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Posted on 09/21/2005 4:45:32 PM PDT by churchillbuff
THE ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury has recommended the European secular state as a model for Islamic countries. Despite Muslim antagonism to secularism, Dr Williams maintained that this was the best hope for avoiding extremism.
Dr Williams was speaking in Lyons at an international meeting of prayer for peace on Monday (picture, above). A European secular state with the community of faith as its critical partner was, he said, "truest to its Christian roots".
Europe taught that it was possible - and in Dr Williams's view, desirable - to separate Church and state. "Once you have recognised the distinction between the Church and any particular political system, you declare that political systems do not have automatic religious sanction, and thus that political liberty, plural convictions and practices, are to be expected in public life, and need balancing and negotiating."
Europe's distinctive identity, then, was a "liberal identity": plural claims adjudicated by law, supporting a communal life. This was a secular pattern, but depended on a "continuing dialogue with the religious community".
"The crucial point for the Christian", said Dr Williams, "is the conviction that this liberal identity is threatened if it does not have, or is unaware of, that perpetual partner which reminds it that it is under a higher judgement. . . Modernity may have turned savagely against Christianity, but it would not be what it is without it."
Dr Williams recognised the tendency in Islam towards theocracy. "Islamic political thought seems to have no obvious place for the kind of separation of powers that has been seen as the consequence of Christian theology." Nevertheless, the presence of Islam within Europe was an invitation to Islam " to become, along with the historic religious communities of Christian Europe, the critical friend of the modern state.
"For Islam, and other religious traditions, to join the Christian Churches in the work of co-operating and negotiating with 'secular' states is the best hope for the avoiding of an extremism and violence fuelled by the resentful sense that faith is not taken seriously in the public realm."
Leader comment
Forum debate: Is Europe at its end?
By Rowan Williams
Europe is, historically speaking, an unusual experiment. It is a cultural and political community which has developed steadily towards a situation in which power is understood and exercised in a ‘secular’ framework; but that secular framework exists because of a set of religious and theological foundations, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not.
Lord Acton, the great English Catholic historian and political theorist of the nineteenth century, said that the separation of Church and state was the foundation of all political liberty. It sounds like an extravagant or eccentric claim, but it deserves to be taken seriously. The Christian Church from the beginning has believed that it exists as a community witnessing to a future yet to be fully realised. It speaks of the gift of God’s Spirit as an arrabon, a pledge and foretaste of things to come (II Cor.5.5, Eph.1.14). Its sacraments announce and make present what we believe the world will be when God’s will is fully done. But although it thus points to, and indeed embodies the future, it recognises that it is set in a world where what has been promised is not yet realised. In the greatest classical work of theological reflection on human political life, Augustine’s City of God, we are warned against thinking that God’s future has arrived, against the danger of thinking that our hopes and longings can be satisfied here and now with what this world has to offer.
In the jargon of theology, it is eschatology, the doctrine of God’s future, that makes the Church restless in the present; and it is thus eschatology that keeps the Church critical of the world in which it lives. The New Testament encourages us to work for the inclusion of all people and all nations within the community of Christ, but it is ambiguous as to whether this encouragement gives us any grounds for thinking that such a universal inclusion will be realised. Many texts in the gospel suggest that Christ does not guarantee that there will be a period before the world’s end when all are brought into the Church. So there is an expectation in the Christian mind that there will almost certainly be a lasting gap between the way the world is organised and the supernatural reality of the Church’s common life. The Church offers a ‘citizenship’ distinct from any kind of belonging in a merely human political community. It lives by a distinct power and ethos; the citizens of the Church are not, as the early Christian Letter to Diognetus says, distinguishable by dress or speech, yet they are foreigners in the present political world, ‘the soul in the body’, secretly giving life and meaning to the world around, yet never identified with it.
The Church works with a system of authority and accountability distinct from that of the state – sometimes co-existing, even co-operating, with it, sometimes in conflict with it, as the experience of the martyrs testifies, and the witness of Christian leaders who challenged secular rulers in the name of the Kingdom of God. The authority of the state is therefore always being questioned by the very fact of the Church’s existence. It cannot be seen as ultimate; it is open to challenge, debate, reconstruction, and its authority has to be justified. And if it is in this way a ‘penultimate’ reality, if it does not have the absolute and final claim on the lives or integrities of its citizens, it is inevitably oriented towards a measure of tolerance and plurality. As Protestant theologians like Karl Barth and Ernst Wolff argued in the mid-twentieth century, Christian theology implied that the state had lost its sacred quality and that human beings were thus enabled to start debating what ‘political virtue’ might mean, what ways of conducting public business were just, defensible and capable of nourishing a fuller set of human possibilities.
This is what Acton meant, I believe. Once you have recognised the distinction between the Church and any particular political system, you declare that political systems do not have automatic religious sanction and thus that political liberty, plural convictions and practices, are to be expected in public life and need balancing and negotiating. States may or may not work by Christian principles, they may or may not succeed in realising certain Christian hopes and values; Christians will work with them – and against them at times – to persuade them to a greater fidelity to these priorities and values, but they will not set their final hopes on what can be achieved here. Christian political involvement may be passionate but it will also be sceptical and realistic.
Of course, this is not by any means how Christian history has always worked out. The Church, composed as it is of sinful human beings, has typically made various sorts of mistake. At times it has indulged the fantasy that the future has come, that the system by which the world is ruled has now become identical with the rule of Christ in history. Some of the Eastern Christian world during and after the reign of Constantine came dangerously close to this; Western Christians in later ages were always (fairly or not) suspicious that the Byzantine and Russian Empires had fallen into this error. At times, though, Western Christians too have fallen into different errors, as Lutherans have justified the divine rights of whatever system of power may be in operation at any given moment, and Anglicans have defended the idea that only monarchy can possibly be accepted as a legitimate form of government, since it alone is divinely sanctioned.
But the history of Europe is the history of a culture in which, because religious authority has always remained distinct in principle from state authority, the ideal of a politics of questioning and creative adjustment and change has slowly taken shape. Political arrangements have never been beyond question. The way this has developed, especially during and since the Enlightenment, has taken a shape which often looks deeply hostile to religious faith; but the paradox which the secularist fails to see is that this vision of a free and self-determining political life, this classical liberal vision, is what it is primarily because of the particular religious faith that moulded Europe. Without the eschatological focus of the Christian Church, it is not at all clear where the impulse would have come from that released political life to be its secular argumentative self. And principled comprehensive secularism simply risks becoming another unquestionable ideology, another kind of sacred system, refusing challenge and visible difference or variety.
We forget very easily just how strange the Christian vision was against the background not only of the ancient Mediterranean world but in relation to all ancient societies. Political authority is religious authority in the pre-modern context; modernity may have turned savagely against Christianity, but it would not be what it is without it. The very fact that the Church has so regularly been drawn back towards a glorification of state authority witnesses to the force of the ancient assumption. And the great tyrannies of the twentieth century, while violently anti-Christian, can be seen as powerful ‘pseudo-religions’ in that they claimed absolute sanction for their ideologies and disciplines.
Europe’s distinctive identity, then, is a ‘liberal’ identity, in the broadest meaning of the word: a political identity which assumes that argument and negotiation, plural claims adjudicated by law, suspicion of ‘positivist’ notions of political power, are all natural, necessary features of a viable and legitimate communal life in society. But the crucial point for the Christian is the conviction that this ‘liberal’ identity is threatened if it does not have, or is unaware of, that perpetual partner which reminds it that it is under a higher judgement. Unless the liberal state is engaged in a continuing dialogue with the religious community, it loses its essential liberalism. It becomes simply dogmatically secular, insisting that religious faith be publicly invisible; or it becomes chaotically pluralist, with no proper account of its legitimacy except a positivist one (the state is the agency that happens to have the monopoly of force).
The Christian sense of what matters about European identity, then, is not about some mythical unity between the faith and the historic culture of Europe, a ‘Christendom’ picture. Nor is it to insist that what is now politically defined as Europe cannot expand beyond the boundaries of what were once the Christian nations of the continent. It is to argue that the bold experiment of a political life that is not sanctioned by comprehensive religious power, a political life that is not held to be in some way sacred, should continue to leave space for the voice of its critical partner, the community of faith, to be heard. This means a willingness on the state’s part both to safeguard religious liberty (and not to assume that the state can legislate for the religious community) and to enter into some sorts of partnership with the community of faith. It should be willing to entertain collaboration in education, social care and community regeneration, allowing its own goals to be questioned and informed by the agenda of faith, without submitting to any kind of religious tyranny. That is, in the argument and negotiation of public life, the voice of communities of faith can be heard without anxiety or fear of a takeover by religious zealots.
This may help us think through the relationship between the ‘modern’ state and Islam in a new way. Islam, of course, begins from a different starting point from Christianity. The Muslim umma is inseparably a religious and a political reality, and Islamic political thought seems to have no obvious place for the kind of separation of powers that has been seen as the consequence of Christian theology. Yet in historical practice, there has been differentiation between the responsibilities, within the one umma, of preacher and ruler; some sense of a gap between the community at prayer and the community in legal and administrative mode, and of the need at times for one to challenge the other. Clearly in a non-Muslim society, interesting issues arise over this; and contemporary Muslim legal scholars have given increasing attention to them in recent years. We should not assume that the only valid or serious Muslim position is that which is usually expressed in terms of working for a universal ‘caliphate’, the restoration of a practically homogeneous social order under the governance of a religiously-legitimated ruler.
So that the presence of Islam within Europe, whether in the shape of significant minorities or through the presence of a majority Muslim state, need not be seen as an insoluble problem for what a Christian might see as the European identity. Islam, in such circumstances, is invited to become, along with the historic religious communities of Christian Europe, the critical friend of the modern state, asking awkward questions, forming partnerships. This does suggest the challenge to Islam to continue formulating new ways of understanding itself in a non-Muslim environment; but not some wholesale abandonment of its reflective theological history.
In short, my hopes for the future of Europe are that it will continue to be a culture of question and negotiation – because I believe that this is the way it is truest to its Christian roots. But given the enormous dangers of a dominant secularism, a denial of the public visibility of religious commitment and its role in managing and moulding social identity, I hope for a political climate in Europe that is open to co-operation between state and religious enterprise. If this does not happen, the state becomes unselfcritical in its godlessness and religious communities become isolated and defensive; they too lose the capacity for critical awareness. For Islam – and other religious traditions – to join the Christian churches in the work of co-operating and negotiating with ‘secular’ states is the best hope for the avoiding of an extremism and violence fuelled by the resentful sense that faith is not taken seriously in the public realm.
I don't think the good Dr. really gets it.
It might be easier [and more desirable] to convert them to Alcoholism.
"Be Muslim or be dead", Muslims tell everybody else.
Good one...go to Hell for being like the apostate Christians rather than for being true Muslims?...
Some choice
Dr Williams, may I call you Dr Dumba$$...you are telling the faithful, who want to establish a world caliphate that they should "go along to get along." You are telling them that if they were to give up Allah, they would get along with the infidel so much better.
Don't you think they know that????
Allah wants them to saw your head off with a rusty knife and he will give the eternal bliss (with 72 virgins) for their effort.
"What to do?" (they say)...should we listen to Dr Dumba$$, who we really don't know...or should we listen to 1400 years of indoctrination?
Doc...call the Vatican and see if you can sign up for that new class on EXORCISM.
IOW they could convert to the C of E.....
They should be told "Be good or begone!"
The 18 inch satalite dish is our most powerfull tool long term. So they have AlJazera, BFD. The kids don't watch news. Their kids minds are soon to be the property of Disney/Sony/TimeWarner/Vivendi corp (same as most American kids).
And they know it. Some will drag it out another generation or two.
In all due respect, as those children age and find MTV increasingly revolting, they will seek God. Unfortunately, in their search for God, they will encounter the demon Allah. He won't exactly fill their need for love, but he will fill them so full of hate and that evil sense of duty...that love will be forgotten.
He's an ass hole if that's what he thinks. He should instead be urging another crusade to rid the globe of Muslims.
Let's see. Archbishop of Canterbury. Ain't he the leader of the denomination that thinks it's just great to have a queer bishop? Some religion.
Until islam is only spoken of in the past tense we are all in danger. Dr. Dumbass is offering warm milk to rabid dogs. What they need is a hail of .223 fire.
Not to worry. No one takes this silly man seriously. My God, they snicker at him in Rome, laugh outright in Constantinople and prepare anathemas for this Arch Druid in Africa.
While Dr Clueless is at it, he might as well tell the Mooselimbs to accept the truth, and not use a deranged genocidal mass murder and pedophile as a role model....
Presenting the Khilafah State Part I
Presenting the Khilafah State Part II
Presenting the Khilafah State Part III
Presenting the Khilafah State Part IV
Hizb ut-Tahrir calls for military support to establish caliphate
Talk about the blind leading the blind.
***Allah wants them to saw your head off with a rusty knife and he will give the eternal bliss (with 72 virgins) for their effort.***
I heard an ex-muslim recently ask,
"So what do the FEMALE martyrs get?
72 male virgins?
That's not heaven - it's more like high school."
Sunday, 20 January, 2002, 15:34 GMT
Archbishop attacks war on terror
Dr Williams' words may anger ministers
The leading contender to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury has attacked the West's war against terrorism, denouncing military action in Afghanistan as "morally tainted".
The Archbishop of Wales, the Most Rev Rowan Williams, said the bombing campaign in Afghanistan had lost credibility and was morally equivalent to the terrorism it sought to defeat.
Dr Williams is tipped as the leading candidate in the race to succeed Dr George Carey, who is retiring from the post in October 2002.
His comments are likely to anger ministers, and suggest that if he were to become Archbishop of Canterbury, he would be more prepared to question the government than his predecessor.
'Strategy confused'
In a book to be published this week - Writing in the Dust - Dr Williams condemns a military strategy which uses anti-personnel weapons and which he says budgeted for the deaths of civilians.
Focus of war on terror has been lost, says archbishop
He also criticises the treatment by the US of al-Qaeda suspects held in Cuba.
"It is just possible to deplore civilian casualties and retain moral credibility when an action is clearly focused and its goals are on the way to evident achievement," he writes.
"It is not possible when the strategy appears confused and political leaders talk about a war that may last many years."
Later, a spokesman for Dr Williams said the Archbishop had written the book from a "Christian view".
"The purpose is to examine how we react to the challenges to our faith raised by extreme and murderous violence," the spokesman said.
Dr Williams' comments came as the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, urged Israelis and Palestinians to return to the negotiating table during a visit to the Middle East.
Dr Carey - spiritual leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans - was speaking on a visit to Yasser Arafat's Ramallah offices, which have been surrounded by Israeli tanks since Friday.
"Religious leaders have a part to play in this," Dr Carey said. "Religion is not only part of the answer, but also part of the problem."
(snip)http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1771086.stm
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