(Untitled)

[napoleonofnerds]

I think the Catholic habit of singing patriotic hymns on Memorial Day weekend and the first reading from Sunday (from Acts 8, the founding of the Church in Samaria, leaving out Simon Magus) form a good basis for talking about something that's been on my mind

Comments

[essius]

We know as Christians that the state is but a commonly agreed upon illusion - it exercises no authentic authority, guarantees no rights, and offers no liberty, for authentic liberty is to be free from the very power that the state embodies, and from the very evil which corrupts, and to a large extent governs, that power. We are the very pinnacle of enemies of the state, when we are truest to the Gospel, for we claim that the Emperor not only has no clothes, he has no Empire.

This doesn't seem like the Pauline, Augustinian, or Thomistic view. How would you respond, in the first case, to Romans 13:1-5, Ephesians 6:12, and Colossians 1:16? and then, Augustine's City of God and Thomas's treatment of human law in the Summa?

[napoleonofnerds]

Show me the inconsistency - nations are necessary evils, human laws are always unjust but they are a reality because Jesus isn't back. I didn't call for anarchy, or for the overthrow of political power - such a thing is impossible anyway. Subversion isn't necessarily disobedience, and the laws of a wicked system may still have all the properties St. Thomas attributes to them

[essius]

How are nations necessary evils? Are they not, rather, conditionally necessary goods? In what way are human laws "always unjust"? Are they not, as Aquinas holds, only unjust if and to the extent that they fall short of natural law?

There's a huge difference between saying that nations and laws are per se evil, and saying that this or that nation or law is evil per accidens.

[napoleonofnerds]

Inasmuch as laws are always going to fall short of natural law because of their human origin and because of the nature of political power, they're all evil to some extent, and thus indeed evil per se. Nations are the vehicle through which systematic oppression of various kinds occurs - so perhaps they are not evil per se (I'd have to think more about what's inherent to the state and what is accidental), but as a descriptive claim I'm pretty comfortable with the claim that there has not been and is not now any nation which cannot reasonably be called evil.

[pastorlenny]

Like.

[napoleonofnerds]

Yay. :)

[pastorlenny]

Do you think this precludes ministers of the gospel from making certain remarks on a national holiday such as this? Is there some appropriate way to leverage the notion of sacrifice for the common good as a means of sharing the gospel in the process of supporting the local community's honoring of soldiers killed in action?

[napoleonofnerds]

I think I'd probably try to draw the distinction between martyrdom and being killed in combat, suggest that respect for soldiers who died doing what they believed to be the right thing is something independent of being critical of (or indeed overtly hostile to) the current military order, and then lead the people in praying for the dead.

[warmsnob]

I second pastorlenny

[napoleonofnerds]

Thanks.

[loxian]

And I third him.

I See Where You're Coming From...

[publius_aelius]

...but this is why Christianity is so opposed to both Judaism and Islam--the one exclusivist to the point of almost being racist, and the other overly "catholic" and overly willing to use power to create a "just order."

Re: I See Where You're Coming From...

[napoleonofnerds]

I'd say that there are far more important reasons Christianity is ideologically distinct from Judaism or Islam, and that this is a consequence of those.

[garpu]

I'd agree...although my reasoning is that Catholicism should be bigger than things like nationalism. That, and any time the RCC gets too wrapped up in politics, it's never a good thing.