BH 201
In No. 199, I mailed out a counterblast (ah, that great olde Puritan word!) against those who attack the notion of empire and the United States as an empire. Okay, the counterblast has been sounded.
Now, in the light of communications from friends, some retractions are in order.
1. First, I apologize to anyone offended by my saying that the notion that the USA is seeking an empire is stupid. I hope I made it clear that the US is not seeking an empire in the traditional Roman/Holy Roman/British/French sense. Once upon a time the US did take over the Philippines and other areas in a stupid attempt to imitate Europe. But that is not the situation today.
I object to using the term empire to describe the present American situation. I do so because empire has a destination, and the present American situation does not fit that definition. If you don’t believe me, take down your dictionary and look the word up. Is the present American situation good? Not very. It is an empire in any traditional sense? No.
I contend that the imprecise use of language does not help us understand God’s world. The Bible is concerned with clear language. The second Person of God is Word/Language. Let us show respect and be precise.
Understand: As I made clear last time, if American [is an] empire, that might be a good thing. The Bible is not opposed to empire as such. But America is not an empire. America is a sphere of influence. Also, it is a sphere of interference. And often a bad sphere of both. But not always.
Also, I have to say I’m pretty dubious when it comes to the James Bondish notion that the CIA is some kind of omnicompetent player on the world scene. From my reading the CIA is anything but competent. The United States was new to the international game after World War II, and has not been highly skilled at it.
If the US were an empire it would have governors in the countries we conquered, and it would force those countries to abide by its rules. I don’t see that happening anywhere. In Afghanistan anyone who converts to Christian faith is put to death. Back in the days of the British empire, that was not so.
Maybe the problem is that we don’t have a good one-word term for the notion of propping up rulers favorable to the US. The US propped up the Shah of Iran. Did that make Iran a part of a US empire. Well, no. If we had been running Iran, Khomeini would not have had a chance.
Look, if the USA wanted to have an empire it very well could have one! Who could stop it? One of Chinua Achebe’s characters in his novel “Longer At East” comments that “The United States is the only nation in history that could have conquered the world but refused to do so.” That’s really true. And we should appreciate it.
So, let us make relevant distinctions. The Soviet Union was an evil empire. Communist Russia conquered and raped these countries. Communist Russia imposed its own rulers on them and its own laws. De facto if not de jure, the USSR imposed taxes on those conquered peoples. (I got several hearty “amens” from eastern European readers of the previous essay.)
A second kind of international interference comes when one nation sets up puppet rulers in other countries. There is good evidence that the US has indeed been guilty of this practice from time to time, and the Shah of Iran is indeed an example. (Britain and America set up the Shah.) At the same time, this has been exaggerated, for the puppets that the US supposedly has under its thumb seem pretty determined to do whatever they want. (Whether or not or to what extent US companies set up puppet governments in Latin America a century ago is another matter.)
So, then, we come to an accurate description of US foreign policy, which is to support governments‘ favorable to the US and to US interests. This may and occasionally has meant active funding and support for candidates for office in some of these countries. But when the US-backed candidate comes to power, he’s still free to do what he wants. The US does not run the internal affairs of these nations. It may influence them, but it does not control them. There is a difference.
Reader, please bear in mind that in my book “Bible and the Nations” (available from Biblical Horizons), I argued for a largely hands-onn policy when it comes to Christian nations. I still believe that, and I have many criticisms of the United States foreign policies! All the same, I am pleading for accuracy of rhetoric, so that we all accurately understand what the real issues are.
2. I used an infelicitious analogy to date rape in my previous essay. I was making the point that imprecise language is used to prejudice discussions. I should have pointed out that for some militant feminists, all sex, even in marriage, is [ ? ] Anyway, the analogy was not as precise as I intended. Thanks to several readers for calling my attention to this.
3. My defense of violence at the end of the essay put some readers off. The reason is that I have objected to violence in some of my writings in the past, but did not make any distinctions in this essay. So, I must clarify, thanks to my friendly rebukers.
Violence in the sense of berserk murderous rage is a sin, period. Loss of control is a sin. This, however, is not how our modern anabaptists use the word “violence.” As I wrote, they use it to mean doing anything that violates the [ ] of (the rainbow-glory sphere around) another person. Spanking your child is violent, and so is outlawed in some pathetic senile societies.
Others seem to have been put off by my suggestion that the US president should blow Bin Ladin’s brains out on television and then publicly praise the Triune God for the privilege of doing so. For anyone to object to this shows how far modern Christians have fallen from the Biblical view. In the Bible, executions are public so that all will see and fear. In modern America, criminals are put to death at midnight in the basements of prisons. The Europeans, including most European Christians (i.e., gnostics), being practical atheists all, believe in no afterlife and so outlaw capital punishment altogether.
When Samuel hacked Agag to pieces, do you suppose he was weeping tears of sorrow? When Deborah delighted over the crushing of Sisera’s head, was she in some kind of sin? Well, plenty of‘ liberal 19th century commentators were quick to say idiotic things like that Deborah was just a child or her time, or that this reflects the incompleteness of God’s work in the human heart before the coming of “gentle Jesus meek and mild.” Such opinions are blasphemous. Both Deborah and Samuel were prophets, and what they said and did came straight from the Holy Spirit. Anyone who says that Deborah’s song is “sub-Christian” should probably be cut off from the Lord’s Table until he repents of his blasphemy. The Church rejected such Marcionism as heresy 1800 years ago.
Psalm 58:10 says that “the righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance; he will wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” If that does not make you excited and happy, you are in sin. If you can’t “AMEN!!” when you read it and sing it, you are not thinking God’s thoughts but Satan’s. Compare Psalm 149:5-9. Ephesians 5 and Colossians 3 command us to sing and thereby affirm these psalms.
How easily we overlook the “violence” of the ‘great songs of women in the Bible. Xena: Warrior Princess, move over! Here come Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, and Mary; not to speak of the fictional warrior-babe Judith! In Exodus 15, while prophetess Miriam did not write the song, she led the women in the refrain, which gleefully celebrates the deaths of the Egyptians. In Judges 5, Deborah mocks the tribes who failed to fight. (Golly gee, Debbie. That’s not very nice.) Then she uses poetic imagery to pretend that Jael punched out Sisera’s head while he tried to rape her. Then she mocks Sisera’s mother, anxiously worried about her boy. The Song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2 rejoices that the wicked rich now go around starving, and this is picked up in the Song of Mary in Luke 1.
None of this is very [ ] Too many modern Christian male intellectual pansies are pathetic wimps next to the warrior “chicks in chainmail” of the Bible. These women, however, are pictures of the Bride of Christ.