I do not disagree with the premise of Radical Orthodoxy that there is no “natural” prediliction to truth in the world, but that all truth, and the preconditions which enable truth to be received, are from God. With Augustine, the Radical Orthodoxy credo is that “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in [God]”.

That is why I have to maintain that there are those not overtly religious in their speech, nor attached to any specific overtly Christian community, that have shown an ability to respond to truth in this matter of war. They are outraged that governments consisting of a select elite have so dominated the ordering of things in terms of who gets the benefit of the vast resources, and how they are gotten, and how they are distributed. One might argue that this is simply a “radical” stance that tends to take the “contrare” position against the government. But it is also usually the case that those who characterize the dissident in this way are those who see the need to protect the machinery of the status quo, having been convinced themselves of the “neccessary” relationships of faith, patriotism, proclamation of capitalism as the Lord of History (disguised as God).

I suspect that there is a movement of the Holy Spirit “amongst the gentiles”, albeit one lacking in an ecclesiology and many other elements that would accompany a fully “funded” resistance (and this is also the case in some activist churches, where they do put forth a rather robust confession and ecclesiology, and yet provide very few of the “technologies” of redirection of desire (to borrow once again from Bell’s argument).

Here is a case in point, in an article by Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States

After the War

Public opinion polls now show the country decisively against the war and the Bush Administration. The harsh realities have become visible. The troops will have to come home.

And while we work with increased determination to make this happen, should we not think beyond this war? Should we begin to think, even before this shameful war is over, about ending our addiction to massive violence and instead using the enormous wealth of our country for human needs? That is, should we begin to speak about ending war—not just this war or that war, but war itself? Perhaps the time has come to bring an end to war, and turn the human race onto a path of health and healing.

A group of internationally known figures, celebrated both for their talent and their dedication to human rights (Gino Strada, Paul Farmer, Kurt Vonnegut, Nadine Gordimer, Eduardo Galeano, and others), will soon launch a worldwide campaign to enlist tens of millions of people in a movement for the renunciation of war, hoping to reach the point where governments, facing popular resistance, will find it difficult or impossible to wage war.

There is a persistent argument against such a possibility, which I have heard from people on all parts of the political spectrum: We will never do away with war because it comes out of human nature. The most compelling counter to that claim is in history: We don’t find people spontaneously rushing to make war on others. What we find, rather, is that governments must make the most strenuous efforts to mobilize populations for war. They must entice soldiers with promises of money, education, must hold out to young people whose chances in life look very poor that here is an opportunity to attain respect and status. And if those enticements don’t work, governments must use coercion: They must conscript young people, force them into military service, threaten them with prison if they do not comply.

This is a message that SHOULD be in the mix of the church’s message, and yet , sadly, is heard more often in “Peace with Justice” groups than in churches. The poverty of the incomplete “systems” of resistance (in many cases, a system of theological justifications for affirming capitalism and national violence as sanctioned by a God of a “reasonable” faith); the absence of an outcry against the injustices of wholesale “violence in the name of justice” to be visited upon innocents who happen to be the subjects of a nation which finds itself in the crosshairs of our nation’s “freedom and liberty” police (code words for the overthrow of a group which stands in the way of what our nation’s leaders have deemed progress and thus “neccessary for our security”) —-this woefully insufficient apparatus our American churches have constructed has made it neccessary for this lacking to burst out of the seams of the church that refused to respond and compelled the unchurched to take up the cause.

It still remains that these “secular” movements (albeit actually “religious” and theological ) are inadequate in that they adress only a small dimension (despite the gravity of the issues of war and peace) of the entire polis/society/structures for fullscale resistance and “equipping of the people of God”. The churches that do a better job of addressing the Inward Journey are often light or negelctful of the social and community issues and implications and what I would consider to be the “telos” of the Inward Journey: to immerse themselves in a formative community in which the discernment of call is possible, and that the intersections of call and particular needs in the world become connected.

More from the article on war by Zinn:

War, I decided, creates, insidiously, a common morality for all sides. It poisons everyone who is engaged in it, however different they are in many ways, turns them into killers and torturers, as we are seeing now. It pretends to be concerned with toppling tyrants, and may in fact do so, but the people it kills are the victims of the tyrants. It appears to cleanse the world of evil, but that does not last, because its very nature spawns more evil. Wars, like violence in general, I concluded, is a drug. It gives a quick high, the thrill of victory, but that wears off and then comes despair.

Zinn concludes with a hopeful note of “they won’t be able to deceive us again”. I’m not so sure. (“us” being the nation as a whole) I expect it to continue , just as it has for centuries of Empires dominating. It seems presumptious to believe that our era is to be the one where the tide will be turned, and tyrants be absolutely defeated. As defeated as they already are, they continue to wreak havok. I remain unsure about how to articulate our role in terms of the eschaton. How much of that “reality” shows up as “observable defeat?” I know that the Christian community does not make conclusions based on conventional notions of “observable”, but these are questions that were probably asked by God’s people during their slavery in Egypt, and in the wilderness. I fluctuate on this, and conclude that YES, there is a place and a truth to seeing BEYOND the “observable history” to the end of history, and there IS an expectation of the transfomation of the observable. And there is the time to WAIT.