As it happens, Your Humble Blogger seems to frequently point to interesting and provocative essays by people who are not big favorites around here. One recent such is the prolific Amir Taheri’s essay in the New York Post of all places, about the Mahathir Mohamed flap. Another such is Jim Wallis’ recent essay in Sojourners. I am no Christian, as my Gentle Readers are aware, and so have no dog with this theological fight, but I find the essay both interesting and a bit disturbing.
First I should say that I despite the Rev. Wallis and Your Humble Blogger both being on the left, and both fundamentally seeing our faiths as demanding that we work for social justice, I disagree with him on many policy issues. Furthermore, I often find his writing leaves me, well, with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. He is a pacifist; I am a pragmatist. He yearns for simplicity; I wouldn’t like it if I ever found it. He likes his hands clean (metaphorically—he is certainly not averse to hard work); I like ’em dirty (again, metaphorically, as I’m the laziest fellow you could ever hope to meet). All of that puts us in different universes, so it’s not altogether surprising that I’m not a big fan.
Still, it’s terrific to see somebody say that Gen. Boykin not only shouldn’t say such things, he shouldn’t think them. Yes, he has a right to think them if he likes, but I believe that dualism (and I can’t figure his outlook to be anything but dualist) is a serious theological error, and it’s incumbent on people who believe that dualism is a serious theological error to say so. To say, on the one hand, he made a tactical error in saying things that will make the world worse, not better, and on the other, he made a strategic error in thinking things that will make the world worse, not better. Gen. Boykin is wrong, and if it’s at all possible to persuade him that he is wrong, we are obliged to do so.
And yet...
There’s as much arrogance in his writings (and of course in mine) as there is in Gen. Boykin’s speech. If Gen. Boykin thinks that his Gd is the one true Gd, and that everyone else is worshipping idols at best, the Rev. Wallis clearly feels that his Gd (the pacifist one, the loving one, the tolerant one) is the one true Gd, and that the General’s comments are “not mere political incorrectness, but idolatry.” So each thinks their theological opponents are not merely wrong but idolaters. And that’s a bit disturbing, isn’t it?
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
Vardibidian, I’m glad that you are reading, and pointing your readers toward, essays that take up positions with which your regular readers are likely to disagree. I have trouble enough finding time to read journals of opinion that keep me informed about matters from a point of view that I feel I can generally trust, so it’s a great help to have someone looking at the other stuff, considering why it’s out there, and making it accessible.
The link to the Wallis essay isn’t working for me at the moment, so I can’t look at it now, but I guess, not having seen the context, that I don’t find it all that disturbing that Wallis is not merely wrong, but an idolater. Part of my feeling, I suppose, has to do with what it means to call someone an idolater, part of it has to do wtih my sense of what idolatry means in a Christian theological context.
Idolatry is _the_ basic devotional error — venerating or worshipping or trusting to deliver you that which is not worthy of veneration or worship or trust — and this is an error that believers fall into all the time. It’s not that idolatry is not a serious matter, but it’s a way of going wrong that believing Christians take again and again, and which they must endeavor to correct. St. Augustine is downright paranoid about this sort of idolatry.
To look at the matter another way, if Wallis sees Boykin espousing dualism, then he can hardly not go on to say that Boykin is an idolater, because dualism is, insofar as I understand the main stream of Christian theology, a form of idolatry. So I’m not sure that Wallis could point out Boykin’s serious theological error and not call him an idolater. But I haven’t been able to read the article, so I should probably just stop speaking as if I had.
Thanks.
Chris,
The Working for Change site is reprinting (re-webbing? re-broadcasting?) the Wallis article on their site, so you should be able to read it there. I should have added the alternate site in my original post, as I had difficulty getting in to sojo.net myself at one point.
As for your point, I suppose if idolatry is something that happens all the time, the accusation of it is less severe; to me, however, the accusation reeks of, well, pride, the first sin and the fount of sins, right?
Thanks,
-V.
Thanks for the additional link!
Having read the article, I would now repeat my analysis that the basic thrust of Wallis’s criticism of Boykin on theological grounds is that Boykin’s beliefs are idolatrous.
What gets tricky as a matter of rhetoric as rather than as a matter of theology is that Wallis is turning against Boykin the accusation that Boykin is making against all Muslims, but what Wallis means by idolatry is something quite different from what Boykin means by it.
Boykin is aligning Allah with Baal and those other ancient gods that the Israelites were tempted to worship, he is denying that Muslims are setting out to worship the same Deity as Jews and Christians: the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jesus, of Ishmael. _That_ is a pretty severe accusation, and Boykin goes on to align such idolatry with devil-worship. Wallis is treating idolatry in a different sense: he’s arguing that Boykin has mistaken the army of the United States for the army of Christ and is therefore misplacing his worship and his trust.
It’s perhaps rhetorically invidious for Wallis to use idolatry in this more sophisticated theological sense without fully explaining it after he has allowed Boykin’s conception of idolatry to enter into the essay. But from my understanding of the mainstream of Christian theology, Wallis’s identification of Boykin’s beliefs as idolatrous looks pretty uncontroversial. It doesn’t come across as an act of pride because he’s speaking not so much from personal insight — “I know that I’ve got the right God, and that you don’t!” — but from a well-established tradition of theology.
I’m troubled by Wallis’s rhetorical handling of the accusation of idolatry, not by the substance of it. If he’s really interested in offering better religious teaching to General Boykin, he’d do better to do more teaching, and less preaching.