the grain of the universe. One does not come to that beliefby reducing social process to mechanical and statistical models, nor bywinning some of ones battles for the control of ones own corner of thefallen world. One comes to it by sharing the life of those who sing aboutthe Resurrection of the slain Lamb.

1Paper presented by invitation to the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics, at WycliffeHall, Oxford, 19 September 1987. I thank the Rt Rev. Richard Harries, respondent, for

indicating some of the points needing clarification. The originally assigned topic wasArmaments and Eschatology;I thank the Society for the freedom to narrow it in the waythat seemed most provocative.2Ernest W. Lefever (ed.), TheApocalyptic Premise, Washington, Ethics and Public Policy

Center, 1982, represents those who reject in principle any challenge to routine realisticmodes of thought.3Stephen King-Hall, Defence in the NuclearAge, K.-H. Services Ltd, 1958,American

edition Nyack NY, Fellowship. King-Halls first statement to the effect that "Total war hasabolished itself" was written in the 16August 1945 issue (No. 475) of his King-HallNewsletter.

4"It is more and more agreed that the concept of a just war is an anachronism": editorialentitled On "Absolute" Morality, WorldView, June 1959, p. 2. The first prominent state-ment of the idea that the just war tradition (JWT) is outmoded may well have been that of

the 1948Amsterdam FirstAssemblyof the World Council of Churches: "In these

circumstances the tradition of a just war ... is now challenged." Report of Section IV inW.A. Visser t Hoof (ed.), The FirstAssembly of the World Council of Churches, New York,



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Harper, 1949, p. 89;also

p.40 in Donald

Durnbaugh (ed.),On Earth Pence,

Elgin,Brethren

Press, 1978. The possible meanings of such a statement are several: (a) that the JWT ismorally, logically valid but no modern war can live up to its requirements; (b) that no warcan 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 pacifismneed not disagree; (d) that we must find some other as yet unknown better way of

thinking.5This 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 toAchieveGood, Chicago, Loyola University Press, 1978.6 Its adequacy as a new and qualitatively more decisive angle has been doubted byMethodists Stanley Hauerwas (132-168 in hisAgainst the Nations) and William Williamson("The people who believe the bomb is our only hope and the people who believe that doingaway 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 ofreproach by George Weigel, in his Tranquillitas Ordinis, 1987, New York, Oxford, the fullestconservative criticism of where theAmerican 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 orPacifism!, London and University Village, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. The

primary impetus for this centring on the biological threat was Jonathan Schells bestseller,The Fate of the Earth, New York,Avon, 1982.8The 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

thought to stand in complementary tension with justice and peace."

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 thatthe nuclear issue should not be seen ecologically. He would have, had it been a

livelytheme

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 ofthese assumptions; they simply take them for granted. The more biblical alternative to suchestablishment assumptions would be not social withdrawal but a more critically discern-

ing form of prophetic presence.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/whyAnglo-Saxon democratic freedom is less athisworldly value than is peace.13

Eternity, June 1980 pp. 16ff. The evangelical editors of the monthly Eternity, if they hadgiven it a thought, would hardly have agreed with Brown that the fear of death which keptthe 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. belownote. 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 donefrom the base of contemplative spirituality (Bernard preaching the crusades), or with the

language of Niebuhrian realism. The planning for nuclear holocaust is being done byrealists. 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 noteworthythat the critics of the apocalyptic mode blame it for both social passivity and for massacre,although most people guilty of perpetrating both are non-apocalyptic.16

People like Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity, PhiladelphiaFortress, 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 itwould take.



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17

Krister Stendahl, article, Biblical Theology, Contemporary, in Interpreters BibleDictionary, Vol. I, Nashville,Abingdon, 1962, pp. 418-432.18

Wayne Meeks in his Understanding New Testament Ethics, Journal of Biblical Literature,105, 1986, pp. 3-11, restates the distinction as if it were self-evident. It is self-evident on onelevel, but as Benjamin Ollenburger shows What Krister Stendahl "meant" A NormativeCritique of "Descriptive Biblical Theology" , in Horizons in Biblical Theology, Vol. 8/1, June1986, pp. 61-98. It conceals semantic problems that are not immediately evident nor easilyresolved.19

"Apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian Theology": Ernst Ksemann, The Begin-nings 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 thesame marks; of fuzzy sets where multiplicity of marks prevents firm outside borders, yetstill 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, ScientificAmerican217, 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 Jewishexperience is that of Paul Hanson in his The Birth ofApocalypse.I applaud Hansons

impatience (p. 7) with the mode of simply listing as definition of apocalypse a number ofnotions found in such literature, his dissatisfaction with borrowing (over against sourceswithin Judaism) as an explanation, and his respect for the genre in its own right. His workdoes not answer our questions, however. His categories of vision versus reality, and ofmyth are so broadly used as not to provide much guidance to one who would ask about theethical appropriation of apocalyptic in the late twentieth century. He validates apocalypticas not a crazy way to think, for people with a certain background in a certain kind ofsituation, but he does not help us to find what might count as the truth of such a word. Imust leave to his

professional peersto evaluate his

highlevel of trust in the

utilityof

liturgical modes of analysis and in the formative impact of Deutero-Isaiah.22My 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 post-Biblical cultures, including our own. What I cannot admit is that a decision against theancient 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 grantthat having to admit the claims of another genre, especially one which challenges ourmental habits, is a concession, a setback, a loss of substance. The opposite is the case. Thestandard account of moral reasoning says that one must choose between (or combine) anethic of principles (claiming timeless validity rooted in the nature of things, a notion losingcredibility with change) and one of prudence (assuming full knowledge of causalconnections 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.24Op. cit. revised edition 1979, Philadelphia, Fortress.

25I shall be drawing without detailed acknowledgement upon recent work of colleagues,

especially Jacques Ellul, Larry Rasmussen, Roy Branson, and Douglas John Hall.I have notattempted to document here the learnings from a growing flood of syntheses by Scripturescholars 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 andHigh Tech Medicine, Loma Linda, Ca, 1987, Loma Linda University Press.27

Larry Rasmussen, Bonhoeffer and the Public Vocation of an EschatologicalCommunity, unpublished, presented to Bonhoeffer section of theAmericanAcademy ofReligion,Atlanta, 23 November 1986, cited by permission.28 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 34. I reported at the outset that one way todisqualify apocalypse (which one rejects, in contrast to eschatology or prophecy, whichone

accepts)has been to

say

that it

portraysnot

historybut the end thereof. That is true

onlyliterally. When tyranny seems to dominate the world, the only way the victim can see theend 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. Thatshould hardly make its social message untranslatable.29To 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

government with Satan.Recent interpreters of violence in the interest of justice speak of it as last resort oremergency. 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.), BiblicalRealism 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 veinthe dependence of the case for violence upon a debateable consequentialism.33

There are metaethical arguments challenging the implicit deontologies behindconsequentialism, 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, 1972.34On Violence, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1969, pp. 4ff., also in her Crises of the Republic,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.

36 Cf. note 10 above.37

Well-known over-simple statements of the dualism are those of William Stringfellowand 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.) thedefence of religious liberty, limited government, the franchise, etc. Such a systemic dualismas would refuse the vote or reject public social services need not follow. Nonetheless thefundamental dualism remains valid at other points where neither moral nor institutiunalprogress 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 onesinformation, or of the thresholds beyond which ones sense-making instruments do not workis not abdication but a higher level of rationality. The first systematic statement of thelimits of what nuclear weapons can do was made as we saw by a hardnosed militaryscientist (note2above).39The just war tradition calls for last resort as one of its standard criteria. The

institutionalizing of readiness with modern technology mocks that criterion.40 The appeal to general agreement has several meanings, overlapping but distinctSometimes it means the universal consensus of all cultures (what the ancients called thejus

gentium);sometimes the intrinsic

meaningof a

conceptas

a linguisticclaim, sometimes

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.

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Armaments and Eschatology

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