Posted on: February 19th, 2007 War & True Politics
War & True Politics
Here is the best reason I know of for opposing the "war" in Iraq that is currently being fought by the American Empire:
"The Eucharist transgresses national boundaries and redefines who our fellow-citizens are. Rousseau was right to note that communion among churches is a threat to the unity of the state. The eschatological breakdown of divisions between Jews and Greek — and all other natural and social divisions — is preeminently made present in the Eucharistic feast. Patristic writers tended to emphasize the eschatological dimension of the Eucharist, regarding it as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet in which ‘people from east to west, from north to south, will come and sit down at the feast in the kingdom of God’ (Luke 13:29). Thus St John Chrysostom, in his commentary on the Hebrews, displays the early Church’s conviction that at the Eucharist the heavenly banquet interrupts into earthly time: ‘For when our Lord Jesus lies as a slain Victim, when the Spirit is present, when He Who sits as the right hand of the Father is present, when we have been made children by baptism and are fellow-citizens with those in heaven, when we have our fatherland in heaven and our city and citizenship, when we are only foreigners among earthly things, how can this all fail to be heavenly?’ This is a fundamental disfigurement of the imagination of citizenship in the territorial state. One’s fellow-citizens are not all preset Britons or Germans, but fellow members (and potential members) of the Body of Christ, past, present, and future." William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, (New York: Continuum, 2002), pp 50-51.
