Summers, Jr., Harry G. (1990, Spring). The chaplain as moral touchstone. Military Chaplains' Review, 3-8.
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Summers opens his article with a discussion around Tinder's essay "Can we be good without God. This quote is part of that discussion:Professor argues that "the notion that we can be related to God and not to the world - that we can practice a spirituality that is not political - is in conflict with the Christian [and the Judeo and the Islamic] understand of God."This is and is not in conflict with what the mission in Vienna seemed - in practice - to believe. It IS in conflict because they would say that all our good without God is as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). They were theologians, after all.
"And if spirituality is porperly political," he goes on to say, "the converse is also true, however distant it may be from prevailing assumptions: politics is properly spiritual... " (p. 3)
On the other hand, they clearly did agree with it because they acted as though they believed in an ends justifies the means philosophy, which opens the door to all kinds of things, including this one. By including not one, but two U.S. military reserve chaplains to comprise the entire human resource department, they made it clear that they were very comfortable relating to the world, in the form of the U.S. government.
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The motto is in Latin and means something like For God and Country. I think the Vienna mission could have gotten caught up in that motto. At the very least they wouldn't have minded support for it, I don't think, if someone was prone to be political that way, as long as the country was the U.S., of course. We did have people from other western countries, but their nations, as far I ever knew were never represented by way of holidays and the like."Important as the ministry to the individual soldier is, and it is very important, the Chaplain's Corps serves the nation in an even more profound way as well - as the moral touchstone which bridges the military's spiritual and political dimensions. The very motto of the Army Chaplains Corps, "Pro Deo et Patria," captures Tinder's arguments precisely." (p. 5)
Around the time of U.S. national voting they did help us get absentee ballots or tell us where to get them. Also, there was an American school that every year had a July 4th celebration so people often went there if they were in town. So there were political things like that, for sure. The kind of thing that just reminds you of your roots, but then if you didn't do these things then you felt badly too, so it was a control thing too. Like maybe I really didn't want to go to the 4th of July party, but if I didn't go with everyone then I'd have to explain my other interests and it would get dicey. So then it was almost expected of me to go. This is just an example of the kind of thing that might happen, because that's what I lived with.
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Not the least of the fundamental limitations "inherent or implied" in America's political purposes are those imposed by the three character traits which have traditionally shaped American forein policy: noninterventionism, pragmatism and idealism. (p. 4)Well, I've been saying since day one, and I thought this even while I was living in Vienna that the mission was pragmatic and that it lived by the principles the ends justifies the means. That's what allowed them to lead such deceitful lives, what they felt they had to do to carry out their ministry. And I disagreed with them, which is why I was "standing up on the inside" until the very end and am still to this day standing up on the inside. But now that I'm out of Vienna I am also standing up on the outside as well. I'm just plain standing up. So what I'm trying to say is that I disagree with them and I did then and I still to this day do, but I had to disagree surruptitiously then, but not any more.
So that's them. As for me, I'm an idealist. I think I thought I was an idealist before this, but it really hit home when I was taking a philosophy of education course Fall 1990 (I just double-checked on my college transcript), that I am an idealist. For me the ideals are Scripture or the ideas expressed therein. But I have picked up things along the way that have been added to it, I think. I don't suppose you could say that absolutely everything I have as an ideal is 100% from Scripture. I do try to to have that as my main reference, though and hopefully the other things at least don't contradict Scripture. When I was in that class I learned that there aren't many people who are idealist any more because it's not practical. Almost the whole class were realists. Maybe there were 1 or 2 other idealists with me, and a couple other different philosophies.
So you can imagine how distraught I might have been to come in Vienna as an idealist and to find that they were pragmatists and they fully expected me to be one too and that appeared to be one of the criteria for becoming a member in good standing. Needless to say, my idealist sensibilities were offended beyond what you can imagine and compromise was simply out of the question. Not the kind of compromise they seemed to be asking.
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Chaplains are uniquely suited to both serve as the commander's moral advisor to ensure that military actions are in consonance with America's sense of right and wrong, and to create a climate of morality to ensure against war degenerating into the Hobbesian world of brigandage and barbarism.I just lost a lot of faith in this author. Do you see what happened here? Is the chaplain's moral sensibilities faith-based? Or is it wrapped up in the whims of the political moment? Based on this text it certainly is not clear. Besides, I don't necessary put a lot of faith in America's sense of right and wrong. I was living in Seoul, S. Korea when 9/11 happened. I came to my early morning class I was teaching and everything was very solemn and I didn't know what had happened because I hadn't had the TV on and so it was one of the Korean teachers that told me and right away I said as a knee-jerk reaction that "oh, no, we're at war again!" And I said we should take it to the International Criminal Court to try to find Bin Laden, but we wouldn't do that. And sure enough it happened just as I said.
To those who think such counsel unnecessary, consider the August 1965 incident at Cam Ne filmed by Morley Safer of CBS News. As Vietnamese women with terrified children clutching at their skirts wailed in the foreground, U.S. Marines, Zippo lighters in hand, burned their homes to the ground. Whatever miniscule tactical advantage was gained by that action was totally obershadowed by the enourmous strategic damage it inflicted on American public support. (p. 7)
So now it seems as if the author is saying the chaplain (or maybe chaplaincy as a corps) has a role to minister to the commanders and have an affect on the military and how it functions, some of the decisions that are made, the morality of them. I don't expect this is an explicit ministry in the same way as it is in other areas of the chaplain's duties, where he can preach, counsel, evangelize, etc. So this, I expect would be a more indirect ministry, at least in most cases, most of the time. So how does he bring his faith to this part of the ministry then?
Since the Vienna mission H.R. department staff had this special moral training as chaplains, they might have been able to use in in the Vienna mission to be a "moral touchstone" at the mission for ethical issues that might come up there, in order to address them and keep the mission on the right track. You'd think that this might be something that could be useful and of benefit, especially since they were a Christian mission and as such they might have been interested in making sure they were on the straight and narrow.
But I'm afraid that this wasn't the case. In fact, if anything, they just hated me (my treatment bears that out, so if they protest, just point to the way they treated me). So they viewed themselves as having the last word as far as right and wrong was concerned (for anything while with the mission); disagreement was tantamount to mutiny.
The thing is that in these circumstances it was almost so bad that if a missionary was told to do something against their conscience, they'd do it. But I wouldn't. And I paid for it. Other missionaries weren't willing to pay for it like I did.
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Except for the short forays into Grenada and Panama, we have an Army with almost no combat experience. And we have those, such as retired Army Colonel Hackworth, who are now preaching that in war morality is of little consequence, and on the battlefield "studs" and "warriors" make their own rules.... "...Without such standards, there is no basis for the existence of an Army in a civilized nation." (p. 8, the last sentence quoting Lt. Gen. Richard G. Trefry)And this is similar to what these missions were saying - and probably still say in other types of "closed" countries - that we don't know how it is in these difficult countries, yada, yada. All I know is I got answers from a bunch of angry paranoid missions when I wrote those letters trying to decide which mission to go with, and if any or a few of them worked with the Vienna mission, maybe with literature delivery or even on the Board or other ways, then I can understand. When I lived in Russia the believers weren't paranoid like these missions were and I was in the heard of Siberia. It was a few years later, but times don't change that quickly. All I know is these missions had a problem.
I don't know who their God is, but I think they must worship a different God than I do, because my God doesn't lead to that kind of stuff and doesn't require that kind of thing. In fact my God can't lie and that's one thing He can't do and so why would he be demanding it for ministry? That doesn't make any sense?
Now some maybe at the mission might have looked at it like I was the one acting like a stud sort of acting on my own. However, the only thing I was going on my own was doing things in Austria because I was told I would be a secretary. I guess, I should not have agreed to be a secretary, because I did not want to be one, but they wanted to shove it down my throat.
