Excerpts from Cavanaugh interview

Just reread a great interview with William Cavanaugh from The Christian Century that touches on a lot of the main aspects of his work, all in a nice summarized form. Here are some excerpts:

On the politics of liturgy:

Henri de Lubac says, “The Eucharist makes the church,” and the church is more than just a Moose Lodge for Christians. The church is a social space in its own right, an enactment of the politics of Jesus. This does not mean that the church should become a political party or interject party politics into the liturgy. It means the church should help create—in collaboration with non-Christians too-spaces of peace, charity and just economic exchange.

On “religious” violence vs. “secular” violence:

Obviously, I’m not a fan of the Taliban. We should be concerned about any regime that abuses people. I worry, however, about the way that the great myth of religious violence serves to justify certain kinds of violence: “Those people over there are crazy religious fanatics; their violence is irrational, absolutist and divisive. We live in a democratic, secular state; our violence is rational, modest and unitive. They have not learned the lesson we learned: religion should be kept out of the public sphere. So we need to help them by bombing them into the higher rationality.” This way of thinking is, I think, one of the subtexts of the Iraq war and of much of public discourse on terrorism. Both Republicans and Democrats assume it.

This myth helps us to think of ourselves as the most peace-loving nation on earth at the same time that our military budget exceeds those of all other nations combined. Our violence doesn’t count as violence, because we are just trying to spread democracy, rationality and peace. Wars by U.S. forces or by proxies—resulting in the death of 50,000 Iraqi civilians, 2 million Vietnamese, 200,000 Guatemalan peasants—don’t make a dent in our self-image as long as we make “religious violence” the bogeyman. I think we should denounce all kinds of violence, religious and secular.

On “just war”:

[T]he church must do more than rely on the state to do justice. The churches must be clear that Christians should refuse to participate in unjust treatment of detainees. Furthermore, the churches must not defer to the president the decision on what constitutes a just war and what does not. If the church decides that a war is unjust, Christians should refuse to fight it. I think this is the most crucial issue facing the church in America today. If the just war theory is to mean anything at all, the church must not abdicate its just war decisions to the state.

On the “already, but not yet” Kingdom of God:

In the Christian reading of Isaiah, however, God has already acted to redeem history. The shoot from the stump of Jesse has already sprouted. The longing of Advent is fulfilled in Christmas. People sometimes misunderstand the “not yet” of the kingdom of God to mean that God is holding back on us. But God has held nothing back; God has given us the Son, the Way. The “not yet” is because we are holding back. We carry on as if nothing has happened, waiting for God to realize the vision of Isaiah. But the good news is that God has acted. God has given us the Christ, in whom Isaiah’s vision of a transformed reality is fulfilled.

Read the entire interview here.