Brian, I’m always interested in conversation about the roots of moral values. I’m curious where you saw someone arguing for a particular value as “pre-moral” or “pre-theological.” I’m not clear how that’s even coherent. Every moral stance is moral and theological and based on certain prior assumptions / core values. This seems self-evident.

Equating justice with ‘equality’ and dismissing it as nothing more than “a restatement of American democratic ideals” gives the American founders far too much credit for originality. There is a specific language of “rights” in the Western context that grew out of Enlightenment rationalism. The American founders’ ideas were also heavily influenced by the polity of the Iroquois Confederacy, which we can safely assume was not rooted in European Enlightenment thought. Would you really argue that nowhere else in the history of the world have people believed that it is better if they have enough food to eat, land to live on, freedom from captivity, etc. and perceived that if they prefer this, others likely do as well? Were Micah and Amos and Jesus also (rather anachronistically) “restating the ideals of American democracy” when they proclaimed liberation for the captives and justice for the oppressed?

I’m happy to admit to a multitude of moral influences in my beliefs, and I think it’s naive for anyone to claim a moral sense unrelated to the culture in which they live or unaffected by their lived experience as a human being in a particular social location. Personally, though I have nothing against “equality,” it’s too abstract and pretentiously “objective” for me to name as a core foundational value. I would sooner go for “love my neighbor as I love myself” (with ‘neighbor’ defined broadly as Jesus defined it) along with a clear sense of awareness of how my life and actions impact others, not only interpersonally but through the interconnectedness of human social institutions and of all life. I try not to approach “justice” issues from an abstract faux objective moral stance, but from as clear an understanding as I can develop about how I am already personally connected to the situation, and thus what my existing responsibility might be to love my neighbor as myself.

A note: I don’t think anyone around here would be unwilling to condemn Israel or any other society for human rights abuses, the forcible seizure of land, or any other dimension of colonialism. On the contrary, the recognition of equal human rights and dignity seems to be the quintessential aspect of justice to which every community must be held accountable. On no one’s terms does it involve any paternalism to protest these kinds of injustices, since ‘paternalism’ (as its usually used around here) mainly involves a dismissal of some other group’s basic rights (life, freedom, happiness). Admittedly, I don’t understand either how this perspective, which really just sounds like a re-statement of American democratic ideals, could be pre-theological or pre-moral as is sometimes argued here. And once it’s admitted that the current undestanding and priority of ‘equality’ is theological in a certain way, rooted in certain prior assumptions that can be disputed, I don’t understand how holding everyone accountable to this standard is not ‘paternalistic’ on their own terms.

Yet one should understand what’s being said. Paternalism requires power and a commitment against the rights of the one being confronted. Protest against the abuses of the powerful, launched from the place of the powerless: this is not paternalism but a continuous cry of insistence on the (higher) standard of justice. Against Israel, such protest is not launched with military might or with the aim of denying the dignity of the Israelis, but by standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine and working for justice with them and on their behalf. (Please, others, correct me if I’m misunderstanding.)

Wow, that’s incredible/disgusting stuff! I hadn’t been aware of the specifics of their re-telling before…thanks for the info.

Back on the wider scale, you suggested the Israeli are engaging in something insidious, the “deliberate use of history as a form of propaganda.” Again, I don’t think that’s unique at all.

In the American public education system, history books are only approved that paint the best possible light in nearly every situation on
America…I’m sure other countries do the same thing. Can you imagine the People’s History of the United States in a public classroom? I think not.

That being said, I think most people around this place (YAR) would agree with our position; that peace cannot be achieved without holding Israel to a higher standard…an agreement based on a Biblically defined understanding of love. We would not be truly loving if we did not address their actions that we consider divisive and destructive.

Yet many who would affirm this stance towards Israel’s policies would reject this position on a variety of “personal” issues because love, relationally displayed (as they define it), should show no inequity in “rights” or “power”. In other words, establishing that one believes the other is involved in a destructive action is, inescapably, just one more flavor of paternalism.

It’s interesting that this disjuncture exists between personal relationships and actions of states (and, dare I say, the institution of the church?) in the thought of some.

I say all this because it should be obvious to all of us that we have positions on issues that we feel are intensely important. I completely agree with you here on the Israel propaganda issue…we should have expectations for them to rise out of their actions and rhetoric for the sake of peace.
But is there something inherently different about relationships that changes this dynamic of taking a clear position that another’s actions are unhealthy? I think not, and so I believe that in order to truly love one another, we must have expectations for one another as God has for us. Now, how we carry ourselves in those relationships mean the world to show whether we truly are loving or not, but that doesn’t deny that we have to, HAVE TO find someplace to stand or we’re rootless, subject to the whim of various cultural pressures to knuckle under to their reading of history.

That said, I think you’re right about the necessity of subverting every story in favor of God’s story. That story will and must hold them to a higher standard; it will also place them in judgment, since God’s story will always include the suffering of innocents at their hands.

It’d be fun to compare the history books of a certain time period (say, World War II) from the Axis Powers and Allied Powers and compare their different readings according to their cultural lenses.

On a larger scale, after recognizing this, it seems clear to me that Christians are called to go beyond this awareness to place trust in God’s accounting and boundary-making in human history above all others. It immediately subverts the human agenda to God’s, and allows us to look beyond the ideological agendas, say, of the Israelis, love them, and hold them to a higher standard. Clearly there can’t be true peace there if violence continues on the surface level and propogandist rhetoric continues underneath; so we refuse to acknowledge their position as a helpful one and seek a way forward.

This is by no means solely an Israeli problem, though this situation reveals their bias