Pope Francis - His Moral Perspective?

One need not be a practicing Roman Catholic to find pope-watching to be a thought-provoking pastime. The papacy, even if one must honestly disagree with its dogma, is nonetheless a source of interesting ideas.

Naturally, general public interest in the workings of the Roman Catholic church is shaped by reporting which centers either on only socially controversial questions, or on the intrigue generated by the selection of a new pope.

But a more reflective consideration of the material goes past the superficial presentations in the news media.

Both the non-Catholic and the anti-Catholic media covered offhand remarks made by Pope Francis I shortly after he took office in 2013. Prematurely reading ideas into the pontiff’s words, they later experienced, as Kathleen Parker writes,

chagrin to some who too soon interpreted Francis’s broad compassion as a precursor to doctrinal changes related to marriage.

Learning that Francis was not preparing a rebellion against the church’s expressed understanding of marriage, the disappointed media reverted to its previous pattern of alternatingly ignoring or disparaging the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Thus there was little coverage when Francis

delivered a pastoral message that is consistent with the church’s long-held beliefs on marriage.

While the media insist on oversimplifying the narrative - either the pope will stay with tradition or flatly oppose it - they missed the more important development. Pope Francis has indeed made, or is at least attempting to make, a major change in the Roman Catholic church’s perspective on homosexuality. As Kathleen Parker frames it,

What’s different is his language. He has sought fresh ways to see and think about things.

Francis has continued the obvious stance of the Roman Catholic church: it is a sin to engage willfully, physically, and deliberately in homosexual genital contact.

But Francis has made a major departure from past patterns of statements on the topic. What he seems to be articulating is a view in which the church’s major task is not moralizing, denouncing sin, or placing disproportionately large amounts of effort into justifying the moral stance.

Perhaps Francis is expressing the notion that the church should make clear moral statements, but not invest large efforts into producing argumentation and social action surrounding those statements. In short, maybe Francis is saying that the church as been placing too much energy into what are called the ‘culture wars.’

To deemphasize the culture wars is not, however, to stop engaging the culture or to stop resolutely affirming moral teaching. It is precisely this point which eludes much reporting. Francis is

unyielding in his definition of family — a man and woman joined in marriage.

One idea which one might attribute to Francis is this: the church should say, yes, voluntary homosexual behavior is a sin, but the church has other important business to do. The church should and must enunciate unambiguous ethical propositions, but then proceed to feed the poor and preach the Gospel of Jesus.

The church should not let itself get bogged down in endless debates about human sexuality, nor let itself be baited by those in the public arena who are continually attempting to provoke it.

Unequivocal moral declarations should be made, but should not become the major focus of the church. Every effort should be made to ensure that positive ministry is the centerpiece of the organized church.

On such a point, an interesting comparison can be made between the Roman Catholic church and the Salvation Army. The latter organization has made clear moral statements about human sexuality, but has made them in passing, and maintained ministering to the physical and spiritual needs of the poor as its major mission and the vast majority of its effort. Is Francis attempting to nudge his church in a similar direction?

Francis clearly has suggested that he wants to make pastoral changes without changing doctrine.

Under this interpretation, Francis is in no way compromising the moral stance of the church. He is simply placing it within a larger vision of the church’s proper functions.

Comparing homosexuality to other sins is instructive. Smoking cigarettes, failing to properly maintain one’s physical possessions, using inappropriate words in public or in private, failing to eat a proper amount vegetables, failing to donate to charities which care for the poor - all are sins. Why allow the church’s energy to be consumed in great disproportion about one particular sin?

To be sure, there are other interpretations of Francis. With so many reporters writing about the Vatican, any number of opinions about the current pope are available. Time will tell which are correct.

To all appearances, however, it seems that Francis is urging the church to move forward in positive ministry, spreading the love of Jesus to all people, because it is a foundational point of dogma that all people are sinners.

In this way, those who engage in homosexual acts are no different than anyone else: all are sinners, all are hopeless and helpless without Jesus, and all can receive hope and help from Jesus. All humans are utterly dependent on God’s forgiveness for their grave moral failures.

Without weakening the church’s moral determination on questions of human sexuality, Francis appears to be expressing the idea that the church needs simply to move forward in positive ministry. Once the clear ethical proposition has been expressed, the matter is settled. Energy is better used to feed the poor and declare God’s love to all people.

Our Human Nature: Blind and Asleep

The New Testament uses the metaphors of sleep and blindness to describe our human nature. We go through this life, through this world, spiritually asleep, or at least very groggy - and spiritually blind, or at least very myopic.

A person walking in such a condition is a danger to himself and to others. With an unsteady gait and bad vision, he’s likely to collide with something or someone. Damage or injury will result.

On a spiritual level, we humans aren’t likely to see or fully comprehend the dangers around us - sin, death, and the devil - or understand the dangers from within - our own sinful nature.

We can’t see the good paths which have been opened to us - and if we could see them, our shaky steps would soon stumble. We can’t see the Savior who’s there to help us.

C.F.W. Walther, who was president of the Missouri Synod in 1847, served in that capacity until 1850 and again from 1864 to 1878. In addition, he headed Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, where he also taught theology (1850–87). Regarding the spiritual fogginess which is human nature, Walther wrote:

Ach, meine Lieben, unselig ist der Mensch, welcher aus diesem natürlichen geistlichen Schlaf nicht schon hier erwacht! Dieser geistliche Schlaf ist nichts anderes, als der sichere Vorbote des ewigen Todes oder, was dasselbe ist, der ewigen Verdammnis. Allenthalben schallt uns daher in Gottes Wort die Stimme entgegen: „Wache auf, der du schläfst, und stehe auf von den Toten, so wird dich Christus erleuchten.“ Diese Stimme ertönt auch in unserer heutigen Sonntagsepistel. O, so gebe denn Gott, daß sie heute nicht nur in unser Ohr, sondern auch in unser aller Herz dringe, daraus allen Schlaf der Sünde verscheuche und uns zu einem neuen Leben in Christo erwecke! - Doch ehe wir dieser Stimme unser Ohr leihen, laß uns vorher den Herrn selbst hierzu um seines Heiligen Geistes Gnade anrufen in stillem Gebete. -

Being human, we go through our earthly existence with impaired spiritual consciousness and impaired spiritual vision. Our only hope is that Jesus takes us by the hand, and leads us, sometimes pulling us against our wills, sometimes picking us up and carrying us.

On our own, we are helpless, witless, and clueless.

We are not doomed to be this way forever. There is a better future. Jesus will lead us, sleepy and imperceptive as we are, through this life.

In eternity, however, God will remake us - we will see clearly (I Cor 13:12) and will be fully awake and alert.

Geopolitical Nightmares

Questions become complicated when ethics, spirituality, politics, and history intersect. The Middle East is a region full of such intersections.

Palestinian think Mitri Raheb wrestles with questions about the Israeli-Palestinian tensions. Those tensions, he argues, are set in the larger context of the world-historical relations between the Middle East and the rest of the earth.

The western end of the Mediterranean has been the object of tug-of-war struggles between major world powers for millennia. Egypt and Babylon, Persia and Greece, Rome and its successors, and the Ottoman Empire, to name only a few, have successively desired, fought over, or occupied this region.

The small and diverse ethnic groups who have been the successive native inhabitants of the region feel themselves to be pawns in struggles between bigger players. The ethical challenges posed by the situations there, by the area’s history, and by competing theological interpretations of the region’s events are complex.

From which perspectives can or should this part of the world be considered? To the Europeans it’s east; to the Asians it’s west. Mitri Raheb reminds us that we should be aware of our perspective - that we will not achieve a perfectly neutral “objective” assessment of the region. Everyone is somewhere, and from that point, he sees the world. If we cannot achieve the ideal neutrality, then at least we should be conscious of that circumstance as we proceed with our considerations. Raheb writes:

I’m often invited to speak about issues related to the so-called Middle East. I like to commence these occasions by stating that this is terminology that sounds obvious, as if everyone knows what we are talking about, and yet it is a misleading. The question to pose is: middle of where and east of what? Once this question is asked, people realize that that we are dealing with a Eurocentric view of the world. Only by looking at our region of the planet from Europe does one see it as east / southeast. To distinguish it from the Far East, Europeans first called it the Near East and later the Middle East.

Imperialism has shaped the region. From Persians to Alexander the Great, from Mohammed’s first conquests to the Ottomans, the Levant has been the object of imperial ambition. The Seljuk Turks fought viciously in 1098 A.D. against Egypt’s Fatimid caliphate to conquer and occupy Israel: that would not be the only time that Muslims killed Muslims in a power struggle over this coveted bit a real estate.

The terminology, Mitri Raheb asserts, used to discuss the region has been shaped by these centuries of imperial ambition:

It is noteworthy that the term was coined in the mid-nineteenth century when Europe was at the height of its power. The region’s name is thus closely related to imperial power. The use of the term because widespread only after the collapse of a vast Ottoman Empire that had held the region together for hundreds of years. The designation of the Middle East is therefore part and parcel of the colonial history of the region.

While many empires - both those arising in the Middle East, and those from outside it - have sought to control or occupy Canaan, it has been the European interests which have been blamed the most. Perhaps because their presence in the region has not been one of merely military occupation, but one of cultural and economic influence. Such influence may be, in some ways, more bitterly resented than the stationing of soldiers in the region.

While Europe developed a growing artistic and scientific culture, the formerly thriving civilizations of the Middle East became less creative under the influence of Islam: the burst of intellectual activity which energized chemistry, mathematics, physics, architecture, and music had its roots in Europe and blossomed there, while Muslim lands produced ever fewer inventions and discoveries.

Aware of their decline and nostalgic for the former cultural glories which surrounded lands like Babylon, Persia, and Egypt, residents of the Middle East resented being named by Europe. Scholar Marc Van De Mieroop writes:

Reconceptualizing the Orient as the Near / Middle East and Far East vis-a-vis Europe reaffirmed the central position of Europe in this imagery and further peripheralized the East, Europe being the Metropolis.

The powerful resentment, arising from the knowledge that Middle East had once been a center of civilization and was now on the margins of it, and from the palpable sense of decline among those who lived there, was directed toward Europe, a latecomer to civilization, which was now surpassing it Ancient Near Eastern cultural parents.

This sense of humiliation needed a scapegoat: Europe would be blamed by Islam for the damage which had been inflicted upon the region. Salim Tamari writes:

The idea of the Middle East cannot be separated from the power to create and impose categories of knowledge on the rest of the world. The Middle East exists because the West has possessed sufficient power to give the idea substance. In this regard the colonial past and the imperial present are parts of the equation that make the Middle East real.

Yet Europe is not guiltless. It could have intervened to rescue the endangered cultural energy and creativity of the Middle East. It could have presented a more humane face at certain key points in the convoluted narrative of the Crusades. Mitri Raheb notes also that the region is ill-defined: the terminology is not a precise name.

But behind this name is not just a colonial perspective but an intrinsic identity question. The Middle East is not easy to pinpoint, because it has no definition or boundaries. While to some and in certain contexts it once meant the whole of the area from India to in the east to Morocco in the west, and from Turkey in the north to Sudan in the south, it is understood today more or less as the area covering the Arabian Gulf to the east, and Syria and Iraq to the north, encompassing Egypt in the west, and as far south as the Sudan.

The diversity within the Middle East makes it difficult to define: not only a spectrum of quarreling Islamic sects, but Jews outside of Israel and Christians scattered across the region form a religious smorgasbord. The Iranians are ethnically Persians, not Arabs. The Turks and Kurds likewise have a unique non-Arab heritage.

One important feature of the Middle East is that it has no “middle” or center. Rather, it has different centers of power separated by deserts and/or mountain chains.

Yet by forming narratives about empires and imperialism, we risk losing sight of humanity. All the parties in the Middle East, and all the parties outside of it, share the common human condition: they are tragically flawed yet contain traces of an original divine image. The commit moral evils, yet are deeply loved by a generous God.

Geographically speaking, part of the Middle East is located in Asia, but part is also found in North Africa. In fact, the bulk of the Middle East could be called West Asia. This is the term used, for example, at the United Nations. The other portion is still referred to as North Africa.

If all the people in and around the Middle East share the same human nature, then they share the same needs, and the same inability to provide for them. It doesn’t matter whom we blame for a long history of injustice. What matters is obtaining justice, and that’s the one thing that humans can’t do. We dare not rely on our efforts to put things right: the only possible outcome of such attempts will be even more injustice.

Justice is divine, and peace is a fruit of God’s intervention, not humanity’s efforts.

Historically speaking, and for over a millennium, from Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC to Charlemagne in the eighth century AD, the nexus of the region was located in the west, where the Mediterranean was the center and the region became part of “Europe.” The rise of Islam and its spread throughout the Middle East pulled the region away from Europe’s sphere of influence, making it part of the Arab-Islamic world.

It is no mere coincidence that Jesus did His major work in this region of the world. He chose it as the proper stage for His mission to help humanity.

Religiously speaking, the region changed religion at least four times, from “paganism” to Judaism, to Christianity, to Islam. Because of these not inconsiderable realities, the region was incapable of self-definition and thus the prevailing empires imposed their weltpolitik.

Geopolitical considerations lead ultimately to a thousand dead ends. Hope is divinely dispensed, and humans can only respond with gratitude. There are possibilities for good things to happen in the Middle East - justice and peace and reconciliation - but they will not be brought about by human effort.

The Hermeneutics of Empire: the West and the Middle East

In colleges and universities, we routinely isolate academic disciplines like history, theology, and textual criticism. In real life, these divisions are not clear or neat.

Political power can be gained by those who determine how a given set of facts is woven into a narrative, or by those who can decide which narrative, among a set of competing narratives, will become canonical.

Once a narrative is established, another layer of decisions will be made about how it is understood or applied. These decisions will likewise determine the distribution of power.

In the complex set of conflicts which is the “Middle East” or “Near East” - already in this nomenclature a decision is being made about the perspective from which the region is viewed - narratives have been, and are being, formulated, understood, misunderstood, applied, misapplied, told and retold in numerous ways.

The sheer number of variations on any one of these narratives, and the complexity of these narratives, explain why the long-sought diplomatically negotiated stable peace is so elusive. Deeply divergent narratives leave little room for common ground or a mutually adopted set of axioms which might be used as a starting point for a new narrative.

The Middle East presents us not only a with groups and their interactions with each other, but also with interactions between the Middle East and the rest of the world.

This region has been the springboard for empire and would-be empires, both in ancient and modern times. It is telling that in every century, more than one invading force has left the Middle East, heading for regions as diverse as North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Hungary, Ukraine, Poland, Austria, and India.

The concept of “empire” is a staple in constructing narratives about the Middle East. Empires from outside the region have worked their way into the narratives as well, including invaders like Alexander the Great.

Author Mitri Raheb reflects on the role which “empire” plays in narratives about the Middle East. The diverse people groups which share, because of their location, the name ‘Palestinian’ see themselves, according to Raheb, as objects having been manipulated by a long series of empires:

Hermeneutics is the study of the theory and practice of interpretation. Interpreting a story is an art that requires much creativity and imagination. It is also a science. It is not an innocent science, but one very closely related to empire. The empire wants to control the storyline - its meaning, production, and marketing. It does so consciously and often - far more dangerously - unconsciously.

The extent to which Raheb speaks for a large segment of Palestinians is not clear. He asserts that a modern empire, not organized as a single state like previous empires, but rather a cultural and economic empire, is maneuvering this ethnically and religiously diverse group.

He posits the “West” as having created the nation-state of Israel and maintained it at the expense of the other nations which had previously occupied this land:

Hermeneutics is one of the most hazardous and repressive elements in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our problem would be much more easier to deal with if it were solely a massive injustice, a problem between Israelis and Palestinians. Unfortunately, the Western world is part of the intractability rather than part of the solution. The Israeli occupation is subsidized by the United States and Europe. The Israelis would not have the financial capability to build a three billion dollar “separation wall” or the thirty billion dollar settlements in the West Bank if they paid the bills from their own pockets. “Rich uncles” donate that money and/or provide soft loans. They do so because, for them, Israel belongs to the empire. In short, it serves their interests, although a small but growing number of people are beginning to realize that Israel is becoming more of a permanent liability than a strategic partner.

It may be asked, to which extent one can properly posit a monolithic “West” and to which extent it unanimously and univocally asserted itself in the creation and sustenance of modern Israel.

The significance of the founding of the nation-state of modern Israel is doubtless significant, but lost in many of the narratives is the fact that even prior to that event, the hope for a peaceful and forward-looking organization of the Middle East was fading as the French Mandate and British Mandates gradually deconstructed themselves.

While many narratives see Israel’s founding in 1948 as the single great destabilizing event, a constructive pattern for the region had by that time perhaps already been lost, when postwar England and France felt themselves overextended and could no longer invest the resources to plant and maintain stability in the area.

So, while Mitri Raheb and others see Israel as an ‘occupation,’ the greater and more foundational problem is perhaps the lack of British and French occupation of not only Palestine, but Syria, Iraq, and other territories in the region.

Because he sees only Israel as the destabilizing factor, Raheb is forced to argue against any and all influence from outside the region:

It is not only the flow of hardware, military equipment, and advanced technology that provides the fuel to maintain the occupying power, but it is also the “software” - the culture, the narrative, and the theology - that helps to power the state of Israel. These provide the soft power or halo that enables Israel to continue to get away with its oppression of the Palestinian people without serious ramifications. This software was long in the making, but it became a dominant reality following World War II. Since then, we have been told that God is on the other side, on Israel’s side. From that time on the story has been mixed with history, and biblical Israel with the modern state of Israel. The myth of a Judeo-Christian tradition has blurred the scene in Palestine, and for the last sixty-three years Palestinians have been demonized by a dominant Western culture.

Raheb sees a monolithic “West” as supporting Israel and therefore oppressing the coincidental mixture of nations which had been on that piece of land. He is perhaps naive to imagine such a unified Western intent or action, given the disunity between European and American diplomats on precisely this question.

In addition to cultural and economic imperialism, Raheb argues that religious motives are at work here. Perhaps he is correct, to the extent that we can distinguish religions from God. Sets of traditions and institutions manufactured over the centuries by people do indeed have an impact in these narratives.

God, on the other hand, is far above these petty power grabs - and far below them. He is present whenever there is an impulse for humane action - with no regard for the ethnicity or nationality of the people among whom such an impulse might take place.

Jesus is present in every humanitarian act, every sincere initiative toward peace, and every step away from institutionalized hatred and violence.

Jesus will not, however, allow Himself to be confined in anyone’s narrative. He is always bigger.

The physical universe in which we live - not only the Middle East - is essentially and permanently flawed. A utopia cannot be constructed here.

We can and should look to improve the world, but we must not allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that we can perfect it. There will always be plagues, famines, wars, and rumors of war.

In our temporal-spatial continuum, there will not be a perfect and lasting peace, with perfect and lasting justice, in the Middle East - or anywhere else. We can make it more peaceful, and more just, and we are morally obliged to make it as peaceful and just as we can.

That will not be done by wading into a tangle of numerous complex narratives constructed by Israelis and Palestinians.

History: God at Work

Because God is active in concrete ways in the physical world, history is not merely an random record of “what happened.” History is theology. History is God’s diary - a record of what He’s done.

Given that history has spiritual significance, the way in which historians do history becomes a theologically relevant matter. This is obvious in cases like Constantine’s imperial policies, or Henry VIII’s break with Rome, but is equally important in less obvious cases, like Mao’s conflict with Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) or how Chandragupta Maurya taxed the peasants of India.

All history is sacred history.

Seeking to unfold the spiritual implications of historical methods, author Mitri Raheb looks at the ways in which the history of Palestine has been recorded. Palestine - or ‘Philistia’ - has been documented as a geographic region for millennia, occupied or dominated by various nations at various times.

To even mention Palestine in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries is obviously a politically sensitive topic. Yet to speak of Palestine only in those centuries is to ignore at least four thousand years of recorded history.

If we examine the ancient history of Palestine, and the many different ethnic groups which lived in, or moved through, it, we can do so either in the light of contemporary events - in which case we are gerrymandering history for the sake of modern politics - or ignoring contemporary events - in which case we are refusing to examine evidence which may shed light on what’s happening now.

The history of Palestine is the history of the land - in the direct physical sense - and not the history of a nation or of a state, because various nations and various states have occupied or ruled this land.

Mitri Raheb states a bold thesis about the historiography of Palestine:

Historical writing by Christians that takes account of the Near East and Palestine falls, without exception, into one of two approaches. The first is biblical history, which starts approximately with Abraham and continues, give or take, up to the time of Jesus. Scholars in this field apply their research to the history of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, and then reflect on the implications of those empires on Palestine. This stream of history generally ends with the second Jewish Revolt in the middle of the second century AD. Because this field is concerned with biblical history, interest in the history of Palestine ends there. After that no one is obliged to hear, study, or even research anything that has to do with the Palestinian history that follows.

According to Mitri Raheb, historians make one of two mistakes: either they treat the history of Palestine as ending between 100 and 200 A.D., or they treat its history as largely uninteresting. Naturally, these formulations are overstatements - very few historians indeed would assert such propositions - but Raheb argues that they, in practice, treat Palestine this way:

The second approach is that of church history. Church history is taught mainly as world history and mainly as Western history. It usually begins with the early church, proceeding from Constantine and the Byzantine Empire to the Holy Roman Empire, the Crusades, the era of Scholasticism, to the Reformation, and on to mission history, concluding with contemporary history. With the exception of the first two centuries and, to a certain degree, the Crusades, Palestine is not deemed noteworthy, and thus its history remains largely in the dark.

The question, then, begs to be asked: in which way should historians treat Palestine? As a question of historical methodology, Palestine should be treated in the same way as any other territory.

If history is theology, then the history of Palestine is a record of how God has manifested Himself there - just as the history of Thailand or Bolivia is a record of how God has shown Himself in those areas.

God is not interested in one’s citizenship. God is not interested in whether one is culturally Jewish or Muslim. God is interested in giving good things to people.

The religious categories of the region are a mess. To be identified as “Palestinian” does not entail automatically that one is a Muslim. God’s vehicle for reaching people is not cultural Christianity. His vehicle is Jesus.

What has Jesus been doing in Palestine for the last four thousand years? What is He doing there today?

These same questions can be posed about China or Bolivia or even the United States.