BILLTESKA

“If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” A silly thing to say in a foreign policy speech. The logical fallacy of the false dichotomy, as though there were not shades of support and opposition in any relationship. Yet today Jesus tells His disciples the same thing: Whoever is not against us is with us.

I say it’s the same thing, because the two are formal corollaries. In logic, the contrapositive is always true. If A implies B, then NOT B implies NOT A. So if whoever is not against us is with us, then whoever is not with us is NOT not against us. (In other words, whoever is not with us is just plain against us.) But somehow Jesus’ observation still feels just the opposite of the belligerent, take-it-or-leave-it posturing of Presidential folly.

What Jesus says is meant to approve and include people who are not formally or expressly allied with His disciples ~ precisely those shades and nuances that The Leader’s remark would exclude by insisting that other countries are enemies if they do not enlist under his command. And so, for a while we got “freedom fries” and wine-dumping. Maybe the disastrous Leader was using language that he thought would resonate with his biblically-literalist political base. But if so, it is terrible to think that he is willing to compare himself with our Lord. I am tempted to fall into the trap of asserting the opposite: that whoever is with The Leader is against Jesus! But I try to remember that Every man acts according to his own understanding, and God alone knows who is rightly guided. So, I could be wrong about this. I am a fallibilist.

I have just learned that this is a type of home-grown, pragmatist epistemology, pioneered by Charles Saunders Peirce. As far as I understand it, the idea is that we can’t be certain of anything – including the basic scientific assumption that the future will be like the past. This is especially true of social sciences. It is also true of theology, as practiced by Anglicans. Peirce was an Episcopalian who came back to Communion in mid-life, much to his own surprise, and I like to think that his fallibilism was inspired by the same hesitancy to shut out the mystery, whether by reason or by dogma, expressed by Richard Hooker, who said of the 16th Century, two things there be that greatly trouble this present age: the one that Rome cannot and the other that Geneva will not err.

Fr. William Countryman has observed that willingness to err is essential to Anglicanism. That is, unlike Rome we do not imagine that God preserves us from error in our very nature as Church, nor, like Calvinism, do we think that grace prevents our will from choosing it. We say that we might be wrong. And so, we are in an asymmetrical relationship with those who are certain about theology. You have to be comfortable, to some extent, with uncertainty and ambiguity – even with paradox and downright contradiction – to be an Anglican. That’s why I think it not insignificant that Peirce was an Episcopalian, even though he was somewhat uncomfortable as one.

He isn’t the only one. I think it is kind of funny that our Episcopal lectionary permits us to excuse ourselves from listening to James’ tirade against the rich. We are, after all, traditionally the church of the upper class establishment. What are we supposed to do with this bit of Holy Writ? Well, choke on it, I think James would say! If we are content to be rich rather than to use our riches for the relief of the poor; if we are unwilling to lay all our wealth at the foot of the Cross, then as far as James the Brother of God is concerned, we can go to hell!

And what is true of rich individuals is also true of rich nations. We had better stop confusing our own avarice with divine favor. If Americans have more than anybody else it may be a sign not of God’s love for a righteous people, but of that people’s unrighteous, ruthless greed; the same kind of intolerable arrogance that is capable of saying “if you’re not with us, you’re against us,” which leads to the appalling wickedness we witnessed in Congress last week, which calls out to heaven for vengeance.

And the cries of the oppressed have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts!