CHAPTER III

PEOPLES AND NATIONS OF GOD:

Response to David Little

FR. ALEXANDER F. C. WEBSTER

St. Sophia Ukrainian Orthodox Theological Seminary

            In the wake of the terrible religio-ethnic violence that has engulfed the former Yugoslavia in the Balkans, Armenia and Azer-baijan in the Caucasus, Sudan in Africa, Israel and Palestine in the Middle East, and Sri Lanka and Tibet in Asia -- to cite only a few particularly egregious cases -- nationalism and ethnicity have become increasingly problematic for the intellectual elites in the West. Any association of religion with either nationalism or ethnicity is routinely criticized as a potentially volatile mix to be minimized, circumscribed, or even avoided at all costs.

            David Little joined this chorus of critics of religio-ethnicity when he launched his "Religion, Nationalism, and Intolerance" project at the United States Institute of Peace in 1990. As an active participant in the original "working group" of scholar-consultants for this project, I offered a formal response at the first conference on the Ukraine. But I withdrew from the project soon thereafter, when I concluded that it was grounded in what I deemed a fundamentally flawed set of principles concerning religious liberty and human rights.

            In this response to Dr. Little’s essay entitled, "Belief, Ethni-city, and Nationalism," I shall attempt to paint a more nuanced and even-handed picture of the positive, as well as negative, dimen-sions of the interplay of the scriptural faiths and ethnicity than Dr. Little seems prepared to allow. I shall also offer a respectful, but firm, rebuttal to Dr. Little’s Western liberal conceptions of human rights, religious intolerance, and ethnic conflict. My perspective is clearly Christian, and Orthodox in particular, but I hope my obser-vations -- drawn mostly from the New Testament and Eastern Or-thodox historical experience -- will resonate also with Jewish and Muslim readers.

PEOPLE AND NATIONS

            A dozen years ago, taking a cue from the classic sociological typologies of Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, and relying on the distinctive taxonomy of religion and nationalism proffered more re-cently by Professor Daniel Elazar of Dartmouth, I proposed a three-part typology for analyzing the range of normative relations between the Christian Church (particularly in the Eastern Orthodox historical experience) and cultural groupings such as nations and ethnic communities.1 Each of these three "ideal-types" is rooted firmly in the Bible and may be discerned in a trajectory through the subsequent history of the Church.

            To narrow the focus of this essay, I shall discard the "public-type," which ignores both the transcendent claims of religion and the ideology of national or ethnic identity in favor of whatever civil society happens to be found within the territorial limits of a given state. I suspect, ironically, that Dr. Little might prefer this model, which does seem, after all, to characterize the prevailing secula-ristic vision of the United States, the Soviet Union (before, that is, its very timely demise in 1991), and other contemporary "multi-cultural" states. But the "public-type" is the least attested in scrip-ture (for example, St. Paul’s reliance on his Roman citizenship in Acts 22:25-29) and the least attractive to people of strong religious faith.

            That leaves the "people-type" and "ethnos-type" trajectories for more serious consideration. The first of these is usually held in high esteem by Christians of all stripes, and so I shall bow to it only briefly. The other type, however, requires more careful unpacking, since it may prove more controversial -- among some Christians, if not those Jewish and Muslim readers whose experience with religion and ethnicity more closely parallels that of Orthodox Christianity in eastern Europe.

The People of God: The People Type

            The New Testament is replete with familiar images of the universal, transcendent, meta-ethnic quality of the Church. For St. Peter, Christians constitute, in the aggregate, "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people" (1 Peter 2:9f, RSV). For St. Paul, accidents of birth have no enduring value for those who are baptized, as he states so eloquently to the Galatians: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). The Apostle to the Gentiles also assures them that Christ has destroyed "the dividing wall of enmity" between Jews and Gentiles, brought the Gentiles fully into the covenant community, and created in Himself "one new man in place of the two" (Ephesians 2:12-16).

            The "people-type" trajectory begins chronologically with the Great Commission. According to the Gospel of St. Matthew, the risen Jesus commissions His disciples to take the good news of His resurrection to all the nations on earth (Matthew 28:19). The next decisive event is the birth of the Church on Pentecost Sunday. St. Luke’s account in Acts 2:4-41 credits the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples with a virtual reversal of the adverse consequences for human unity in the Tower of Babel mythos (Genesis 11). In the well-chosen words of a recent ecumenical conference on ethnicity and nationalism in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Pentecost was not a rever-sion to cultural and linguistic uniformity, but rather "an advance towards the harmony of cultural diversity . . . in which each ethnic group remains faithful to its dynamic and changing identity and yet is enriched by and enriches others." In the "one multi-cultural community of faith" Christians are redeemed by the blood of the Lamb that was slain: "The `blood’ that binds them as brothers and sisters is more precious than the `blood,’ the language, the customs, the political allegiances or economic interests that may separate them."2 The "people-type" trajectory achieves its natural end in the eschatological vision of St. John of Patmos. In Reve-lation 7:9-12, the seer beholds "a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes, and peoples and tongues, standing before the Lamb." The "people of God" from beginning to end, therefore, knows no ethnic bounds.

            In the two millennia of Christian experience east and west, the meta-ethnic or trans-national character of the Church as the people of God has proved irresistible in theory, if not necessarily in practice. For Roman Catholics, the institution of the papacy -- especially since the 450-year Italian hold on it was broken in 1978 -- has a universalizing effect on the vision of the Church. For Pro-testants in the historic denominations of the Reformation and in contemporary fundamentalist or evangelical communities, an unre-lenting individualism serves the same purpose -- especially as a countervailing tendency to the de facto linkage between church and nation in Germany, Scandinavia, and northwest Europe. Even the Eastern Orthodox, so often identified in the modern world with the nation-states of eastern Europe, may stake a strong claim to this type of religio-cultural relation.

            For example, the contemporary Greek theologian, Fr. Ioannes Karmiris, cites the historic Orthodox principle of eccle-siastical organization as both a reflection and a cause of Orthodox universalism. The local church, whatever its familiar name, is based on geography, not ethnicity or nationality per se, so there ought not to be any elect, chosen, or superior nations among the many that, historically and in terms of a popular majority, have claimed Orthodoxy for their faith. The proper relation of Church to nation and state is, for Karmiris, "akin to that of the soul toward the body" -- a familiar simile from the unique Byzantine experiment that lasted a thousand years from A.D. 330 to 1453, but dating back to the anonymous Epistle to Diognetus in the second century. From this inclusivist perspective, the Church "pursues as its policy one that guides all people, nations, states toward God, and unites, transfigures, and transforms them all into one `people of God.’"3

Nations of God: The Ethnos Type

            The spiritual and moral dangers of nationalism and ethnicity are obvious to anyone who reads the newspapers today. Their more virulent expressions have, in large part, motivated the unprecedented carnage of this century. One need only remember the attempted genocide of Armenians in 1915, the atrocities of Nazi Germany, and the "ethnic cleansing" that has come to be associated with Yugoslavia during the Second World War and, again, since 1991.

            In the last century or so, Eastern Orthodox leaders have not shied away from denouncing such racial or ethnic hatred and its attendant violence. An excessive preoccupation with one’s own ethnic group, which contrasts sharply with the ecumenical trans-national vision that prevailed in the medieval Byzantine common-wealth, was condemned as "phyletism" (from the Greek phyletis-mos -- "blood union") by the Synod of Constantinople in 1872 and as "ethnoracism" by Patriarch Joachim of Constantinople in 1904. Bishop Kallistos Ware of Oxford University lamented recently, "Nationalism has been the bane of Orthodoxy for the last ten centuries."4 Perhaps the most encouraging sign of supra-nation-alistic Orthodox consciousness was an extraordinary inter-religious conference hosted by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul (Constantinople for the Orthodox) in February 1994. Inspired by the Appeal of Conscience Foundation headed by Rabbi Arthur Schneier in New York, the event gathered prominent international Jewish, Muslim, and Christian leaders, including Orthodox repre-sentatives from Russia, Romania, Georgia, Bulgaria, and the United States. They produced the "Bosporus Declaration," which proclaimed without equivocation: "We reject any attempt to corrupt the basic tenet of faith by means of false interpretation and false nationalism."5

            The key word in the Bosporus Declaration, for our purposes, is "false." Not all forms of nationalism or ethnicity undermine scriptural faith. Dr. Little concedes as much, although his rigid neo-Weberian distinction between "liberal" and "illiberal" forms hardly allows for the rich variety that obtains in Christian experience, as well as that, I surmise, of the Jewish and Muslim communities.

            We may, all of us, however, agree on the basic definitions of ethnicity and nationalism. Dr. Little’s use of Weber here is instructive. If an "ethnic group" is a "people" who hold "a subjective belief in their common descent," whether construed in terms of accidental characteristics such as a race, territory, or language, a "nation" is an ethnic group writ large, as it were: more self-conscious of its inherent cultural superiority and more politically assertive to the point of seeking to establish its own independent state.6

            At either echelon, the concept of a distinct people with a shared cultural identity, apart from other peoples with other cultural identities, may actually enhance, much less distort, the Christian understanding of the universal gospel of Christ. What I have dubbed the "ethnos-type" trajectory through Christian history lends itself variously to abuse or good use.

            The Greek noun that supplies the name of this ideal-type, to ethnos, means literally "a `mass’ or `host’ or `multitude’ bound by the same manners, customs or other distinctive features," or, more properly, a "people."7 It is, as Dr. Little observes in his notes, a rather "porous" or open-ended term. But that vagueness also manifests its genius. For ethnicity is not necessarily tied to bloodlines, nor does it lead inexorably to phyletism. A shared ethnic consciousness is not automatically grounded in a shared territory, although a sense of a common or ancestral homeland seems indispensable. Nor does a positive ethnic identity require a com-mon spoken language; otherwise the children of immigrants, who are not conversant in the mother tongue, would have to forfeit all claims to their family’s ethnic heritage. Ethnicity may, therefore, be difficult to pin down, but that same indeterminate character lends a mystical quality to the enterprise, especially where religion is involved.

            Sometimes this ethnic mysticism pushes the envelope of moral propriety. Romantic nineteenth century notions of the "Rumanian soul" and Russia’s messianic mission degenerated in the twentieth century into xenophobic fascism and Soviet im-perialism, respectively. But these, and similar perversions in Western Europe and North America (one need only recall the religio-ethnic American notion of a "manifest destiny" that pushed aside the indigenous tribes of the Old West), do not invalidate the essential worth of the "ethnos-type" trajectory through all of Church history.

            The struggle of the early Church over the "ethnic question," if you will, is well-attested and has preoccupied theologians in virtually every era. How integral was Jewishness to the gospel of Jesus Christ -- and hence a prerequisite for membership in the Church that He founded -- and to what extent, if any, could other nations (Greek: ta ethne) become part of the eschatological Kingdom of God foreshadowed by that same Church? In some sayings of Christ, the priority of Israel as the "chosen people" of the covenant is presumed -- sometimes in an exclusive sense, as in the "lost sheep" passage (Matthew 10:5-7). The same St. Paul, who in Ephesians 3:6 refers to the Gentiles as "fellow heirs," stresses in a highly problematic section of his most theological epistle the special relation that still obtains between the "chosen" Jewish nation and God; he indicates further that the Gentiles (or "nations") enjoy only a somewhat secondary status in the divine plan of salvation (Romans 11). In Acts 6, the ethnic controversy between Hebrew and Greek-speaking Jewish believers threatens to rend the spiritual unity of the original believers in Jerusalem until the appointment of the first deacons solves the problem temporarily.

            When the mother Church finally determines the conditions for the admission of Gentiles into the community (Acts 15), the die is cast for an inclusive, universal evangelistic mission with the nations on a more or less equal basis. But the condescending tone of St. James’ pronouncement at the Council of Jerusalem, however much an ethical breakthrough the act itself represented, still betrays a sense of ethnic superiority that often informs the "ethnos-type" trajectory. Along that historical trajectory, ironically, the relative positions of the two groups have been reversed. The Orthodox (and Roman Catholic and Protestant) Churches have tended to regard various Gentile nationalities as normatively Christian and the Jews beyond the pale (often literally, especially in eastern Europe), deserving of condescension at most and perhaps even ethnically inferior. This development also paralleled a metamorphosis of ta ethne in the first two centuries after Christ. The Greek term gradually resumed its original meaning as the equivalent to the Hebrew term for "foreigners." Since the Church saw herself as "Israel," the "nations" were the unrighteous (Vision of Hermas 1, 4, 2), pagans to be converted to the gospel (Second Epistle of Clement 13, 3) or lawless heathen (Martyrdom of Polycarp 9, 2).8

            The most compelling biblical ground of the "ethnos-type" trajectory consists of two passages, the relevant details of which are often glossed over by Christians with a single-minded preference for the "people-type" ecclesiology.9 The first text is the very familiar parable of the great judgement in Matthew 25:31-46. Popular presumptions notwithstanding, it is not individual persons who are gathered before the "glorious throne" of the Son of man when He "come in his glory," but rather panta ta ethne: "all the nations." Whether ethne refers here only to Gentiles or, as is more likely, every nation in the world including the Jewish people as one nation among many,10 the collective identity of the subject cannot be denied. It is the "nations" whom the Son of man will separate "one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats." Does that mean, therefore, that entire nations will be consigned to heaven or hell in accordance with their collective treatment of the "least" of the brethren? Probably not. But this dominical saying in the Gospel of St. Matthew points to some kind of permanent role of nations in the divine economy of salvation -- one that warrants further reflection.

            The other New Testament passage I have in mind also merits attention from those who would quickly dismiss ethnicity and nationalism as enduring spiritual and moral categories. In his address to the sophisticated Greeks on the areopagus of Athens, St. Paul declares that the "God who made the world and everything in it . . . made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God" (Acts 17: 24, 26f). At the very least, God is at work among the nations, guiding them, indwelling them, causing them to rise and fall. Beyond that, one may only speculate. Perhaps the Rumanian nationalist historian, Nicolae Iorga (1871-1940), was right, after all, when he insisted that nations are living organisms no less mysterious or spiritual than human persons, or at least entities greater than the sum of their parts.11

            Viewed in the most positive Christian light, nations and ethnic groups are fully capable of incarnating the gospel. If what I term the "people-type" approach to religion and culture seeks an essential, "Platonic" trans-nationalism or meta-ethnicity, the "ethnos-type" reflects an "Aristotelian" recognition of the particular and concrete in human society: that is to say, one may no more transcend his ethnicity (or nation) than exchange his parents or change his sex. To borrow political humorist P.J. O’Rourke’s comparison of the Democrats as the non-existent Santa Claus to the Republicans as the sterner but very real Old Testament Yahweh,12 one may say that the "people-type" ideal is far more ethically appealing than its often misbegotten alternative, but the problem is that the former is hard to find in the lived experience of the Church!

NOT A ‘LITTLE’ BIAS AGAINST ETHNICITY

            Although it may seem counter-intuitive to argue against someone who argues against discrimination, I take up this cause willingly, confidently, and with all due respect for my colleague, Dr. David Little. In two sentences of his essay, Dr. Little suggests, first, that "all nationalists -- liberal and illiberal" have "a certain problem complying consistently with universalistic norms" and, second, that so-called liberal nationalists are more likely to promote "tolerance and peace" than so-called illiberal nationalists. Contained in this couplet is the key to what I regretfully must describe as Dr. Little’s bias against any kind of vital ethnicity and his rather narrow secular Western conception of religious and ethnic intolerance.

            For Dr. Little, who readily wears the mantle of Max Weber and Isaiah Berlin before him, the only good nationalist (and, mutatis mutandis, ethnic) is a "liberal" or "non-aggressive" one. This is the kind of nationalism that evolved from the French or American revo-lutions; it stresses "the ideals of citizenship," which include, above all, a commitment to "a multiethnic and nondiscriminatory" state. Since Dr. Little also worries a bit about tendencies toward "cultural standardization" -- presumably a common language, historical memory, and, heaven forbid, religion -- we obviously face in his liberal nationalism a Potemkin village: the only thing genuinely ethnic or nationalistic in this variety is the name. Anyone who takes reasonable pride in his ethnic identity or perceives a strong link between a particular religion and an ethnic group or nation, in Little’s view, has already begun a slide down the slippery slope to intolerance and armed conflict. Compare this animus against religion and ethnicity to the more positive views adduced above that are expressed in the New Testament by St. James, St. Paul, and, according to the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus Christ Himself!

            The Achilles’ heal of Dr. Little’s argument is his presumption that the prevailing Western liberal opposition to "discrimination" participates in a Platonic universal. He simply cites the articles in the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief as if these are self-evidently true for all times and places. However, discrimination -- including any "preference based on religion or belief," as well as hostile, restrictive, or oppressive measures against someone -- is not necessarily linked causally to into-lerance. Nor in this case is the contra-positive necessarily true: "respect for freedom of conscience and diverse belief" does not re-quire application of "the principle of nondiscrimination." Tolerance and nondiscrimination are not balanced in a zero-sum relation. I can envision many scenarios, both historical and theoretical, in which positive discrimination toward a majority religio-ethnic com-munity does not equate to negative discrimination against minority religio-ethnic groups in the same state.

            If Dr. Little and the United Nations Organization were able to implement their view of religious tolerance, Israel would have to rescind its "law of return," the state-churches in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom (and any revived arrangements of this sort in eastern Europe and the Caucasus) would have to forego their special status, and every Islamic state would have to forfeit its religious identity or be subject to charges of violating fundamental "human rights." Most ominously for people of faith in the United States, the public square in this country would, in Fr. Richard John Neuhaus’ now classic image, have to remain permanently "naked." Dr. Little apparently would relegate religion to a "private" sphere of behavior, although not necessarily without influence on the public sphere.

            Precisely what this entails I can not fathom, but it sounds like an enforced secularization of the polity and the national culture -- in other words, more or less what the U.S. Supreme Court has wrought in the last half century.

            The real issue, in short, is not religio-ethnic discrimination, but rather the use of power -- especially state power -- for or against certain religious or ethnic groups. I would argue that positive po-litical action on behalf of a religio-ethnic majority (say, for example, Jews in Israel, Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Roman Catholics in Poland, Lutherans in Sweden, or Orthodox Christians in Romania) may be morally licit, while any negative political action (such as restrictions on free speech or access to buildings) directed against a religio-ethnic minority is intrinsically evil.

            Whether this half loaf of "human rights" will satisfy Dr. Little or other Christians, Jews, or Muslims enamored of Western liberalism remains an open question. From my Orthodox Christian per-spective, this is one instance where "less" is clearly better than "more."

NOTES

            1. Alexander F. C. Webster, "Antinomical Typologies for an Orthodox Christian Social Ethic for the World, State, and Nation," Greek Orthodox Theological Review, XXVIII, No. 3 (Fall, 1983), 246-53.

            2. "Ethnicity and Nationalism: A Challenge to the Churches," The Ecumenical Review, XLVII, No. 2 (Spring, 1995), 228, 229. Sponsored jointly by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, Lutheran World Federation, and World Council of Churches, this consultation gathered 36 persons from 21 countries in November 1994.

            3. Ioannes Karmiris, "Nationalism in the Orthodox Church," Greek Orthodox Theological Review, XXVI, No. 3 (Fall, 1981), 175-77.

            4. (Kallistos) Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (Balti-more: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 86.

            5. Quoted in Alan Cowel, "World Religious Leaders Meet on Ethnic Strife," New York Times, February 10, 1994, p. A15.

            6. Little acknowledges his indebtedness to Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), Vol. I, 385-98, and Vol. II, 921-26.

            7. Gerhard Kittel (ed.), Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, trans. & ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1964), II, 369.

            8. William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich (eds.), A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 217.

            9. I must confess that only in the last several years have I noticed these details, leading me to revise accordingly the harsher assessment of the "ethnos-type" trajectory in my earlier works.

            10. The latter is also the interpretation of Karl Ludwig Schmidt in Kittel, loc. cit.

            11. See, for example, the excellent secondary study: William O. Oldson, The Historical and Nationalistic Thought of Nicolae Iorga ("East European Monographs"; New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 1973), p. 45. Iorga’s nationalism also had a dark, obverse side; like many of his contemporaries a fervent anti-Semite, he was assassinated by right-wingers more extreme than himself.