Thought that is real and not merely “notional,” is thought that is sympathetically situated in time and place
Our American Babylon
by Father Ricard John Neuhaus
Once upon a time—it was the 1976 bicentennial of the American founding, to be precise—I wrote a book on the American experiment and the idea of covenant. Time magazine picked up on it and reported, “On the day of judgment, Neuhaus wants to meet God as an American.”
That’s not quite right. What I wrote is that I expect to meet God as an American. And that for the simple reason that, among all the things I am or have been or hope to be, I am undeniably an American. It is not the most important thing, but it is an inescapable thing. Nor, even were I so inclined, should I try to escape it. It is a pervasive and indelible part of what is called one’s “identity.” Among American thinkers, and not least among American theologians, one frequently discerns an attempt to escape one’s time and place. It is a very American thing to try to do. We are never more American than when we believe we have transcended being American. America is, after all, as some like to say, the world’s first “universal nation.”
The theologian Robert Jenson has employed to fine effect the phrase “the story of the world.” The story of Israel and the Church, he writes, is nothing less than the story of the world, and the world is today lost in its confusions because it has “lost its story.” I would add that, for those of us who are Americans, we are as Americans part of the story that is the story of the world. Moreover, America itself—this nation that the founders called an experiment and, like any experiment, may succeed or fail—is part of the story that is the story of the world. Of the many ways of thinking about America—economic, political, cultural, etc.—there is today a striking scarcity of thinking about America theologically.
It was not always so. Not so long ago, American intellectuals, including American theologians, spent considerable time thinking about their place as Americans. But in the last half century or so, we have largely lost our story and our place in the story of the world. Theologians, too, have succumbed to the false-consciousness of having transcended the American experience, which is expressed, more often than not, in a typically American anti-Americanism that is relished and imitated by others, notably by European intellectuals. As in the writing of biography, or of history more generally, one cannot think truly about a story with which one is not sympathetically engaged. Love is sometimes blind, but contempt is always blind.
Perhaps we should from the start attend to one common misunderstanding. To think about the American experiment theologically, or to suggest that God is not indifferent to the American experiment, in no way implies that people who are Americans are “special” in the sense of occupying a superior place in God’s concerns and purposes. The Christian tradition gives us to understand that a beggar on the streets of Calcutta is in the view of God, sub specie aeternitatis, as important as the president of the United States. As for the proud pretensions of worldly powers, Psalm 2 tells us that God holds them in derision, laughing them to scorn. And yet, it is precisely God’s concern for everyone, including the littlest and the least, that warrants our belief that He takes an interest in realities that affect billions of people on earth. America and its role in the world is such a reality.
To the God who marks every sparrow that falls, everything matters. God is infinite and his capacity for concern is inexhaustible. To propose that He cares more about one people than another is both unseemly and theologically incoherent. To God and to its five million citizens, the Kingdom of Denmark “matters” as much as the United States of America. But the Kingdom of Denmark is not, insofar as we can measure consequence, as consequential for human history as is, for better and for worse, the United States. Our subject is the stories within the story of the world, which is to say human history, which is to say the events and forces that influence and engage people who are the object of God’s infinite concern. Any suggestion that one nation is more “special” to God than another is excluded. The people of Israel and the Church joined to Israel are His elect people, but God is no respecter of nations. At the same time, neither is He indifferent to, among other things beyond numbering, the political configurations that may hinder or serve His purposes. It is by no means the decisive thing, but neither is it a trifling thing, that we Christians in America are American Christians. We have a measure of responsibility for this country and its influence in the world. As do Danes for Denmark, Japanese for Japan, Kenyans for Kenya, and on and on. Because America impinges upon them all, they, too, have more than a passing interest in how the American story within the story of the world is told.
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=268
