It is mid-July 2016. You are Theo Epstein, president of baseball operations for the Chicago Cubs. You took the job after a similar position with the Boston Red Sox, who, under your leadership, broke an 86-year championship drought known as “The Curse of the Bambino.”[1] Now you have been hired to break an even longer drought, the 108-year old “Curse of the Billy Goat.”[2]

Your Cubs are the best team in baseball, even though it is also the youngest. You have the best record in baseball, and your entire infield started in the All-Star game for the National League. But the team is not perfect. In particular, your “closer”[3] Hector Rondon and setup man[4] Pedro Strop are B+ performers: good but not great. You know that you have the opportunity to trade for Aroldis Chapman, who can throw a baseball harder[5] than any human being alive. However, Chapman will cost you. The Yankees, Chapman’s current team, insist on getting in return Gleyber Torres, the Cubs’ number-one future prospect and perhaps the top prospect in all of baseball. (Torres is currently in the Cubs’ minor league system, and not counted on to contribute to the major league club this year.)

Do you make the deal for Chapman? Let us crystalize the dilemma. First, let’s assume some sort of Faustian bargain made by Epstein: acquiring Chapman guarantees a World Series championship.[6] Most Cub fans would have said “absolutely, make the deal,” and, as we know, Epstein did, and the Cubs did win. But let’s complicate the question a bit. First, assume you also know that you will only have Chapman for the remainder of this season, because he will re-sign with the Yankees. You also know that Torres will be turn out to be every bit as good as advertised, starting in 2018. How does the deal look now? Let’s suppose further than you know (as Epstein could not have in 2016) that Addison Russell, the Cubs’ shortstop who plays the same position as Torres (thus blocking his path to the majors), will fail to live up to his potential and by 2019 will have so many serious personal problems that you’re ready to give him away. Still so sure about making the trade? Then let’s tighten the vise a bit more. It’s revealed to you that Javier Baez, another middle infielder every bit as dynamic as Torres, will turn out to be a keeper, but then in early September 2019, when the Cubs are in a desperate pennant race with the Cardinals and Brewers (their two most hated rivals) will break his hand and miss the rest of the year, starting a downslide that leaves the Cubs out of the playoffs, never having won another championship. Reaching for a second does of Prilosec?

Continue reading “From the Box Seats, Darkly (Knowledge Part 3)” →

How do we know what we know?

Last week I was in the waiting room of my cardiologist’s office, for my annual checkup. Sitting across from me was an elderly (i.e. my age) gentleman, in shorts and trainers, listening to some sort of radio or tv show on his phone, without earbuds. Immediately, I sorted him out: he’s here for a stress test, because of worrying symptoms brought on, no doubt, by too many years of high fat, low exercise living. Which turned out to be untrue. He was there for an exercise class, organized by the clinic. Not two minutes after I noticed him, here came the trainer to take him and five or six others back for their morning workout.

What might he have been thinking about me? Most likely, the answer is, he wasn’t, having better things to do. But if he were, was he thinking of me as a gracefully aging ex-marathoner, with no apparent reason to be at a cardiologist? Even less likely, given that absolutely nothing about my physical presence suggests “long-distance runner.” If he were paying attention, he probably sized me up pretty much the same way I did him.

Last time in this spot we considered the philosophy of hermeneutics, especially in relation to other people. The examples I gave came out of my travel to Scotland, which I think of as sort of a second (or third) home but which would regard me as an occasional visitor. The question was how we form our opinions of others. Do  we grant to others a hermeneutic of generosity, or of suspicion? Do we impute good qualities to them, or not so good? Are they innocent until proven guilty, so to speak, or the reverse?

This applies not only to strangers, but to people we encounter every day, and even to ourselves. I still think of myself as a long-distance runner, even though Barack Obama had been president scarcely a month when I ran my last marathon, and I never was any good in the first place. (Fastest slow guy was probably the best you could say about me.) No stranger would look at me and be reminded of Pheidippides (except perhaps for the collapsing in exhaustion and dying part.) And it happens not only when we assess people but when we talk to them. Misunderstandings happen more often that we realize because we assume that each of us understands what the other is trying to say, rather than actually listening to them. So we respond to what we thought we were going to hear, rather than what was actually said. I was on a business call earlier this week with someone that in a fairly bullying manner shouted that he absolutely would not tolerate actions that no one else on the call had even hinted as possible. (That was not me, by the way, although it certainly could have been.) It took the rest of the 45-minute call to claw back to some sort of productive conversation.

He responded to something that was not said (and was not going to be said.) In other words, his suspicion of what the others might be up to prevented him from hearing what was actually said. We could have had a phone call that actually accomplished something had he come in assuming that everyone else spoke in good faith rather than devious self interest.

Which, sad to say, brings us to the perennial breaking news topic: America’s President (who shall not be named.) One way to understand the political firestorm surrounding the call with the Ukranian president is hermeneutically. The President wants all of us to interpret his actions generously. It was a “perfect,” a “beautiful” call. It was the kind of call that world leaders have all the time. It had nothing to do with politics. On the other hand, the President wants us to regard the unnamed whistleblower, the House of Representatives, and the media with some combination of suspicion and disdain. Their motivations are purely political. It’s all part of the swamp, the deep state out to get him. Which raises two questions. First, at what point does he forfeit the right to the benefit of the doubt? Christians, in their dealings with their neighbors, say “never.” But here is a case where, clearly, the government does not and cannot operate on purely Christian principles. While God may be infinitely forgiving, our system of checks and balances cannot be. At some point, enough is enough. The acceleration of impeachment proceedings is not simply outrage over this incident, outrageous though it clearly is, but a sense that we increasingly know beyond a reasonable doubt who this President is.

The second question gives us all pause. If we insist on insisting on always getting the benefit of the doubt, without extending that courtesy to others, look to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the company we keep. Christians have been given our role model, one of humility and self-sacrifice. The President gives us another one. There is a story about Voltaire catching some pompous nobleman admiring himself with some faux award pinned to his chest, and saying “If I catch you doing that again, I shall be forced to tell you the names of other winners.” When we find ourselves affording the benefit of the doubt only to ourselves, we should think about the company we keep.

Anne and I returned last week from a week in Scotland. We spent 3 days in Glasgow and then 5 in St Andrews (the “magic village,” one of my colleagues calls it). Every time we go, I wonder whether this is the last time, and hope it isn’t.

I took Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt with me, finishing it in Glasgow. Travels with My Aunt is about Henry Pulling, a fifty-something retired bank manager who reconnects with his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta at his mother’s (her sister’s) funeral. Henry discovers, as Aunt Augusta reenters his life, that almost everything he thought he knew about his father, his mother, and ultimately himself is untrue. Henry, in true bank manager fashion, likes to size people up as soon as they walk into the room, but unfortunately his assessments always turn out to be overly narrow at best, and often completely false. I’ll leave it at that, to avoid spoilers.

When we are alert to them, we realize that we all constantly have moments like that. Traveling, when we run into people that we don’t know and have to size each other up, is even more full of them than usual. Ours started on the airplane to Edinburgh. Anne and I like to order “specialty meals” for the transAtlantic flights, because we have found that they look and taste more like real food than the usual “chicken or pasta.” More often than not we order what the airline calls “Muslim” or “Hindu,” because that usually means “curry.” Now here is the interesting point. The flight attendants, all veterans, had a hard time finding us to give us our “Muslim” meals, even though our seat numbers were marked on the tray. I didn’t understand this until I realized that they made the same mistake with our dinner and our pre-landing breakfast; they tried to give them to a black couple two rows in front of us. In other words, someone that (unlike Anne and me) fit her mental image of “Muslim.” (It was a bad assumption anyway, curry having supplanted fish and chips as the most popular pub dish in Great Britain.)

Once in Scotland, on the other hand, we were asked approximately once an hour whether this was our first trip to Scotland. Our answer got to be almost rote: no, we’ve been here many times, I graduated from the University of St Andrews, I’m back for my college reunion, I do a bit of work for the University so this is at least partially a working trip, etc. At which point, their eyes would glaze over (as perhaps yours are right now) and smile politely. This was especially true in St Andrews, eating in restaurants that we’ve visited many times and being treated as first-timers. Now, we didn’t mind this at all, because — the Scots being so friendly — the question was invariably a prelude to an offer of help to clueless, first-time visitors. Which I, a clueless return visitor, am always happy to accept.

Our reception on our return, sadly, was not the same. An immigration official barked — there is no better way to put it — at us for crossing an imaginary line exiting customs. Once again my only explanation is his wrong assumption of who we were: either pushy Americans wanting to cut the line, or non-English speakers who would understand him perfectly if he just yelled loud enough.

The question this raises is how we know other people. When someone cuts you off on the highway, how do you know that they aren’t simply distracted by some personal problem, or rushing to home or hospital because of an emergency? We don’t, of course. The real question is what assumptions we make. How do we interpret the people and events around us? Philosophers call this hermeneutics, after Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods. Do we view life from an attitude of suspicion? That is the default position for law enforcement (such as our customs officer in Chicago.) Or from one of generosity, which seems to be the typical Scottish attitude. Are we more like Henry Pulling, or like Aunt Augusta?

In fact, what most of us probably want, deep down, is for others to treat us generously while we are allowed to hang onto our own suspicions and prejudices. Which of course won’t work.  I owe that customs officer the same benefit of the doubt that he failed to give me. That is a test that we all fail, all the time. I found myself swearing under my breath because the Criterion, the pub across the street from St. Mary’s College usually patronized by locals and university folk, was overrun last week by apparent tourists, especially golfers. (Damn TripAdvisor.) But there are a hundred different reasons why those people might have been there, and what made it my pub anyway?

In the early 1960s The Naked City was a television cop show based in New York City, which always finished with the same line: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” Everybody’s got his or her own story. (Including the no-name actors that populated the cast, two of whom turned out to be Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.) We should remind ourselves, every day, that everyone we meet has his own story.

Jeffrey Epstein died in his jail cell yesterday. It was apparently a suicide, although there are already internet speculations of something more sinister, involving powerful people that wanted Epstein and his story buried. Certainly it was not a peaceful death.

Epstein’s sorry history will be researched, rehashed, and reenacted for years, in continued criminal investigations into his associates, in civil suits seeking compensation for his victims, in newspaper articles and books recounting the tale, and (no doubt) in true life, semi-fictionalized, and fictionalized retellings on television and in the movies. The truth is, however, that Epstein’s life is the latest, real-life example of one of literature’s archetypes: Faust. Originally a German legend (based, it is said, on a real person), Faust, who is learned and wealthy but nonetheless dissatisfied with the limits of human existence, sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for a lifetime of unlimited knowledge (and the wealth, power, and worldly pleasures that come along with it.) The English playwright Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s contemporary, wrote a play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, in the first decade of the 17th Century. The great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a massive two-part play simply titled Faust in the early 19th Century. Faust was one of German literature’s greatest works, and Goethe worked on it for decades, the second part not being published until after Goethe’s death. There have been retellings ever since. Stephen Vincent Benet’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is an American version. (More on that shortly.)

Each author puts his own stamp on the story. Marlowe’s play has long been thought to be based on the  Puritan debates about predestination (although scholars disagree about whether Marlowe intends to endorse or criticize Calvinist predestination theology.) Marlowe’s Faustus is not redeemed. Goethe’s Faust, however, is, because he is forgiven by Gretchen, one of his victims. In each case, however, one thing is clear: evil, as embodied in the Devil, is real. It is both an external force that works on Faust, and an internal disposition — call if ambition, pride, hubris, or whatever — that makes Faust susceptible to the Devil’s advances. The Devil doesn’t make Faust do it, as Fred Sanford used to say, but he certainly opens the door through which Faust walks.

In classic Romantic fashion, Goethe’s Dr. Faust is something of a Byronic antihero. It’s hard not to have some sort of grudging admiration for him, and he is redeemed at the end. There is nothing remotely heroic, even ironically, about Jeffrey Epstein. He was a despicable human being. Yet, his story follows the Faust legend almost to a T. He weaseled his way into a plum teaching job at a fancy New York private school, even though he was a college dropout. He went from there to the investment firm Bear Stearns, but left amidst rumors of both an affair with his secretary and inappropriate loans of company funds. He started his own investment firm, and then, in partnership with one Stephen Hoffenberg, started a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme that cost hundreds of thousands of ordinary folk their life savings, but made Hoffenberg and Epstein wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. When it all collapsed, Hoffenberg went to prison for eighteen years. Epstein, for reasons that we don’t know (but have prosecutors getting calls from newspaper reporters today) wasn’t even indicted. In 2008 Epstein was charged with aggravated sexual assault of minors, which should have landed him in jail for decades, but instead resulted in a plea bargain of only 13 months in state prison, with work release privileges. His sordid treatment of young women continued, and stories even emerge that he planned to start some sort of master race, genetically seeded by himself, that would give him a ghoulish mortality. Now, facing similar charges but this time without hope of spitting the hook, he dies in his jail cell. We may never know all the facts about Jeffrey Epstein, and so everything we read about him, even this, is largely speculation. However, for the moment at least, the idea that the Devil called in his debt yesterday is, to my mind, as good as any.

There are things we can learn from this story. Among them is what our legal system can do for us. Many of Epstein’s victims issue anguished cries that his death denies them “justice.” Those feelings are understandable, to the extent that any of us can truly understand what they have been through.  But what do they mean by “justice?” One way that theologians look at justice is as a restoration of the right order of things, as a return to the stage of affairs before the wrong took place. This, sadly, the “justice” system can never do. This kind of justice would make it as if Jeffrey Epstein had never entered these people’s lives. The law cannot do that. On the other hand, perhaps what they mean by justice is monetary compensation for their suffering. Perhaps the law can do that, and one hopes it can, although typically people like Epstein are good at building walls around their wealth. Perhaps, they mean simply that they now will never see Epstein punished. The Faust legend tells us that perhaps we don’t see it, but the punishment commences apace.

Or perhaps what they mean is that they’ve been denied the chance to tell their stories. We owe it to them to offer them that chance. One of the functions that the law does serve is to declare where the boundaries are between right and wrong behavior. That happens in courtrooms every day. It is a way of defining who we are as human beings. That is why unlimited forgiveness in the justice system, whatever its merits as a theological concept of God, is inappropriate. In the justice system, forgiveness can be appropriate, because of all sorts of mitigating circumstances. However, those are exceptions to the general rule that the purpose of the justice system is to declare certain behavior as wrong. We should allow Epstein’s victims the chance to do that.

The other thing the justice system can do is take malefactors out of circulation, so that they can’t do any more harm. Twice, the federal legal system had Jeffrey Epstein in its sights, and twice it let him get away: once without charging him at all, and the second time by giving him a sweetheart deal. Today, we should all contemplate the damage that caused. In Benet’s story, a good lawyer (the title character) gets Jabez Stone, Benet’s version of Faust, out of his compact with the Devil. There’s something typically American about that. But Jabez Stone is not a megalomaniac scholar as was Marlowe and Goethe’s versions of Faust. Stone was simply a farmer down on his luck. In other words, Daniel Webster doesn’t get a monster off the hook. Can Epstein’s lawyers say the same?

We don’t talk about evil much anymore, and we certainly don’t talk about the devil. But the persistence of the Faust legend tells us that there is truth in it. Anyone that spends much time in a courtroom knows that evil is real; sometimes you can feel it. And there’s no need to believe in a red-skinned demon with a pitchfork and a spiked tail. (Think about Peter Cook and Elizabeth Hurley in the Bedazzled movies.) Evil doesn’t even have to be personified. Walter Wink’s “Powers” books help us spot evil in the practices, organizations, and systems of everyday life. As the lurid details of Epstein’s sorry life emerge, thinking about the powers at work in it will be instructive.

In September 2015 Anne and I were in St. Andrews for my biannual residential study week, when the story of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, drowned while fleeing Isis-ravaged Syria with his family for the safety of Greece, appeared on the front page of papers across Europe and the UK. Most horrifying was the picture of Alan’s body washed ashore on the beach near Bodrum, Turkey. The story, and the photo, cast a pall over the entire university, if not the entire country, that day. All I remember is being in morning chapel with my colleagues, praying for Alan, his family, and all refugees, and not wanting to do anything the rest of the day but reach out to those we love. I can’t say what the mood was in the States, because I wasn’t here, but I would hope it was the same.

Those memories came flooding back this week, with the story from my own hometown of Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his infant daughter Valeria, drowned in the Rio Grande River trying to get to America in order to ask for asylum. You can see the photo of Alan here, and of Oscar and Valeria here. I warn you, they are profoundly disturbing, which is why I have not posted them directly. However, they should disturb us, and we should look at them, over and over again.

Unfortunately, the reaction to this most recent tragedy has not been quite so noble. Instead, we have politicians from both parties pointing fingers across the aisle. Such language is, to me, quite literally, obscene, which is rooted in the Latin obscanenus, “ill-omened.” Using such a tragedy to make political points, to exonerate one’s self and blame others, does not bode well for the future of the republic.

We would do better to turn to W. B. Yeats, the greatest poet in English in the Twentieth Century, and his 1928 poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” Taking as its subject the horror of World War One and the brutal conflict between the IRA and the British security forces that followed hard upon the end of the war, Yeats writes of a world that has seemingly gone mad. Two of its more memorable parts:

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare

Rides upon sleep:  a drunken soldiery

Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,

To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;

The night can sweat with terror as before

We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,

And planned to bring the world under a rule,

Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

And then

But is there any comfort to be found?

Man is in love and loves what vanishes,

What more is there to say?

Weasels fighting in a hole, all the while planning to bring the world under a rule of some so-called “philosophy.” A pretty good description of modern political discourse, I would say. Meanwhile, as Yeats says, what we truly love vanishes, to “come no more. Never, never, never, never never.” (King Lear, V, iii, 308-309.) This is why Lear, when Cordelia dies (a scene so shocking that Dr. Johnson for years could not bear to read it) finds himself unable to speak but only only “howl, howl, howl.” (Lear, V, iii, 258.)

Yeats’ point, of course, is that we are all culpable: at times like these, none of us is better than a weasel in a hole. There is a very long chain that put Alan on that beach in Turkey, and Oscar and Valeria on the banks of the Rio Grande. All of us could have done something that would have helped to break that chain. Jürgen Moltmann, who as much as anyone has helped Christians come to grips with the implications of the Holocaust for the traditional view of an omnipotent and all-loving God, rejects the notion that bystanders can complain about God’s absence in scenes of horror such as these. “Where is God,” he says, is a question for the sufferers to ask. (The answer to that question, says Moltmann, is suffering along with the sufferer.) The question for the rest of us, Moltmann continues, is one not put to God, but by God to us: Where are you in this tragedy? Where were you when this happened? This, he says, is the question he put to Cain: “Where is your brother Abel…what have you done?” “We have to exist in the question,” says Moltmann, “and with it, as with an open wound in our lives.”

Not, where is the Congress, or the President, or the European Parliament? Where are you? Jesus tells us over and over again why we fail, time and again. We literally cannot see the misery around us, cannot hear the cries of the suffering. The priest and the Levite pass by the other side of the road, so as not to be troubled by the sight of the suffering, nearly dead, traveler. (Luke 10:25 ff.)   Dives the wealthy man literally could not see the beggar Lazarus starving at his gate, dogs licking his sores. (Luke 16:19 ff.) Indeed Jesus tells us “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8.) Jesus doesn’t say, “call an ambulance” or “donate to Save the Children.” He tells us to do something ourselves. Feed someone, clothe them, house them. This is why we need to look at the pictures, over and over again.

So, as Yeats asks, where is comfort to be found? Perhaps it is in the fact that, time and again, we are given the opportunity to see things as they really are. Here’s what Alan’s aunt said about the photo of her nephew lying drowned on the beach: “It was something about that picture, God put the light on that picture to wake up the world.” Sleeper awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” (Ephesians 5:14.) The hope that, sooner or later, the world might wake up is the comfort to be found. At times, however, it seems small comfort indeed.

Today, by coincidence, is both Trinity Sunday and Father’s Day. That is a happy coincidence for preachers, who can preach about how God the Father models excellence in parenthood, rather than preaching about the doctrine of the Trinity, which (we’re told every year) is every pastor’s least favorite topic. (My own parish, on the other hand, got a lovely sermon from the Rev. Mike Fulk about the Trinity being a way to describe our experience of God as creator, sustainer, and redeemer, rather than a way to intellectually understand God.)

What we don’t hear so much about, even on Father’s Day, is any reflection on the Mosaic admonition to honor our mother and father. Which is both odd and a bit unfortunate, because the Fifth Commandment[1] is an intriguing one. It’s often said that the Ten Commandments fall into two groups: four “religious” ones and six “secular” ones. I’m not quite sure how a command straight from God qualifies as secular, but it does seem logical to see the first four commandments as pertaining to our relationship with God, and the rest as pertaining to our relationship with each other.

The last five commandments are often thought to be expressions of natural law: things that everyone, everywhere knows.[2]But the Fifth Commandment is not a real good fit. It’s the only positive commandment of the last six, and it doesn’t typically show up in lists of basic moral or legal principles the way the others do.

So, let me propose a slightly different way to look at it. Many have given the Fifth Commandment a slightly broader reading than just referring to actual parents, and encompassing elders in general, or those in authority, or perhaps tradition. With that in mind, could it be said that (i) following the last five commandments is the way in which we honor our elders (including our parents) and their wisdom, and (ii) in so doing, we honor God, as mandated by the first four commandments?

It works something like this. How do we show that we have only one God (the first commandment)? We don’t make anything of more importance than God, by not coveting what others may have (the tenth). How do we avoid idolatry (the second commandment)? By keeping our relationships in right order (the seventh). How do we respect the power of God’s name (the third)? By telling the truth (the ninth), and by treating God’s creation and our fellow creatures with compassion, not violence (the sixth). How do we honor the Sabbath? By acknowledging when enough is enough, and taking a day away from work, content with what we have, to worship and reflect, rather than keeping up with the Joneses (the tenth). These are all lessons our parents tried to teach us, and we we do well to recall them.

However, this is not a one-way duty that children owe their parents. We who are parents and grandparents owe it to our children and grandchildren not to steal from them by spending beyond our means or by ruining the environment, in the process making the world uninhabitable and the economy unsustainable for future generations. Those of us fortunate enough to live in the First World need to stop planting the seeds for generations of conflict in the future by being so greedy that those in the Two-thirds World don’t even have enough to live on. Both parents and children owe it to each other to (lovingly) tell each other the truth about their lives, since every generation has its own peculiar shortcomings. (My children’s generation, for instance, is much more accepting of differences between people than I will ever be, although I’m learning.)

Far be it from me to suggest that God and his amanuensis Moses could have used an editor. But it might have helped if the Decalogue, and not just the Fifth Commandment, had been written as positive commands rather than negative. Instead of “thou shalt not murder,” how about “be kind,” or “cherish life”? Instead of “don’t commit adultery,” perhaps “be faithful to your loved ones.” Or “respect everyone” rather than “thou shalt not steal.” “Tell the truth” rather than “do not bear false witness.” “Be satisfied” rather than “do not covet.” Now that would be honoring your father and mother.

[1] Fourth if you’re Catholic or Lutheran

[2] Well worth a look on this topic is Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know, especially Appendix I.

Feast of the Ascension

National Public Radio last weekend told a refreshing story of remarkable common sense in the midst of the national disgrace that pretends to be an immigration policy. Candelaria Texas and San Antonio del Bravo, Mexico are two tiny villages – perhaps 150 residents total – straddling the Rio Grande River in far West Texas. The best way to describe Candelaria’s location is that it is 8 miles past “Resume Speed.” San Antonio del Bravo has a free medical clinic, open to both Mexican and American citizens, while Candelaria has no medical care. On the other hand, San Antonio del Bravo does not have a school. Neither does Candelaria, but it is on the road to the county seat of Presidio Texas, which does. So, the two communities exist as essentially one, with residents going back and forth as their needs require.

There is only one problem. There is not an official border crossing between Candelaria / San Antonio del Bravo. There is a rope bridge, which one suspects is not even necessary during the dry months. People walk back and forth every day, or on Friday afternoon and Monday morning, to go to school, buy groceries, and get medical care. But while there is no requirement in U.S. law that a citizen leave the United States only at an official crossing, no one, even a citizen, can reenter except at a legal point of entry. But the difference can be life-saving, as it involves a 10-minute walk rather than a three-hour drive to the nearest hospital in Alpine Texas.

Of course, the Border Patrol knows all about this. Which is where the story gets refreshing. Here is what agent in charge Mike Shelton says about it:

“The Border Patrol doesn’t want to admit that things like this are going on, but the reality of the situation is it does,” Shelton explained. He said agents are trained to use their judgement on a case-by-case basis. “We want these agents to reason for themselves: ‘Is what I’m about to do going to further the interests of the government and society?’ “

“Just because we can take enforcement action doesn’t necessarily mean we should,” Shelton continued. “We don’t want agents to put people’s lives at risk simply because [the agents] are blindly following the letter of the law. It’s about being human.”

Is what I’m about to do going to further the interests of the government in society? Should agents put people’s lives at risk by blindly following the letter of the law? Agent Shelton, come on down. You have just expressed a better sense of legal equity than anyone on the front page of any national newspaper in the past month. From Aristotle to Aquinas to Kant, we have been told that law was based in and carried out through reason. Aristotle called it phronesis, which translates more or less as practical wisdom. In Texas we call it horse sense. You’ve given us one small example of how that works. On days when we feel as if the world is going crazy, it’s nice to read one small story about sanity.

Google News, in addition to the preloaded topics such as “Top Stories,” “Science,” “Politics” and so forth, allows you to create and save your own topics, and then goes out to the web to retrieve stories fitting in with that topic. I have three saved searches: “Chicago Cubs,” “Law,” and “Theological Ethics.” The first, I have to admit, gives me the most pleasure these days.[1][2] However, it’s the last two that caught my eye this weekend. The Internet stories on law and ethics put the lie to the modern claim, notably made by Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, then by our own Oliver Wendell Holmes, and now by most appellate judges and law school professors, that law and morality have nothing to do with each other. In fact, one could easily confuse the results of the two searches. The “law” stories are dominated by topics that traditionally have been thought moral issues.

At the top of the list, of course, is abortion. The state of Alabama, in a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, has passed a law that would essentially outlaw abortion. The state of Missouri has passed its own highly restrictive statute, intended (the governor says) to conform to the minimum requirements of Roe. The state of New York, on the other hand, passed its own statute that would essentially codify, and perhaps even expand, the Roe rights if the United States Supreme Court overrules Roe.

Abortion is not the only moral issue on the front page of the legal section. Issues of gender identity and sexual preference share the spotlight: same sex marriage legalized in Taiwan, anti-homosexuality laws in Brunei, and civil rights for gay and transgendered persons, a topic that the United States Supreme Court will take up.  Border issues and the rights of asylum seekers continue to get attention, as does the homelessness problem. The conflict between Israel and Hamas comes in for analysis under traditional “law of war” theories.

Everyone has his or her opinion of these topics, so that there is no need to add mine. The last thing the Internet needs is more gasoline poured on those fires. What I am concerned with is whether there is an underlying Christian response, in addition to the legal one, to all these issues. I believe there is. The law of love.

Charles Camosy makes the point, in the Washington Post earlier this week, that a truly pro-life ethos would express concern for both the unborn child and the mother. (Stanley Hauerwas made this same point a number of years ago.)[3] No matter what your moral or religious beliefs about abortion are, how can Christians justify forcing a young woman to bring a child to term and then bear the burden of that child alone? In other words, shouldn’t we examine our own collective response to the birth of that child – affordable day care, paid time off, accessible health care for mother and child – before we get on our high horses talking about the sanctity of life? What would it mean to be truly “pro-life?” My completely unresearched instinct is that there is a high degree of correlation between people that are stridently anti-abortion and people that talk about Obamacare and the social safety net as “creeping socialism” or some such nonsense.

Let’s take gender issues and sexual freedom. Now, let me start out by saying that I am NOT, repeat NOT, claiming that homosexual or bisexual behavior is sinful. However, I know people that do think that, and not all of them are mean-spirited hopeless bigoted flat-earthers. My question is this: Even if you, based on your reading of the Bible, do believe such behavior is sinful, what makes it such a special sin that it justifies excluding persons from full participation in the church, or in society in general? We don’t exclude alcoholics, misers, usurers, or adulterers from full social participation. (In fact, that would be a pretty good description of several corporate boards I’ve worked with.) Even convicted criminals get invited back into the fold. Google search “famous convicted felons” if you don’t believe me. What sort of person could believe that sexual preference is “worse” than those, some sort of “unpardonable sin”? On what basis does gender identity or sexual preference justify denying someone the same protections in employment that the rest of us enjoy? (Richard Hays talks about this at length in his 1996 book The Moral Vision of the New Testament.) William James said “(t)he first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.” There must be much weeping in heaven these days.

We seem to be in danger of moving from the divorce of morality from law to the replacement of morality by law. What are essentially moral questions of how to treat our neighbors get answered by Congress and state legislators. It would be one thing if we retained a sense of what has been called legal equity. But we don’t. Equity was essentially a question of fairness, not bound by strict construction of statutory law. Now, we think that the legislature makes the rules, and courts only apply them.  If you want to see the absence of equity at work, look no farther than this story in the Los Angeles Times. Residents of tony neighborhoods in Venice and San Francisco have filed lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act, trying to stop the construction of homeless shelters in their neighborhoods. Yes, you read that right. The neighbors want to treat the homeless under the same legal protocols used to deal with PCBs, asbestos, and acid rain. The question, unfortunately, will be whether that is a fair reading of the statute, and not the real question of what bizarro legal universe would treat a human being like a pollutant. California, perhaps. Let’s hope not.

This is where the divorce of law and morality hits home. No less than John Calvin, not exactly a flower-in-his-hair kind of guy, thought that equity was the essential component of any social order, especially to protect the widows, the poor, and the unemployed. It is the jurisprudential equivalent of the law of love. Equity was based, according to Calvin, on what we now call the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. To which I would add: do unto others as you would have them do unto you if you were them. (Calvin says “no act of kindness, except accompanied by sympathy, is pleasing to God”). What would you expect from society if you were 18, unmarried, and pregnant? How would you want to be treated if you were transgender and out of a job? Sympathy, from the Greek sumpatheia, “feel with” is precisely what Calvin calls for.

What all of us would want, I think, is to be treated as a child of God. This is our obligation from the time of baptism: to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.” Perhaps this is where the law and the church diverge. The law can say “don’t discriminate on the basis of x, y, and z.” The church says, “treat everyone like your brother and sister.” We have room, even need, for both. We should just remember that the first tells us what we can and can’t do, the second what we ought to do.

[1] Sorry, Cardinal fans.

[2] Not really.

[3] Hauerwas, “Abortion, Theologically Understood,” in Lysaught, et al, On Moral Medicine. Hauerwas quotes extensively from a sermon by the Rev. Terry Hamilton – Poole on the same topic.

The Gospel of Luke quotes Jesus, in the “sermon on the plain” as saying “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”[1] Matthew, in the “sermon on the mount” has it “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs in the kingdom of heaven.”[2] And, a few verses later, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”[3]

Last time in this place, we talked about the concept of two kingdoms: a kingdom of man and a kingdom of God, and how the Law of Nations, and the idea of fundamental human rights, are tied to a sort of dual citizenship in both kingdoms. But what is the kingdom of God? Scholars point out that, unlike English, Greek and Aramaic use the same word for the geopolitical concept of kingdom as an area of jurisdiction, and the constitutional concept of kingship as executive, legislative and judicial authority all rolled into one. (The Greek word is basileia.) In other words, Jesus can quite legitimately be read to say that not only will the poor and persecuted inherit the “kingdom of God” in an ownership sense but that they will have royal authority over it and its inhabitants.

The idea of their being government in heaven is not the least bit unusual. Aquinas thought, for a number of reasons, that there would be a need for laws in heaven. Well if there is a need for laws, then there will be a need for administration. And one has to take a very cribbed reading of the Gospels to conclude that there won’t be some sort of judgment.

But think about who will be overseeing those laws and passing those judgments. Let’s imagine a heavenly joint session of congress with the executive and judiciary all in attendance: a “state of the Kingdom of God” address, as it were. The Governor or President will be the oddly-dressed woman that always sits by herself, in church or at the coffee shop or in the town hall meeting, ignored by everyone. The Chief Justice will be the ghetto resident who pled guilty to a crime he didn’t commit, in order to get five years in prison instead of fifty. The director of HUD will be that homeless guy with a McDonald’s cup tapping on windows at the stop light. The treasury secretary will be the widow in the grocery line that has a coupon for every item in her cart, keeps a huge ball of rubber bands in her kitchen drawer, and gets scammed by pseudo-charity telemarketers but never complains about it. The secretary of education will be the single dad who was the school janitor until he got fired for falling asleep on the job one day. The Speaker of the House will have a speech impediment. None of them will be the person that ran for office and lost. They will be the person that never ran because no one, including themselves, deemed them worthy to hold office. By the standards of this world, they were right.

Which helps us understand the “rewards” teachings in Matthew 6. Pray, give alms, or fast publicly and prominently, and you will have an earthly reward. Do those things in secret, and you will have a heavenly reward. This is not simply Jesus saying that it’s someone else’s turn to be the homecoming queen. Rather, the attitude behind performing prominent acts of piety disqualifies you from holding the kingship of heaven. It’s an eligibility to hold office, not a term limit.

So where is the good news in this, if you are a First World successful mover and shaker, or honored benefactor, or even, dare we say, a bishop? Well, it’s in a couple of places. First, Jesus doesn’t say that the prominent can’t get into the wedding feast. He just says that they will have the lowest seat.[4] (Cf. Luke 14:8-10.) Second, as Albert Nolan points out, when the poor and persecuted get into power, they won’t judge by the same standards used to judge them on earth.[5] He quotes Mark:

“You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”[6]

That, friends, is very good news. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

[1] Luke 6:20. All Scripture quotes are from NRSV.

[2] Matthew 5:3.

[3] Matthew 5:10.

[4] Luke 14:8-10.

[5] Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity.

[6] Mark 10: 42-45 (NRSV)

Last Sunday I was on an airplane to Chicago for a quick visit with my son and his family, which by pure happenstance coincided with the Cubs’ home opener. At the gate, waiting to board, I ran into an old acquaintance with a handful of boarding passes, and a gaggle of teenagers (or tweeners). Softball team, I asked my friend? No, she said, they’re going to be “reunited.” I obviously didn’t get it, so she said it again. Reunited.

Then it hit me. These were kids that have been sleeping on cots, in chain link enclosures, for months, while their parents were shipped somewhere across the country. So here I am flying across the country for a 36-hour visit and a single baseball game, while these kids are flying across the country to, they hope, see their families for the first time in months. I was seated in first class, because that was the only seat available—my scheduled flight had been cancelled—and turned down the roast beef sandwich / Asian salad lunch combo, because I had eaten in the airport café. These kids had a Ziplock bag with a bottle of water and a package of peanut butter crackers. I didn’t know whether to laugh, or cry, or be ashamed. I do know that God is way more merciful to me than I deserve.

It was with that background that I read this week about the plans of the president who shall not be named and his adviser Stephen Miller to send undocumented immigrants to “sanctuary” cities. “Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only,” he tweeted, “The Radical Left always seems to have an Open Borders, Open Arms policy — so this should make them very happy!”

Indeed it should. In a previous post I expressed my opinion about the way we should welcome the Central American refugees. Nothing on this flight changed my mind. There may have been people on that flight that concerned me. (The fellow next to me who was annoyed because the flight attendant wasn’t able to get him a second gin and tonic—on top of the beer he carried on the plane—before takeoff would be a more likely candidate.) These kids were not among the worrying ones. If the emergency exit had to be opened I know whom I would pick. If shipping these kids to my city is the President’s idea of punishment, all I can say is “hit me with your best shot.”

A few people seem to get this. The Washington Post reports that Joseph A. Curtatone, the mayor of Somerville, Mass., says that Somerville would welcome all the immigrants the government wants to send. And studies show time and again the economic benefits that communities enjoy from having an influx of immigrant workers. But it certainly doesn’t appear that the president intends to confer a benefit on these “sanctuary” cities, and Mayor Curtatone seems in the minority in interpreting it as such. More importantly, the majority way of thinking once again conceives of immigrants as part of a grand utilitarian calculation of costs and benefits, and as chess pieces in a political game.

So how did we get to this sorry state? Part of it, I believe, is amnesia about the nature of our legal relations with other countries and their citizens. The concept of international law (or more properly the law of nations) is a fundamentally Christian one. The Greeks looked as other countries as enemies, although they did have the early makings of diplomacy among Greek states. The Romans took international relations  a bit farther, although, being by nature conquerors, they were primarily concerned with the dignity of treaties settling wars. It was the church that truly developed the idea of the law of nations, which came from a profoundly theological concept of human existence. While individual states had jurisdiction over its citizens regarding temporal matters, the church had jurisdiction over spiritual matters, including moral relations among peoples. For centuries, the church had a parallel legal system, with courts to decide disputes and issue orders in such matters. (Indeed, the church can be fairly said to have created the first true legal “system” in western culture, and secular legal systems, especially in Western Europe, borrowed heavily from canon law.) In other words, we were all subject to dual sovereigns: the state and the Church. Some of the most important works of Christian theology, including Augustine’s City of God and Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms (discussed by him a number of times) deal with this concept.

The church’s  jurisdiction over persons came from their status as members of the brotherhood of humanity. We are, literally, both citizens of our own nations, and citizens of the world. There are no aliens, no undocumented refugees in this kingdom. Each of us has certain rights that no local law can vacate. Now, however, we seem to have returned to the Roman idea, that our responsibilities to non-citizens are contractual only. (While we’re on the topic, I would suggest reading the Holy Week narratives next week thinking “us” whenever the Romans pop up. It’s rather enlightening.) Even if we believe that human rights are universal, we seem to believe it because it is in our best interests to honor them. We deem them universal, out of political prudence. This seems to be the current argument against torture; if we torture other soldiers, they’ll torture ours. While that may be practically true, it’s not particularly ennobling.

Of course, if human rights truly are universal, it doesn’t take a politician to recognize them. If we recognize that we in fact share a common humanity, that we are in a real sense fellow citizens, then we have a better basis for universal human rights than our own self-interest. Otherwise, human rights turn into contract rights, that may be negotiated. (I’ll trade you three degrees of religious freedom for five degrees of a fair trial, and a privacy right to be named later.) While that may seem preposterous to us, that seems to be exactly how our leaders sometimes look at it, except, of course, that they are the ones doing the deals. Harold Berman, the great historian of the relations between law and religion, said that our legal systems are in crisis, for precisely this reason: we have forgotten the origins of ideas we now take for granted.

Yes, I realize that it’s generally thought today that our society is formed on a “social contract” theory. You and I agree not to harm each other, and are free to do whatever we want subject to that agreement. However, we forget that John Locke, as much as anyone the “father” of social contract theory, was a Christian. We also skim over the words of the Declaration of Independence (which, although authored by Jefferson, borrowed heavily from Locke): “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The references to a Creator and humans being created are no accident. Humans are equal because they are created by God as such, and the basic rights we enjoy as humans cannot be bargained away. Nor do they depend on a green card.

For more on the law of nations, see here. For more about Harold Berman, his Amazon author page is here.

I apologize for the absence. Having extended twice the deadline for finishing my manuscript, I couldn’t justify imposing on the kind folks at Wipf and Stock any longer. So, manuscript delivered, I am back.

In this last month, two strikingly similar cases have occupied the news. Hoda Muthana and Shamina Begum, each having travelled to Syria and married ISIS fighters, now want to return with their Syrian-born children to their home countries: Great Britain for Ms. Begum, the United States for Ms. Muthana. Ms. Begum, it appears, indisputably has British citizenship, which may now be revoked by the British Home Office because of her affiliation with ISIS. Ms. Muthana was born in the United States, has been treated as a citizen, and claims American citizenship, although the State Department now contests her citizenship (after issuing her a United States passport) on the grounds that her parents were here as diplomats when she was born.

The arguments against readmitting the two women  center around questions of security (are the two women dangers to their countries) and loyalty (should a country admit someone that aided and abetted the enemy.)  Those supporting readmission tend to focus on mercy. There seems no doubt that the two women now are in a terrible plight, as are hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, endangered by ISIS supporters in those same camps.

I would like to suggest that these two positions are not mutually exclusive. If, as is so often the case these days, our debate on this issue assumes a justice versus mercy divide, I see no reason why we couldn’t have both. If, in fact, Ms. Begum or Ms. Muthana aided and abetted our enemies, they committed crimes against the laws of Great Britain and the United States, respectively, and should be tried for those crimes. The only way to try them is to readmit them and hear their stories in courts of law. One or both of them may have either legal or equitable defenses. Ms. Muthana went to Syria at 19, Ms. Begum at 15. How soon after they got there did they realize they had made a mistake? Were they terrorists, or brides of terrorists, captives, or slaves? We don’t know. There is only one way to find out.

The two cases also point out something even more troubling about our social and political discourse these days. On the one hand, anyone that admits to past indiscretions (Kevin Hart, Liam Neeson) faces ruin, even if they sincerely regret what they did. On the other hand, this seems to be a swing of the pendulum — and perhaps a brief one — from recent times when all questions of morality were deemed to be personal. It was said not so long ago that we tolerate everything except intolerance. What seems to be lost is that both these attitudes — pure judgment and complete tolerance — eliminate virtues that are central to the Christian worldview: contrition, penitence, forgiveness, redemption, reconciliation, to name just a few. If there is no sin, we have no need for forgiveness. If all our sins are unforgivable, there is no point in being repentant.  What a sorry world that would be.

In other words, there is no true justice without mercy, and no true mercy without justice. They go hand in hand. According to the Baptismal Covenant, we are required to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human
being?” All means all. Every means every, not just almost every. Justice and peace means both, not one or the other. Respecting the dignity of these two ladies does not require us to let bygones be bygones. In fact, it denies them the status of independent moral agents that is part of human dignity. But neither does it allow us to treat them as symbols of an evil adversary in order to make a political point.

Bishop N.T. Wright, in a letter to the Times, suggested that the story of the Prodigal Son should inform our view of Ms. Begum’s case.  As usual, Bishop Wright hits the nail on the head. I, however, would go a bit farther. I like to think that the day after the return of the prodigal, the welcome-home party having ended only an hour or so before, his father woke him at 5 in the morning with a cup of coffee, two Excedrin, and a hoe, telling him it was his turn to take the early shift in the fields. We do not respect the dignity of Ms. Begum and Ms. Muthana either by locking our doors to them, or by giving them a “get out of jail free” card. (To be clear, Bishop Wright suggests nothing of the sort.) We should let these ladies in, to face the consequence of their actions, whatever those might be. And may those consequences be both just and merciful.

When I was an undergraduate, in the early 1970s, one of the most popular dorm room posters, along with Jimi Hendrix and Farrah Fawcett, was a quote from  Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 2: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” The line showed up on t-shirts and bumper stickers also. I’m not sure why these posters were so popular — I have a much better idea for the late, and highly lamented, Mr. Hendrix and Ms. Fawcett — but I suspect it was something along the lines of creating a new world order, the “Age of Aquarius,” perhaps, with a dash of “Ten Days That Shook the World.”

The sentiment, whatever its merits, made a rather unliterary choice for its motto. Anyone who has actually read Henry VI knows that Dick “the Butcher”, a murderous follower of the rebel Jack Cade, offers the line as a suggested first step to bringing about  anarchic chaos, the kind of environment loved by opportunistic criminals. Lawyers need to be killed precisely because they are the defenders of the rule of law and the people’s Magna Carta liberties. An ironic choice for defenders of free speech, peace and brotherhood.

The news this week helps us understand Dick the Butcher’s thought process. Yesterday the New York Times had a column by David Brooks, “The Lawyers Who Did Not Break,” praising federal prosecutors, including assistant US attorney Robert Khuzami, who continue to do their job in the face of intense political pressure to back off. Politico magazine today has a profile of Karl Racine, the attorney general for the District of Columbia, that makes essentially the same point. (Who knew that the District of Columbia even had an attorney general?) Above all, of course, we have Robert Mueller, quietly (to the media, frustratingly quietly, I suspect) doing his job with the background noise of presidential tweets calling him everything except a child of God.

Mr. Brooks says:

The point of this is not to lionize Khuzami. He’s part of a team. There are teams like that spread anonymously throughout the U.S. government. They are clinging tenaciously to the old standards of right and wrong, to the Constitution and the rule of law. And if we get through this, it will be because of people like them.

Nor should we lionize lawyers in general. We have an equal number of sordid examples, whether it is new attorney general William Barr populating the White House and the federal government generally with friends and family, or the periodic media pratfalls from the not-late and decidedly unlamented Rudy Giuliani, the president’s own special counsel in charge of something or other. But in one regard, I think Mr. Brooks goes not far enough. These lawyers represent not the rule of law, but the rule of Law. The work of Mr. Khuzami and Mr. Racine and Mr. Mueller pays strict attention, to be sure, to precise legal standards and evidentiary details. But their work comes from someplace deeper, more fundamental: a sense that what transpires from this administration is simply not right, that it violates standards of honesty, decency, and, dare we say, virtue that do not depend on any statute or regulation, but in fact form the basis for those statutes and regulations, and without which laws (with a lower case “l”) cannot stand.

Which would include, of course, presidential emergency declarations. A judge or a member of the clergy, by saying “I now pronounce you husband and wife” makes it so. Philosophers call this a “speech act;” the words have the power to make real the matter they pronounce. The President seems to think he has unlimited power to perform speech acts, in the same way that the Queen of England can pronounce Mick Jagger (!) or Judi Dench  a knight or a dame. By saying “we have a national emergency,” the current state of affairs on the border becomes a national emergency. (This may be true, but not in the way he means.) Not so. The President’s power is to recognize a national emergency, not anoint one. That is the essence of the rule of law.

So, I suggest we all take a moment to raise our glasses to Messrs. Mueller, Khuzami, Racine, and colleagues. Long may you live.