Di4928 - Anthropology (Alan Torrance)
How Realistic are Christian Politics?
A Case for Eschatological Realism
In theological ethics, two opposing schools of thought dominate the question of war and peace, each with their corresponding intellectual heavyweights. Following WWII, the conversation was dominated by Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Christian realism,” itself a reaction against Walter Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel movement that found popular support in the early twentieth century. Niebuhr’s realism contributed to America’s entrance into WWII and continued to hold sway well into the conflicts in Korea and later. Following the disastrous results of the war in Vietnam, however, John Yoder began articulating a pacifism that directly countered the realist school for which Niebuhr was responsible. In his 1971 magnum opus, The Politics of Jesus, Yoder referred to his methodology as “Biblical realism” in a direct shot across the bow of Niebuhr’s use of the qualifier “Christian” to describe his account thereof.
I hope here to engage with the phenomenon of realism by exploring whether there is any common ground between Niebuhrian political applications and Yoderian scriptural implications. Yoder saw Niebuhr’s school of thought as “mainstream” in the US and specifically cites Niebuhr’s 1935 Interpretation of Christian Ethics as a work that opposed “an ethic of imitation” by which Biblical pacifism is known. It is my belief that there is something of value in insisting, with Yoder, that holding to the doctrine of prima scriptura is not unrealistic. I affirm that Yoderian pacifism has something to say to politics, but I want to go deeper. Yoder coined the term “Biblical realism” primarily (if not exclusively) as a dig against realism, and did not expound much on the implications of his proposed field. I hope in this paper to pick up where he left off. But more than simply filling out the wrinkles of his discarded verbiage, I want to explore a particular kind of Biblical realism in light of claims Yoder makes about the centrality of eschatology for Christian ethics, something I have called Eschatological Realism.
An eschatological realism would be a subset of what Yoder called Biblical realism. To fill out what might be meant by such a discipline, we will need to outline the debate over war and words that have carried the rhetorical trajectory that leads us there. To adequately describe a realism marked by an eschatological focus, we will first need to define what is meant by “politics” and “realism” as they have been used in theological discourse. The first section therefore focuses on the “realism” ping-pong game that began with Niebuhr’s reaction to the Social Gospel movement and was carried forward through two world wars to Yoder’s under-developed exegetical redirection. A second section will develop a theological anthropology determined by the eschaton that will help us visualize a properly ‘realistic’ yet scripturally robust political ethic. This is accomplished by focusing on the distinctiveness of Biblical apocalyptic literature as a description of the ‘end’ of creation initiated in Genesis and consummated in Revelation.
What is ‘politics’?
To comprehend what is at stake, we need to begin with language; we must appreciate what it is to be political creatures and what is meant in describing politics. Politics, in an ancient sense, first developed systematically by Aristotle, implied the organization of human relationships in order to create and preserve goods, material and immaterial alike. Natural resources and manufactured goods were as worthy of being held in common as were virtues like courage or wisdom. Goods served the purpose of preserving the polis, or city-state, and of promoting the highest good as equitably as possible. For the Greeks, the highest good was happiness and human flourishing. The modern world, however, produced a distinction between public and private spheres of life, thereby reducing ‘politics’ to a derogatory term connoting the public exercise of power over goods only appearing to be shared amongst private citizens, like justice. The modern notions of politics instead focus on conflicting self-interests and the power dynamics necessary to maintain their tenuous balance. Nowhere is this more apparent than in international relations, defined as it is by ceaseless violence.
Niebuhr cannot be faulted, then, for thinking of politics as a synonym for the activity of nations, the collective identity of human beings. Political leaders are therefore by their nature responsible to an incredibly large polis, to the tune of millions. As an absolute, pacifism was an unrealistic ideal to which politicians, beholden to a diverse constituency, could not adhere precisely because absolutizing biblical injunctions (turning the other cheek, or giving to the poor, for example) would spell the destruction of human society. No politician, Christian or otherwise, could espouse a position that would lead to the demise of people for whom they are responsible. Niebuhr’s criticism of pacifism was that it failed to take into account the plurality of lives a Christian politician was responsible for. Pacifists, by his assessment, did not appreciate the fuller polis within which they resided and from which they derived material and immaterial benefits.
Early in his career, Niebuhr had in mind Walter Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel movement, which he viewed as investing too much theological capital in human perfectibility. Social Gospel theologians, besides tending strongly toward pacifism, saw the industrial revolution as the key to finally ushering in the the eschaton, of bringing about the kind of world God desired, seeing in the great technological advance the dissolution of world hunger and, in the foundation of the United Nations, the abolition of war. This is not to say Niebuhr did not see his world as being eschatologically determined. To the contrary, two world wars animated the apocalyptic sympathies of the entire globe. The Social Gospel movement saw their responsibility as being to help usher in the final end of evil by good works that contributed to evil’s ultimate demise.
To Niebuhr, this reeked of Pelagianism, the heretical view Augustine railed against for conclusions it drew about accomplishing perfection without the aid of God. His firm footing in the Augustinian vein compelled him to conclude that human nature is unavoidably inclined toward corruption. For Niebuhr, the anthropology inherent in the Social Gospel movement was dangerously unrealistic and lacked a fundamental element of human nature, namely sin. Humanity was self-absorbed to the core and needed some kind of intervening power to keep evil in check. The anthropological optimism required by pacifism, which Niebuhr saw as out of touch with the tragedy of human reality, was irresponsible for a Church ingrained in the politics of nations engaging one another with violence. With Augustine, Niebuhr held that nations shared with individual humans the right to survive. As an association of so many individuals, the dissolution of a nation was akin to death. A leader derelict in her duty to such a corporate body becomes a murderer.
Therefore, the best ‘politics’ the Christian Church could conceive would be Paul’s admonition in Romans 13, which had an obligation to punish evil-doers with violence when necessary. Politics was a stand in, a temporary reprieve for societies and churches bound up in violence. His great contribution to political and theological ethics was his determination to wrestle with “the paradox of claiming a higher stature for [humanity] and taking a more serious view if [its] evil than other anthropology.” His perspective remained popular in and through the second world war, but as the United States government engaged in conflicts in Southeast Asia that were only moderately justifiable, this “realist” politic began to wane in popularity.
By no coincidence, John Yoder’s political exegesis of Luke’s gospel, The Politics of Jesus, was published at the height of the unpopular American war in Vietnam in 1972. Yoder sharply attacked Niebuhr’s relegation of pacifism to “prophetic irrelevancy” for being out of touch with the clear witness of scripture. For Yoder, no politics could be Christian that did not adhere to the ethic adopted by Jesus, which was clearly nonviolent. The politics Jesus lived by violated the secular idea distilled into the Clausewitzian dictum that “war is politics by other means.” The regrettably violent intervening authority Niebuhr attributed to governments, for Yoder, had come in the person of Jesus Christ, our Lord and King whose death upon the cross signaled the end of violence.
But to the Anabaptist Yoder, any politics that assumes the necessity of violence cannot be Biblical, and for Christians to give political primacy to secular assumptions is, among other things, an affront to the sovereignty of Christ. The politics of Jesus, by Yoder’s account, largely held to a definition determined by the world Niebuhr saw and described. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection did not radically redefine politics so much as it took the existing order and flip it, leaving politics to remain as a largely a way to describe the violence required to subdue evil.
Given the above, we can turn now to the nature of reality and the importance of eschatology for determining the (teleological) end of humanity and indeed of the very world.
What is realism?
Niebuhr’s is not the only strand of realism, though he is perhaps its most noteworthy proponent. Dalferth, in his essay on Karl Barth’s eschatological realism, outlines three major realms in which the realist claims engage: ontology, semantics, and epistemology. First, “Ontologically, the realist holds that there is a reality independent of the human mind and our social constructions of reality.” In other words, reality exists apart from our means of representing it. Second, semantically, realism maintains that “truth [cannot] be reduced to verifiability.” In other words, just because one cannot verify that something is real, that does not mean it fails to be real. This follows from the first, that reality exists distinct from human perception. But, third, epistemologically, “reality... may at least approximately be known as it truly is.” Even though human knowing may be inadequate, it is not improper to ponder. We will return to this construct of realism later. For now, we shall explore how ‘realism’ acted for and between Niebuhr and Yoder.
Politics and morality, for Niebuhr, rotate around some mixture of power and desire. In his essay “Augustine’s Political Realism,” Niebuhr explains political and moral realism as “the disposition to take all factors in a social and political situation which offer resistance to established norms into account, particularly the factors of self-interest and power.” He saw his debate with Yoder as centering on Anabaptism’s inherent sectarian attitude toward the world in which it lived and was dependent upon. Namely, pacifism failed to be considerate of the reality of a pluralistic world in which conflicting interests, while ideally mediated by mutuality and political compromise, were (in “reality”) settled by recourse to violence. According to Niebuhr, a world without violence was a utopian ideal, an “illusion,” which he intended to counteract via an appeal to “realism.” Theology holding an optimistic view of human nature was unrealistic “idealism” that failed to acknowledge the clear weight of sin and the necessity of authoritative violence to keep evil in check.
Indeed, he devotes an entire chapter in his Christian Realism and Political Problems to “Augustine’s political realism,” in which he is careful to differentiate between “political and metaphysical theory.” Niebuhr himself identifies realism with Machiavelli, for whom “the purpose of the realist is ‘to follow the truth of the matter rather than the imagination of it.’” To Niebuhr, the truth is apparent; it is observable in the world around us. It therefore follows that politics is necessary in order for nations to interact with minimal violence; diplomacy and negotiation are therefore tangible manifestations of politics for the realist. But whether he adequately distinguishes between politics and metaphysics is not clear, for precisely what is meant by “truth” is open to debate.
By Yoder’s account, on the other hand, reality was a product of divine creative intent begun as and oriented toward a nonviolent “end.” Scripture makes it clear to Yoder that God ordained a body, not a program or society, to bear witness to the nature and totality of creation’s subordination to its Creator. If Christ is indeed Lord and present as the Word when the world was created ex nihilo, then the God to whom Jesus and his body bear witness determines reality. Any human institution, religious or secular, is inherently finite and untrustworthy as an interpreter of reality insofar as reality has its origins in God. According to Yoder, Niebuhrian realism is problematic insofar as it ascribes “reality” to a location outside the world revealed by Scripture. What Niebuhr might be calling “reality,” Yoder’s theology insisted was a creaturely construct and ultimately illusory.
What is real and what is illusion? Realists resist what they see as the idealist impulse to imagine that a better world exists or is possible, insisting instead on “the truth of the matter.” But discussions of “truth” seem to beg a discussion of metaphysics, if not at least a conversation about reality being at least partially inaccessible to sensible matters (contra imaginary illusions), which Dalferth’s definition above points out. Well, what if the better world were not imaginary? What if the world that animates Yoder’s reality, which the Social Gospel movement glimpsed but held too firmly to, was in fact more real than the one that Niebuhr seemed to privilege? Let us now turn to eschatological reality for a fun little thought experiment.
TOWARD AN ESCHATOLOGICAL REALISM
“Metaphysical” realism as Niebuhr used it may have been a stand in for what we now refer to as ontology, the nature of being itself. Crucial to this observation is the related question; real for or to whom? For Yoder, reality is determined not by reason, but by revelation. For Niebuhr, the intelligibility of reality was critical, for to journey beyond reason was to enter the realm of illusion. Unfortunately, his claims about realism could easily boil down to nothing more than a critique against idealism. Such a methodology is always a bit weaker than a substantive claim on its own. Reality, after all, is not the absence of illusion any more than peace is the absence of war. Yoder’s criticism zeroed in on this, insisting that a politics without eschatology was a politics without Christ, and a world without Christ at its head was not only heretical, but also untrue.
This begs to the ultimate question Christ poses - “Who do you say that I am?” If Christ is really Lord, the very Word present at and for Creation, then the world is ontologically determined by a particular person, namely the incarnate Son of God, who by Christ entered and affirmed the (real) world we see when we look out our windows. And if this God self-disclosed and became real in Christ, then that revelation has occurred through scripture, which itself becomes a carrier of ontological determination. If this is all true, then what is real begins and ends with Jesus, including our politics.
Whose politics? Which reality?
Despite Niebuhr’s esteem of Augustine’s political/metaphysical distinction in City of God, he fails to define a reality that will hold eschatological water. Though he is admirably suspicious of arrangements based on self-interest and power, the truth after which realists endeavor (defined in Machiavellian terms) strongly implies a metaphysics, even though Niebuhr reduces truth to the same ‘social realities’ to which idealists are subject, undermining his entire argument by relativizing the “truth” which a realist follows. Yoder, however, proposed an alternative framework that will help us build toward a more comprehensive ontology inclusive of the metaphysical, eschatological nature of reality.
Yoder and Niebuhr both saw humanity as fundamentally flawed, but unfolded very different conclusions from the same assumption. For Niebuhr, extracting ethical claims from the Bible was not only irresponsible; it was never Jesus’ intent. We can see by Yoder’s cursory use, and its tongue-in-cheek reference to realism, that “Biblical realism” was primarily a semantic jab. Nonetheless, centralizing scripture enabled him to out-Protestant Niebuhr and ultimately turn the tables by claiming the reality to which Christian realists subscribed was human and therefor finite and ontologically inconclusive. For all its superficiality, I think Yoder is on to something with realism being tempered by Scripture, but the diverse genres of the Bible implore us to consider more specifically the forms of realism by which we can derive a particularly eschatological form of it, which is most fitting to the discussion of ontology.
Scripture and Reality
Although one can certainly derive a Christian account of reality from a close reading of the Psalms, for example, or an in-depth exegesis of Numbers, to get at the most fundamental question of being, it will benefit us most to look to apocalyptic literature. Apocalypticists, after all, illustrate reality in terms of its dependence upon and reflection of God. More important to our discussion is a careful look at the meaning of apocalypse and its close relative, eschatology. The word apocalypse means ‘revelation’, deriving from the Greek kaluptein, to conceal, coupled with the negating prefix apo; essentially to un-conceal, to reveal. Indeed, the book of Revelation, in some translations, is also known as “the Apocalypse of John.”
Eschatology, from the Greek root eskhatos is the study of final things, or the “end” of things. The double meaning of “end” should not be quickly overlooked. The end of everything can mean both the chronological conclusion of time, as in, say, the second coming of Christ, which Revelation describes. But end also means the purpose, the entire reason for a thing, in this case of reality. Holding both these meanings at once can be described as a thick view of eschatology, for it unites the chronological inevitability to which humans are bound as creatures with the ultimacy and teleological trajectory of creation itself as intended by its Creator.
Insofar as apocalypses give us a glimpse of where we are going, they reveal to us the state in which we find our being. A fundamental premise of a particularly scriptural account of reality insists that the Church, being Christ’s body on earth, precedes the world (and its prince). This is true both in a thin, chronological sense, but also in a thick epistemological and ontological sense as well. It is not simply that God will bring about the end of the world, but that God is the end of the world.
Put another way, there is a certain apocalypticism to Genesis 1 and 2, where we see the full potential of creation to be as God intended. Eschatology, therefore, frames the entire Biblical witness to the extent that it gives us a picture of what we truly are as creatures before sin entered the world and what we are to become once more when sin has been finally been driven from our midst. Apocalypse therefore runs throughout the Biblical witness. Those flashes of apocalyptic insight, such as we find in the prophetic tradition (especially the Major Prophets and Daniel) and Matthew 24 and Mark 13, to name a few, are but bursts divine light in which more decisive clarity erupts. A Biblical realism is determinatively eschatological. If this is true, what does this make of humanity, are we fundamentally good or corrupted to the core?
Is human nature good or evil?
Clear in Niebuhrian anthropology is a derogatory view of human nature. There is a kernel of goodness in his account of humanity, but his overall appraisal for human beings is not positive. This clashes with what he would certainly call our optimistic appraisal, but being eschatologically realistic forces us to grant ontological primacy to the state in which we most fully reflect not only our intended design as creatures, but the final state toward which God is moving the entirety of creation. Being realistic in a particularly eschatological way will help us understand ontology in political terms.
This is not to say that Niebuhr had a weak eschatology, or that his exegetical instincts were lacking. In fact, Lovin claims Niebuhr saw himself within “the tradition of the Hebrew prophets” that refused the idolatry of humans thinking of themselves as gods, of being perfectible. In terms of politics, this means the totalitarian (i.e. communist) claim “leads to a state that not only acts on God’s authority, but acts in God’s place.” Rather than seeing in the prophets a critique of the very foundation of civilization, as pacifists tend to, Niebuhr emphasizes their critique of human self-righteousness as a caution against thinking too highly of humanity to influence the arrival of God’s kingdom. According to Niebuhr, “the root cause of our illusions...is anxiety over the finitude which is necessarily part of every human situation. We trust distorted visions of ourselves because we fear to trust the only real source of security, which lies outside ourselves, in God.”
But a better vision of ourselves, if it is in God, speaks against Niebuhr’s account of humanity and the nature of sin. Karl Barth is helpful in this regard, who gives the Church an image of what it means to be fully human, which is to be with God. To be with God suggests a lower view of the fundamentality of sin, which Niebuhr’s claim necessitates. Barth’s theological anthropology helps us discover the importance of seeing ‘realism’ as a distinctively eschatological task, for humanity both comes from and will return to God. As for the in between, though Barth is no pacifist, he provides ground for theology like Yoder’s, which insists that what calls itself Christian realism has a low view of the reality of Christ’s sovereignty over actual worldly affairs. What Paul calls “authorities” are not ultimate, only provisional. As Christ makes abundantly clear, they “would have no authority… at all unless it had been given you from above.” Barth’s politics is decidedly eschatological insofar as it locates both sovereignty and anthropology outside this world and the way it rules; “The being of man …[is] ruled in this rule of God and drawn into this history inaugurated and controlled by God. It thus concerns all men and every man that in the man Jesus God Himself is man, and therefore acts and rules and makes history.”
The debates about Christ’s second coming should have less to do with some future date then with recognizing God’s immanent rule here, now! The ascension was not a departure, but something like its opposite, an arrival, and an inauguration. When Christ “comes again” it will be a departure from his throne at the right hand of the Father; it will not be a return in the sense that he was gone, but a re-entry to the limits of sensible perception and chronological captivity of finite humanity. As for our genesis, humanity has suffered no ontological change, but something just short thereof. After all, Barth insists against most classical Protestant reformers and their low anthropology of depravity. Instead, he insists that creation always and everywhere begins with a Yes. The No of most modern theological anthropologies is Marcionite insofar as their Bible excludes Genesis 1 & 2 and they fail to account for the immanency of Revelation.
The political differences between the pacifist and realist claims as we have shown them part most clearly on the question of the extent to which the eschaton is real-ized in the world we inhabit. In terms of scripture, the Cross must define reality, though pacifists and realist will disagree as to the material implications. Pacifists like Yoder emphasize an inaugurated eschatology, that Jesus’ life was not merely sacramental but exemplary; he showed us how to live and gave little attention to the “political” machinations the world might concoct. “The kingdom is here” might be their refrain. On the other hand, realists are hesitant to endorse such a theology because of the Pelagian influence the Social Gospel movement left, of God’s kingdom being susceptible to human influence. Realists would insist more that “the kingdom is coming.” Each has a thin view of eskhatos, as though it can only be one or the other, only past or future. A thicker view of reality, one we have been calling eschatological realism, grounds itself not in chronology, but teleology, the end is both in view and yet mysteriously in each of us. We are to live as though the way it will be is the way it is, regardless of our finite human capacity to comprehend reality in all its richness, because in fact reality has never changed. Humans are called “very good,” but we fell from our created state; we fell out of right relationship with God.
The fundamental claim made by an eschatological realism is that the church precedes the world in every way. Our creator determines whom and what we are, and our being is derived from something that predates sin. Furthermore, we can glimpse the state to which we are moving (and from which we fell) by looking at Biblical apocalypses with a genre hermeneutic that allows myth like Genesis to be myth and metaphor like Revelation to be metaphor. An eschatological realism is political in as far as it is to be instructive to our daily lives, as far as it gives us an ethic for how to act in relationship with one another. Preeminent moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre insists “The whole point of ethics… is to enable man to pass from his present state to his true end.” True end can and should evoke both human purpose and telos as well as humanity’s apocalyptic end. With Yoder, we affirm that Christ indeed provides an ethic to live by. This is not to reduce him to mere sage, as the historical Jesus quest has tried to do (which animated Niebuhr as well), but to elevate the exemplary to equal status with the sacramental.
Another theologian helpful for constructing an eschatological realism is John Zizioulas, who leans on patristic writers who utilized the Bible beautifully in adapting inherited Greek philosophies to accommodate an otherwise coherent metaphysics. Rather than deriving particular ontology from universals, as the Greek school had, the Christian tradition insists “being is caused in a radical way by someone – a particular being.” Sensible reality, which is to say the only reality to which human knowing has access, does not move from universal forms to particular substances, but from a particular person, one whose very name denies derivability, who calls themself “I am that I am.”
In other words, within a particularly scriptural ontology, a Biblical realism (to use the Yoderian phrase) “particularity is to be understood as causative and not derivative.” This goes for God, however, not for humanity. For finite creatures, being is derived via a uniquely Biblical phenomenon Zizioulas calls “corporate personality” from “the person of Adam.” However, this might need to be teased out a bit. He must mean something more like “first family” since Adam fails to be a “reality of communion” in Zizioulas’ account of personhood. Adam is alone, which God calls “not good.” Adam finds his corporate personhood in relationship, which would be at least with Eve and possibly in Cain, Abel, and Seth as well. “Corporate personality” is great, but even “Israel” rarely ever implies simply “Jacob” but instead suggests the entirety of the twelve tribes thereof. “Adam” has no such corporate-ness apart from the persons who made him “humanity” (namely, Eve).
The emphasis on Adam and Eve, for our purposes is intended to show that the being of humanity may and ought to derive from Biblical precepts. This helps us see the way in which reality is coherent for Christians only insofar as it aligns with the central authoritative force common to our many diverse communities. Yoder’s critique of Niebuhrian realism stands by this account, but must be made more specific. After all, it would be a stretch to try to construct an account of reality based upon, say, the poetic elements of Psalms. But apocalyptic elements of the Bible intend to be taken in precisely that manner, apocalypses intend to depict a reality somehow more real than the one humans perceive on a daily basis. Apocalyptic literature uses striking imagery to insist that the realm in which God is primary fails, either by human design or incapacity, to be the world to which human beings granny primacy.
Conclusion(s)
Though Niebuhr has reigned supreme as the major proponent of Christian realism, we have seen that in fact there are competing claims as to what a distinctively Christian realism must be. Against Niebuhr’s account, pacifist John Yoder referred to his Anabaptist exegetical methodology as Biblical realism, however cursory his titling may be. We recounted the overall trajectory of realism and discussed the implications of Yoder’s emphasis, namely that any Biblical account of reality and being must focus especially upon the apocalyptic literature in the Bible and encompass a thick view of eschatology as not merely a chronological end but as humanity’s teleological end as well. With the help of Barth and Zizioulas, we gestured toward such an eschatological realism that assumes ontological primacy in the Word of God, which is the body of Christ, before the world. This primacy assumes not just a political sovereignty but also ethical necessity. In all, we have sided with Yoder’s realism but called attention to a need for greater focus on the particularities of the Bible, and the special relevance of apocalyptic literature for deriving a fuller perspective on human nature, its origins, and its end.
Bibliography
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Dalferth, I. (2009) “Barth’s Eschatological Realism,” in Sykes, S. W. (ed.) Karl Barth: Centenary Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
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Lovin, R. W. (2008) Christian Realism and the New Realities. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
MacIntyre, A. (2010) After Virtue. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Niebuhr, R. (1966) Christian realism and political problems. Fairfield, NJ: Augustus m Kelley Pubs
Niebuhr, R. (1980) The nature and destiny of man: a Christian interpretation. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons
Yoder, J. H. (1972) The Politics of Jesus: vicit Agnus noster. Grand Rapids, MI: Ethics & Public Policy Center
Zizioulas, J. (2006) Communion & Otherness. New York, NY: T&T Clark
