Ephraim Radner and the Frailty of Contemporary Ecclesiology

 As always, this should be read in its entirety.

I was by then disillusioned by the promise of jumping ship, as I am still: was there really a better one, the “true ark,” plying the currents in the night, unmarked by what seemed more and more a drifting fleet of imposters? Burundi, then Rwanda, the urban centers of America, then simply reading and looking about the world and its past and present, made it quite clear to me that Catholics, Anglicans, and all the welter of Protestants busying about had come to the same horrendous moral shipwreck that my own little window onto the Great Lakes Region of Africa had looked upon. It struck me as more likely that all of them were but remnants, the battered timbers and rafts that had been set loose from one once grand vessel, eight souls now holding on to this or that within the tides, often too far from one another even to be apprehended.

“Bring them together again!” I began to yearn, tying myself not so much to a pristine boat, as to the task of repair, calling to this or that passing group — and they to me — so that somehow, before the currents swept us too far away from one another, we should lash our boards together, bit by bit. Ecumenism became the new road for my search. Though it couldn’t quite see the ark itself, the ecumenical venture to which I now gave myself seemed to guess at the blueprint, its earlier towering form; to recognize this or that piece of what was once a lofty ship; to intuit the nails and fittings, like some great marine jigsaw that skill, acuity, and patience might resolve.

That was some years ago. I now think the ecumenical road is a journey of “defaults” — it is whatever it is we simply end up being, as churches come and go, pressed up together, pulled apart, refashioned by the waves. Our skills at putting things back together seem to have withered, if ever we had them, and acuity and patience both are out of fashion in church and civil society. We have been drifting farther from each other, not closer, as the days pass on. Eight souls were saved within the ark, and truly so, I believe. But many souls have been lost within the ark as well. Who is who, and where they are, and how far the distances, no one knows. We are left to trust the tides, the long swirl of the currents, the default of the globe’s encircling streams.

This long circling, I now believe, will wash up the (Roman) Catholic Church that, by default, will gather up, in some fashion, the pieces of everything else, including its own broken witness. Not as a “takeover.” More like someone coming back to their home after a fire has burned it down, and kicking through the embers and piles, the scattered bits of uncharred belongings, and then taking them up and caring for them together in some new setting where new homes are built.

Inevitable Defeat?

I posted this at my LinkedIn account earlier today.

Even as I write the Taliban are entering the outskirts of Kabul, almost twenty years since Ahmad Shah Massoud's assassination in Takhar Province and the assault on the World Trade Center two days later. In the immediate aftermath, certainly in 2001 and even in 2003, I would have counted myself a fellow traveller with those Neoconservatives who pressed for intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, not least because those who talked most loftily of respecting international law were also those who fell strangely silent when the talk of human rights abuses switched to Cuba or Venezuela and who seemed unfazed by the willingness of the United Nations to include representatives of notoriously brutal regimes on the Human Rights Council. In the case of Afghanistan, the hosting of Al Qaeda and the Taliban's refusal to expel it after 9/11 certainly seemed reasonable grounds for intervention. In the case of Operation Iraqi Freedom, I could never understand why this was not couched in terms of the simple fact that for over a decade the Iraqi regime remained in breach of many aspects of the UN resolutions to which it had committed itself in the ceasefire agreement in 1990 (the enduring complaints about the cost of maintaining the no-fly zone were a staple of the 1990s). Recalling further the betrayal of the Shia community, who were encouraged to rise against Saddam Hussein only to be then left unprotected by the Coalition (in contrast with the Kurds), there seemed ample justification both for the removal of the regime and the promotion of a multi-ethnic state in the Fertile Crescent.

The devil, of course, is in the detail. The vignette of the forty-third president's victory address on board the USS Abraham Lincoln beneath the banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" in retrospect proved symbolic of the shambles that characterised so much of the peacekeeping and 'nation-building' of the next twenty years. Ironically, for a nation that has long recognized the importance of subsidiarity and federalism, all too many of the 'experts' failed to recognise the enduring importance of the local community (which, after all, helped sustain Kurdish resistance to the Baa'thist regime, Mujahidin opposition to Russian occupation and, indeed, the Taliban themselves). A sustained commitment to a federal model from the outset might have kept in check the Sunni resentment that ultimately gave rise to ISIS and empowered local ethnic communities in Afghanistan to resist the Taliban (of course, it might also have given rise to a resurgence of warlordism, but the evident bankruptcy of the Kabul regime and the Afghan National Army today suggests that this would hardly have been worse than the present situation).

I was only five years old when South Vietnam fell, so for me it has always been a historical debate, rather than a process through which I Iived. There are many issues on which I disagree with the current president, but it seems incredibly hypocritical of some of his political opponents to condemn him for following through on a process that his predecessor set in motion. Bob Dole's acid comment in the 1976 vice-presidential debate about the deaths in "Democrat wars" in the twentieth century hardly holds true for the twenty-first (though the death toll - of Americans at least - is far less). Even if the Republican Party has now repudiated nation-building, it was a Republican president who brought us to this pass. I must confess that I better understand the old midwestern isolationists (many of whose views on economic - though not cultural - issues would suggest them to be men of the Left). They viewed the priorities of the Old World - including colonialism - as incompatible with those of the New World, but they did not offer up the United States as the embodiment of the perfect society but rather as the nation most predisposed to strive for that goal. For them it was a model that could only be adopted, never imposed.

The hubris with which the wars of the early 2000s were launched has brought us to where we are today. The sacrifices of military personnel - American and otherwise - and of those Afghan and Iraqi citizens who struggled to build a civil society would appear to have been thrown away on a cause which few politicians - on the Left or the Right - have shown much interest in promoting. What more can one say?