Feeding or Eating

In the gospel of Mark, when John the Baptist’s head is served up on a dinner plate (Mk. 14:11), this is juxtaposed with the scene in which Jesus feeds the five thousand (Mk. 14:20). So the contrast is clear — the choice is between feeding God’s people or devouring them.

This, as I take it, is the point that William Cavanaugh is unsuccessfully attempting to make in his contrast between torture and Eucharist. He wants to argue that the modern nation/state needs and requires enemies in order to keep the general populace docile and manipulable. And if you need enemies, you need to act like you have them, and if you act like you have them, you will have to devour them to show that you really mean it. This is what he means by “torture.” The nation/state, he argues, necessarily eats people.

In contrast, he sets forth the way of life found in the body of Christ, where the practice is not to devour and consume, but rather to be consumed. This is the way of the cross — self-denial, self-sacrifice, and self-giving. And of course, there are many ways in which Cavanaugh is quite right.

But there are two points to make here in response. One is the personal observation that while Cavanaugh believes himself to be offering a genuine third way, everything about his presentation reveals him to be a soft leftist. If the point really were about the modern nation/state, then the only effective way to transcend the categories of right and left is to use examples for his thesis that alternate like this — consider Argentina, consider Cuba, consider Chile, consider China. That would have been an honorable and quite accurate point. But he doesn’t do that — his approach is consider Argentina, consider Chile, consider the U.S. in Iraq. Third way, nothing. There is nothing factual here that I couldn’t hear from some vapid news analyst on CNN.

Tolstoy once said that the difference between revolutionary violence and reactionary violence is the difference between dog shit and cat shit. Whatever other problems Tolstoy may have had, that, at least, is the kind of even-handedness that goes missing in all our contemporary downstream permutations of liberation theology.

Please do not assume from this that in saying this that I am in any way condoning or excusing the outrages committed by various right wing regimes in the name of fighting Marxism. Evil is evil wherever committed, and pleas of “necessity” won’t wash. God will bring it all to the bar of His justice. If I point out that one serial killer has murdered hundreds and another one murdered sixteen, I am not defending the second guy. I am just proving that I can count. The history of Marxism is about as blood-soaked as the history of any movement can be, and is the first murderer. But it is no alternative to fight them by imitating them on a smaller scale and becoming the second guy. There is a genuine third way, and Cavanaugh is right that it is centered in the Church. But he profoundly wrong in the way he seeks to apply it.

The second point to make here is that for Christians who understand the antithesis, the two options for violence outlined by Tolstoy do not exhaust the possibilities. There is another kind of violence that is neither revolutionary nor reactionary. There is such a thing as godly violence, found in Scripture from its first pages to its very last pages. There is the godly violence that God Himself will exercise — the Last Judgment, Hell, and a lake of burning and everlasting fire. Then there is the temporal violence that He visited, for example, upon Sodom and Jerusalem. Then there is the godly violence that He delegates to the magistrate, who is God’s deacon and who does not bear the sword for nothing (Rom. 13:4).

The history of this world will end with a division between the sheep and the goats. Those who define unrighteous violence in terms of such divisions are at war with the revelation of God in Christ. But when the judge of the whole earth has done right, and has executed His justice, the entire congregation of the redeemed will sing, and shout, and will say amen. The one place in the entire New Testament where the saints of God use the word Alleluia is quite striking. “Alleluia. And her smoke rose up for ever and ever” (Rev. 19:3). God’s people rejoice in His judgments.

Incidentally, the root of this problem in Cavanaugh is his faulty view of the atonement — he denies that Christ’s death was a propitiation of the Father’s wrath, and all his other errors flow from that very serious error.