Strategy and Tactics

So the Roman Pontiff is retiring.  I must say that I admire him for his decision not to put us through a repeat of his predecessor's protracted and very public death-throes. I am also grateful to him for his determination to restore the balance of the Roman rite, even although that doesn't effect me personally.

But I'm not nearly so sure about some of the pope's statements on moral matters such as birth control.  Likewise his claim that gay marriage would bring "serious harm to justice and peace."  Would it really?  But aren't de facto relationships more harmful to society - especially to children?  And what about the soaring rate of divorce?  Surely it is divorce which has devastated the lives of thousands, perhaps even millions of actual human beings.

But I believe the pope has been absolutely right to call attention to the enormous changes which have occurred in just the last century or so in the West.  In many ways the turmoil generated by scientific inquiry, technological advance, the devasting effects of modern political ideologies (not to mention the wars which they helped to bring about) have been too much for us to digest in a mere generation or so.  And whether we like it or not, we now know more than we used to.  Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein, among many others have seen to that.  And when I say we, I don't mean a just a small privileged class of the educated -  radio, television, the paper-back book and many other forms of communication have seen to that too.  A whole lot of  different voices now want a say as to what is right and wrong, and we are all forced to listen.

Both Judaism and Islam are revelations of human behaviour.  Jews and Muslims know right down to the smallest detail what they should or shouldn't do, and when and where they should or shouldn't do it.  But in the Christian religion God took the great risk of revealing his life, rather than of setting rules for ours.  (Hence the rows about the Trinity, the incarnation, and so on for much of the first millenium.)  We have the strategy for our behaviour - unconditional love - but (by comparison with Judaism and Islam) a lot of the tactics (that is, how to put the strategy into practice) simply aren't there.  For many Christians only definite tactics make life in society safe.  We just must know exactly what is what, where and when.  We need rules, even if they don't exactly square with the strategy which is set forth in Christ.  And often these rules are really little more than the inherited prejudices of the tribe masquerading as Christian principles.

As a comparatively young academic at the University of Regensburg the present pope was greatly alarmed by the extreme radicalism of some of his students, and I have no doubt that had I been there at the time I would have been very much on his side. But the Nicaeo-Constantinopolitan Creed is about the doctrine of God, not the behaviour of his children.  In my opinion the pope has been more than justified in being very clear indeed about the former, but about the latter, well there I'm not so sure.  The expression of unconditional love to all and sundry is not easy to put into practice, and I can't help but notice that certainty in these matters has often led to the betrayal of the strategy itself on the rack and at the stake.


[Originally published on my now-defunct blog Speculations and Certainties]