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This next article is:Summers, Jr., Harry G. (1990, Spring). The chaplain as moral touchstone. Military Chaplains' Review, 3-8.
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"Can We Be Good Without God?" That was the question posed by University of Massachusetts political science professor Glenn Tinder in his provocative essay in the December 1989 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. An excerpt from his new book, The Political Meaning of Christianity (Louisiana State University Press), Professor Tinder 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] understanding of God."I included a link there to the article if you want to read it for yourself, but I thought the last page was especially closer to what I might want to discuss. However, I don't want to branch out too much, because he has a lot of good stuff there and I could really go on for a while on it. But I'm not sure it would be necessarily relevant to my situation with the Vienna mission.
"And if spirituality is properly 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)
I've said before that I never really considered myself political and even though my B.A. was in European Studies and I studied the history, I was more interested in the social history than the political and military history, for example. I did study then and later on about politics in Eastern Europe, just because that was an issue I was going to have to deal with and I wanted to also understand their lives and that was a big part of their lives. And although I was told, for example that there were KGB spies among the Soviet emigres in the city where I went to Bible school, and where I helped at an emigre center. But I never bothered to ask who they were and I never got into the red scare thing regarding ministry in Eastern Europe. As far as I was concerned it's one thing to be careful and it's another to go in panic mode like those people who built bomb shelters in the backyard during the red scare in the 50s or something. That's what it felt like with the missionaries who were so panicky about the red scare. It's like, "Okay, keep your cool, yes, they're communists and you need to be careful, but you really don't need the bomb shelter."
Anyway, that was Vienna. After Russia I felt I had a whole truckload of material to pretty well prove that I had had political problems because of my dad's work and I was leaning more and more over on the far left towards pacifism. Then I wanted to work more for the underdog and tried to work that round. It took me awhile to find my way, but finally it looked like I was going to be able to do that as a librarian... until I got sick. I was doing research on social movements, though and grassroot community development, but all of this I felt like some of these doors I wasn't going to have open doors ever because it was political. You don't know how many jobs I've applied for here in the USA since returning here in 1997 - hundreds. I have to see if I can add them up on all my floppies when I get to this part of my autobiography. See, that's the thing, as a librarian at least I got work (I worked as a library assistant after leaving Vienna/before going to Russia. Or I could have taught English for a Russian school in the US. But I might as well have stayed in Russia then.
So the thing is between returning from Russia to the States and getting sick I was pretty political. But really, here is my view of Christians and politics:
I agree with Tinder that the Christian's relationship with worldly social institutions is ambivalent, Scripturally speaking. As a Christian, my citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20).
So all these things are true. But we could also say the we are given a lot of instruction about what to eat spiritually (I Cor. 3:1-3), but does that mean that I shouldn't eat at all? And the Apostle Paul tells Timothy that physical exercise isn't as important as spiritual exercise (I Tim. 4:8).
So the thing is, I think that we need to keep things in perspective. The spiritual realm always takes precedence for the Christian. Or it should. But that doesn't mean that the other things are completely neglected; it just means that they're of lesser importance than spiritual things.
Now I have a special consideration for the Church as a collective. I don't think the Church (the Body of Christ - not the stones and mortar, I don't care about those, or about the paper constitution or whatever) should be political. I'm not going to go into a whole long drawn out theological thesis on this, but basically, I believe the church is about saving people and building up people in the image of christ, building the body so that it is a functioning whole and working by faith in and by the power of God and the Holy Spirit. The church, of course, freely uses the gifts God gives, whether inside or outside the church. I think that's a good start.
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"And if spirituality is properly political," [Tinder] goes on to say, "the converse if also true, however distant it may be from prevailing assumptions: politics is properly spiritual." (p. 3)I already answered the first half of the equation, but as to the second, I don't think politics should be spiritual because, in a country like the USA (and this was written here for this audience), you have such an ideologically/religiously diverse citizenship that you'll just end out alienating some groups by doing that and I do think that governments should be government for all (and I'm not speaking necessarily as a Christian here, but as a humanitarian, a concerned citizen). If politics is properly spiritual you could be heading down the state church road too, depending on how strong a single church or coalition of churches might be.
However, I think that the Vienna mission probably would have agreed with this statement. Just in that They were political as relates to Eastern Europe. Remember the anti-Communist handout we had during my candidates' course? We only had that kind of thing for the USSR, and it was in particular the comparison between how effective their economic system was vs. the U.S. economy! That has absolutely no bearing on whether or not I am going to choose one over the other; However, I can think of a lot of other better reasons than that. But that is the first clue, not that I think of it, that they think in terms of ends justifies the means. That is, the USA Gross National Product, for example was better than that of the USSR so that means that Capitalism must be better. Or, but another way: The ends (better GNP) justifies the means (capitalism). That's exactly the kind of thinking the Vienna mission used to justify their security methods (probably half of which I never knew, because I wasn't trusted enough to be privvy to them.)
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The rest of the article doesn't have anything that I'd like to comment on, so I'm going end there.