Theology of Nuance; Struggling with God and Man and Overcoming

Author: Thomas Merton
Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, pp.165

An Excerpt from the Jacket:

“In this long-withheld manuscript, Thomas Merton identifies the readiness of many nations – led by our own – to prepare for and threaten mass murder as the most urgent moral crisis of our time. Ringing across four decades, his profound warning is more timely than tomorrow’s headlines.” Daniel Ellsberg

An Excerpt from the Book:

(Click here to read the Forward to the book)

This then in conclusion: the Christian is bound to work for peace by working against global dissolution and anarchy. Due to nationalist and revolutionary ideologies (for Communism is in fact exploiting the intense nationalism of backward peoples), a worldwide spirit of confusion and disorder is breaking up the unity and the order of civilized society.

It is true that we live in an epoch of revolution, and that the break-up and re-formation of society is inevitable. But the Christian must see that his mission is not to contribute to the blind destructive forces of annihilation which tend to destroy civilization and mankind together. He must seek to build rather than to destroy. He most orient his efforts towards world unity and not towards world division. Anyone who promotes policies of hatred and of war is working for the division and destruction of civilized mankind.

We have to be convinced that there are certain violences which the moral law absolutely forbids to all men, such as the use of torture, the killing of hostages, genocide (or the mass extermination of racial, national or other groups for no reason than that they belong to an “undesirable” category). The destruction of civilian centers by nuclear annihilation is genocide.

We have to become aware of the poisonous effect of the mass media that keep violence, cruelty and sadism constantly present to the minds of unformed and irresponsible people. We have to recognize the danger to the whole world in the fact that today the economic life of the more highly developed nations is in large part centered on the production of weapons, missiles and other engines of destruction.

We have to consider that hate propaganda, and the consistent heckling of one government by another, has always inevitably led to violent conflect. We have to recognize the implications of voting for extremist politicians who promote policies of hate. We must consider the dire effect of fanaticism and witch-hunting within our own nation. We must never forget that our most ordinary decisions may have terrible consequences.

It is no longer reasonable or right to leave all decisions to a largely anonymous power elite that is driving us all, in our passivity, towards ruin. We have to make ourselves heard.

Every individual Christian has a grave responsibility to protest clearly and forcibly against trends that lead inevitably to crimes which the Church deplores and condemns. Ambiguity, hesitation and compromise are no longer permissible. We must find some new and constructive way of settling international disputes.

It is clearly the mind of the Church that every possible effort must be made for the abolition of war, even though the theory of the “just war” and the right of legitimate self-defense remain intact. But appeal to this right must not blind us to the much higher and more urgent duty of working with all our power for peace.

This may be extraordinarily difficult. Obviously war cannot be abolished by mere wishing.

We have still time to do something about it, but the time is rapidly running out.

Table of Contents:

1. Preamble: Peace – A religious responsibility

2. Can we choose peace?

3. The dance of death

4. The Christian as peacemaker

5. War in Origen and St. Augustine

6. The legacy of Machiavelli

7. Justice in modern war

8. Religious problems of the cold war

9. Theologians an defense

10. Working for peace

11. Beyond east and west

12. Moral passivity and demonic activism

13. The scientists and nuclear war

14. Red or dead? The anatomy of a cliche

15. Christian perspectives in world crisis

16. Christian conscience and national defense

17. The Christian choice

This book has my highest reccomendations. It has helped seal my understanding of the issue of the Christian perspective on warfare once and for all.

Concerning the term “post -Christian” Merton writes this:

“Whether we like to admit it or not, we are living in a post- Christian world, that is to say a world in which Christian ideals and attitudes are relegated more and more to the minority. It is frightening to realize that the facade of Christianity which still generally survives has perhaps little or nothing behind it, and what was once called “Christian society” is more purely and simply a materialistic neopaganism with a Christian veneer… Not only non-Christians but even Christians themselves tend to dismiss the Gospel ethic on nonviolence and love as “sentimental”. “

Merton’s book was written in 1961 at the onset of the “Cold War” and the Vietnam conflict. Not only was it very prophetic for that time as well as this, but it recognizes the rise of the hardline neopagan pseudo- Christianity that holds sway in today’s toxic political discourse. If one were to substitute the word “terrorist” each time Merton wrote the word “Communist” he would be speaking directly to us today about the “War on Terror”.

For instance:

“At one extreme we have the “hard” and “realistic” view. It excludes all other considerations and concentrates on one inescapable fact: the “terrorist” threat to western society. It considers that negotiation with “terrorism” is for all practical purposes futile. It is thoroughly convinced that only the strongest pressure will be of any use in stopping “terrorism” and the victory over “terrorism” by any available means takes precedence over everything else. Hence this “hard” position is in fact favorable to nuclear war and makes no distinction between preemption and retaliation, except perhaps to favor preeemption as more likely to succeed…
…they tend to regard anyone who strongly favors peace and disarmament as a “terrorist” dupe or fellow traveller, simply because of the worldwide propaganda given to the “terrorist strategy for peace”.

The simplicity and ruthlessness of this view makes an immediate appeal to a very large proportion of the American middle class. It is simple. It is clear. It promises results. It has the advantage above all of permitting disturbed and frustrated people to discharge their anxieties upon a hated enemy and thereby achieve a sense of meaning and satifaction in their own lives. But unfortunately this kind of satisfaction leads to moral blindness and to the stultification of conscience. The fact that this “solution” at the same time favors nuclear war, and considers it fully morally justified by its “good cause” and also appeals to certain types of Christians, shows that it is a SERIOUS danger. To be succinct, it produces a state of invincible moral ignorance. It consecrates policies that have very dubius justice, blurring the ethical clarity of Christian thought, making base emotions and hatreds with the specious appearance of christian zeal.”

This book is the most refined, comprehensive and persuasive tesament on this subject i have ever read.

Lyrics:

When I die don’t cry for me
In my fathers arms I’ll be
The wounds this world left on my soul
Will all be healed and I’ll be whole

Sun and moon will be replaced
With the light of Jesus’ face
And I will not be ashamed
For my savior knows my name

It don’t matter where you bury me
I’ll be home and I’ll be free
It don’t matter where I lay
All my tears be washed away

Gold and silver blind the eye
Temporary riches lie
Come and eat from heaven’s store
Come and drink and thirst no more

So weep not for me my friend
When my time below does end
For my life belongs to him
Who will raise the dead again

This excellent and informative video is a segment from one of the Transformations series, dedicated to racial reconciliation found here:

http://www.globalnetproductions.com/

The Native American Resource Network Page is here:

http://www.narnministries.org/economic.html

If you are in Oklahoma or the surrounding region and are interested in developing a fellowship or ministry dedicated to reconciliation and/or preaching Christ among American Indians, contact me. Like the video says… this work is of utmost importance.

Here is one of the most powerful songs I’ve heard in a while. Hope it gives you a blessing. It made me shed tears.

Lyrics:

I then shall live
as one whose been forgiven
I’ll walk with with joy
to know my debts are paid
I know my name is clear before my Father
I am His child and I am nolt afraid
so greatly pardoned, I’ll forgive my brother
the law of love, I gladly will obey
I then shall live
as one whose learned compassion
I ‘ve been so loved, that I’ll risk loving too
I know how fear builds walls instead of bridges
I’ll dare to see another’s point of view
and when relationships demand commitment
then, I’ll be there to care and follow through
Your Kingdom come around and through and in me
Your power and glory let them shine through me
Your hallowed Name, O, may I bear with honor
and may your living Kingdom come, in me
the Bread of Life, O, may I share with others
and may You feed the hungry world through me
Amen!!!!

Here is another brilliant article that I found at Nonviolence.org

Its sad to me that one of the greatest if not THE greatest proponents of non- violence in history was Jesus Christ and yet the modern voice of Christian non- violence is seriously marginalized and squelched by the more popular positions of “Christian” militarism. I have had a lot to say about both Christian non- violence and “Christian” militarism on this blog. If you are interested… just look around and you will find it.

Meanwhile, enjoy the article:

Here is a brilliant article that I found at Nonviolence.org

Its sad to me that one of the greatest if not THE greatest proponents of non- violence in history was Jesus Christ and yet the modern voice of Christian non- violence is seriously marginalized and squelched by the more popular positions of “Christian” militarism. I have had a lot to say about both Christian non- violence and “Christian” militarism on this blog. If you are interested… just look around and you will find it.

Meanwhile, enjoy the article:

Philosophy of Nonviolence: Yes, But What About Hitler?
Part Four. By David McReynolds

At some point all pacifists face this classic question, stated in many different ways. “Yes, but what about Hitler” can also be “Yes, but what about Arafat … Netanyahu … Criminals … Fascists … Racists … Serbs … Croatians … Muslims”.

At first glance nothing is stranger than the notion that a people without weapons could take defeat an occupying force (India), or an oppressive and unjust racial structure (the U.S.). But then some dismiss these triumphs by saying the same tactics wouldn’t work against Hitler - that “nonviolence really needs a humane, Christian, decent, democratic opponent … such as the white Southerner or the British … or it won’t work”.

Part of the problem here is myth. There was very little “nice” about the British. I will come back to that in a moment. But first there is a “terrible truth” we all have to face, whether we are pacifists or the most dedicated of violent terrorists - not all battles can be won. There are times when nothing will work. (This does not mean we shouldn’t try - we never know when the tide of history is about the change). Racism was not less evil in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 when the Montgomery Bus Boycott began than in 1915. Nor was this the first resistance. Blacks had risked their lives and lost their lives during their entire “American experience”.
SOMETIMES NOTHING WILL SUCCEED

In South Africa, decades ago there had been nonviolent campaigns led by Gandhi’s son, Manilal - they failed. So far - let’s be blunt - we have failed in this country at the task of “turning America around”. In some ways our job is harder than Gandhi’s - the Indians knew they were militarily weak compared to the British and were willing to examine alternatives, while Americans think they are strong because of the weapons they possess - and are reluctant to consider alternatives.

But back to the British and those “nice Christian Southerners”. The British were imperial rulers, repressive, violent when necessary, and if there were paradoxes to their rule in India, they were less from some decency inherent in British Imperialism than from self interest. The tropical climate of India did not attract large numbers of English. To rule the vastness of India, the colonizers relied on “natives” trained to manage the courts, police, transportation, postal services, etc. From a Marxist point of view there were contradictions built in. The British trained the Indians in the skills of running India. But the result was to create precisely that educated elite which led the independence movement.

Gandhi studied for the law in London, went on to South Africa, one of the many lawyers, and civil servants the British had trained to run their Empire. There was nothing about the English that was uniquely nicer than the Germans. Germany was the most civilized nation in Europe in the 1930’s. Hitler was a monster, yes, but not an alien. Second, because the Holocaust was documented, and happened in the midst of Europe (and because “our side” won) we know a great deal about it - and may think it was unique. Unhappily it was not. Records of the slave trade suggest far higher numbers of Africans died during that trade, and the evidence of Belgian rule in the Congo is shocking - in a short period after the Belgians took over in the last century, they killed several million more Africans than the Germans did the Jews. Evil in human affairs is universal, the Nazis had no monopoly on it.
EVIL IN HUMAN AFFAIRS

Americans need to pay attention to our own history. I am not trying to downgrade the Holocaust. I hope WRL Locals take note of April 22nd, Yom HaShoah, and arrange an observance in your community. No pacifist should be in the business of arguing “my pain is greater than your pain”. But we are charged to be honest about what we ourselves, or our nation, has been complicit in. The pain of 400 years of slavery is of the same level of evil as the Holocaust. In reading a New York Times Magazine piece about the Vietnam War (8.10.97), the figure accepted for Vietnamese deaths was 3.6 million. Their sole crime was defending their nation against a foreign invader - us. (As the Times noted, that many dead is equivalent, on the basis of the relative populations, to 27 million Americans). When someone says “pacifism is fine but it wouldn’t have worked against Hitler” they should consider that to the Vietnamese, Lyndon Johnson was Hitler, and to Black America Jim Crow was Hitler.

We will never know if nonviolence would have worked against Hitler (or if it might have worked against the Americans in Vietnam if the Vietnamese had chosen that method). The history of the Holocaust shows little resistance of any kind to Hitler from the Jews ( this is not surprising - they could not believe anything as terrible as the “final solution” was contemplated. Historically the Jews survived anti-Semitism by keeping a low profile). Some have said “The Jews were pacifists and look what it got them!” Sorry, they were passive - there is a world of difference. There is no way of knowing if active pacifism would have had any chance of working - we only know it was not tried. I remember the chilling deduction of Hannah Arendt in her book on Eichmann, in which she concluded it was the passive cooperation of the Jews of Europe with the Nazis which helped make the Holocaust possible. If you think about this for a moment it is, unhappily, true. To track down, arrest, transport and kill six million people who are resisting - even by not showing up when ordered, would, at the very least, have caused massive public disorder. (Nothing is easier than saying “I would have resisted” - a cheap sentiment expressed by people who weren’t there. Documents show some resistance, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Violent or nonviolent, radicals honor resistance).
SOME ISOLATED VICTORIES AGAINST HITLER

But within Occupied Europe there were well documented victories for nonviolence. In Norway there was a successful teachers’ strike against being forced to teach Nazi ideology. In Denmark the opposition to the Nazis was led by the King, who said that if the Jews had to put on the “Yellow Star of David”, then he, the King, would be the first man in Denmark to put one on. When the Nazis moved to arrest the Danish Jews, members of the Gestapo leaked this news to the Danish authorities and in 48 hours virtually all the Jews in Denmark were gotten to safety in Sweden. In Bulgaria, which had no history of anti-Semitism, spontaneous civil resistance (including crowds sitting on train tracks) prevented the Nazis from shipping any Jews out of the country.
“THOSE NICE CHRISTIAN SOUTHERNERS”

Of all the places Americans thought resistance to Jim Crow would begin, Montgomery, Alabama, heart of the Confederacy , was the last. I remember a bus ride through the Deep South in 1951, coming back from my first trip to Europe (a pacifist youth conference in Denmark). Inspired by Bayard Rustin and the Journey of Reconciliation I took the Greyhound bus’s Southern route back from New York to Los Angeles. My challenges to Jim Crow were timid - I was alone and not very brave even in a crowd. But I had a good chance to see and feel what it was like to move through the Deep South in the early 1950’s. So much time has now passed - nearly a half century - that Alabama is as far removed from us as Nazi Germany. But the incredible mass opposition to racism began there, in the Deep South, where the greatest danger a civil rights worker faced was not from the Klan but from the Sheriff, where there was no appeal to law, where Blacks could not vote, where night was a time of terror, not rest. Don’t tell older Black Southerners about how safe nonviolence was then!

Nonviolence cannot win every struggle - there are defeats. This is no more reason to abandon nonviolence than the military would give up its weapons if it lost a battle. (Philosophic note: it every military struggle there is a winner and a loser, so half the time violence fails, and half the time it wins. But in nonviolent struggle the objective is not to have a victor but to change the situation itself - a radically different concept).
WHY DOES NONVIOLENCE WORK?

Having admitted our approach cannot win all battles, why does it work at all? Why did it work against the Nazis in Norway and Denmark, or against the power structure in the American South? Or against the British in India?

Let us concede that all human events have “plural explanations”. It takes nothing from the Vietnam Peace movement in our country to see that while our nonviolence was effective, so, too, was the pain of the body bags coming home as a result of the military struggle the Vietnamese waged against our troops. Let us concede that while the British in India weren’t terribly nice, Britain had a democratic society which permitted an anti-colonial politics to develop. Let us admit that the violence of Southern racists was limited by fear of federal intervention, due to strong Northern support for Martin Luther King Jr.

Looking farther back in history, to times before any “civil society”, there are two examples of movements which spread in the face of great oppression. Buddhism is a totally non- violent philosophy which, despite hardship and persecution, spread throughout Asia, finally subduing the Mongols, who had so savaged Europe and China. Christianity, which did not make an alliance with the State until three hundred years after the death of Jesus, became the dominant religious force in the West, triumphing over the total power of Roman Emperors.

Neither Christianity nor Buddhism was a philosophy of social change - that awaited the teachings of Gandhi in this century.

But the fact remains like a stubborn rock - both Western and Eastern civilization are founded on the basis of ideologies that were nonviolent, and which for some time in their early period faced extreme persecution. Thus, when Gandhi began “to experiment with truth” in this century, and see if nonviolence could be used to challenge social injustice, he was working on a foundation that was not entirely new. Nonviolence is older than the Christian era.

Next: the dynamics of why nonviolence works.

NEXT: PART5: Why Nonviolence Works

“Nonviolence doesn’t work because it appeals to the ‘best in the enemy,…’ but also because our tactics absorb the pain and suffering even as we create social disorder so great that something must yield.”

Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

Debate this with others on the Nonviolence.Org Board

David McReynolds was a long-time staffperson for the War Resisters League. He writes: “There is not a single original idea in this material. Some of the ideas may be new to you, or may be arranged in ways that seem novel. They lack the power to kill, but contain the power to change. Read with caution. They have not been approved by any government authority. You are free to reprint, giving the source.”

This case is a perfect example of the selective humanitarianism and selective truth engineering of the corporate media and the western powers in general.

Link.

In response to these “words of wisdom” by Teddy Roosevelt;

(”But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile…We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language…and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”)

S.S. says:

In one very small area of what is now called “Northern California” there once existed at least 110 different “language families”. These “families” were as different and distinct as Italian is from Vietnamese in nearly every case. Yet these diverse groups found a way to co-exist in relative peace and harmony for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years. This is just one example from Native America that disproves the thesis that a collective continental grouping of people must homogenize language and culture to survive or function smoothly. In fact, this xenophobic drive for homogenization only leads to “genocide of the mind” (if not actual genocides of human groups) and a culture that devours everything in its path. The natural state of God’s good, nurturing creation is in fact one of diversity…infinite diversity in infinite combinations…not of homogenization, mechanization and industrialization.