Three More Reasons to Ditch the GOP

Unbearable as the experience often is, I can't resist peeking in on news related to the Republican presidential nomination race from time to time, and each time, it seems, I find another damning testimony which reveals how tenuous the connection between the GOP and anything recognizably Christian is becoming.  Perhaps it is now not so much the party of the "Christian Right" as the "Cold-Hearted Pelagian Right."  Here are three examples I've saved from the stories of the past couple weeks:

The new media favourite of the race, Herman Cain, whose chief qualification for governing the most powerful nation on earth seems to be that he ran a pizza chain once, had this to say about the recent Wall Street protests: "Don't blame Wall Street.  Don't blame the big banks. If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself. . . . It is not a person's fault because they succeeded. It is a person's fault if they failed. And so this is why I don't understand these demonstrations and what is it that they're looking for."  

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Retributive Justice--further thoughts

Brian Auten over at the Boars Head Tavern has drawn attention to my previous post and asked a very salient question about the latter portion: 

"How does this work if it’s about “redress of a wrong suffered” as well as innocents who are in ongoing-but-perhaps-not-immediately-clear danger?   That is, what happens when you come upon the someone who killed your mama three years ago, and you know that same someone is, or really appears to be, planning to kill all of the other mamas in your neighborhood?  I just wonder about the frequency of situations, particularly regarding state actions, where “redress of a wrong suffered” isn’t bound up in all sorts of connected concerns over the protection of innocents and tranquillitas ordinis."

Somewhat bizarrely, the ensuing discussion of my post over there has centered merely on the question of whether in my sentence "However, I’m with Paul on this one, who had no hesitation in calling himself “the chief of sinners” even when he clearly was not" I am "explaining away Scripture"  Be that as it may, Auten's question is a very good one, and one that I half-hoped someone would raise.

Essentially, what he's saying is that, in political practice, the distinction between retributive justice and what we might call "protective justice" (presumably there is a proper term for this, but not knowing it, I shall coin this one) tends to break down.  This objection requires some very careful thinking through, and here’s a first attempt.

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Counsels or Commandments: The Protestant Line through the Heart

In his Loci Communes, Philipp Melanchthon turns at chapter 8 to address “the Distinction of Commandment and Counsel,” which as mentioned in my previous post, has been growing on my mental radar of late as a key player in my ethico-political ambiguities.  Most intriguingly, though, Melancthon turns specifically to consider this distinction in terms of the lawfulness of private property, an issue I have been reading and writing on for the past several months.   

My bold, tentative thesis that emerges from this brief passage: it was the Protestant dissolution of the tension between the commandments and counsels that naturalized the moral justification of private property and thus paved the way for the development of the capitalist principle of absolute private property rights, in which one’s freedom to do entirely as one wished with what one owned preceded and relativised any legal or moral claim that could be made on one’s property.  Bold thesis, right?  (If you have any idea what I’m talking about, at least.)  I’ll sketch out the background of the distinction of commandment and counsel, and the Protestant reaction to it, in this post, and in the following one, I’ll develop how Melancthon applies it to the question of property.

So, let’s take a tour through 1,500 years of Christian ethics. 

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