Dr. Dockery: This morning we want to focus on questions that will help us be aware of what has taken place in recent days – geographical issues, cultural issues, political issues, perhaps to get some broader historical perspective on some of these things.

We have a very distinguished panel here this morning––six faculty members who are experts in their various areas who can help us think through these matters in a very informed way and hopefully will clarify for you, and for all of us this morning, many of our questions.

Dr. Ann Livingstone is professor in political science, an expert in international areas, will take the lead on many of these things. Others here who will participate with us--Dr. Hal Poe, professor of faith and culture; Dr. David Gushee, who is professor of ethics and moral philosophy; Dr. Sean Evans, also professor of political science, more from the American side; Dr. Cindy Jayne, director of our Institute for International and Intercultural issues; and Dr. David Thomas, professor in history. Mrs. Sara Horn will serve as our moderator and guide our discussions today.

I know you will join me in thanking all of these for giving their time in our behalf this morning. Let us ask God to bless our time together this morning. Would you join me, please, as we pray.

Our Father, we are reminded during these times that you alone are God, and we come to worship you and to adore you, to recognize you as a faithful, loving heavenly Father. We ask, our Father, that you would guide our time here this morning as we reflect upon these tragic and horrific events of recent days.

We continue to pray for those who have been impacted by these events and for their families. We ask for your comfort and faithfulness to be real in their life. We pray, our Father, for our leaders this day, particular for President Bush and General Powell, that you would give them wisdom and direction. We pray, our Father, for all those who are giving of their time to volunteer and help those who are in need. Give them strength this day, we pray.

We pray for our own Jim Veneman, our Father, and ask that you would protect him as he serves in New York in these days, that you would watch over him in a very special way. And Father, we would follow your injunction this day and we would pray for our enemies and ask that you might somehow bring good out of evil, that you might bring redemption out of these difficult days. So we commit this time to you and ask for your help and your guidance. With thanksgiving we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Sara Horn Thank you, Dr. Dockery. I want to thank each of the panelists, also, for giving of their time and sharing this important information with us. Just to give you an idea of the format, I will be giving a few questions where the professors will be able to talk on the different topics and share their thoughts. We will try and allow about 20 minutes at the end to open it up to you all to come and ask questions of the panel. Let’s start off with Dr. Livingstone.

Can you please give us an idea of the countries that we are talking about, maybe a little geography lesson, if you will?

Dr.Ann Livingstone Sure. My students know how much I love maps and geography--right guys? (chuckles from audience)

When we talk about the Middle East, we’re talking about a range of states that stretches across a globe that we’re not particularly familiar with. So I thought we would look first and foremost at a map of the Middle East. It moves us from Egypt to Turkey through Sudan, through Saudi Arabia, up through Iran and Iraq, the Middle East there of Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Syria, and across then into just a little corner where Afghanistan is. Can you see where Afghanistan is, there in the far corner?

This is where Afghanistan is in a larger context, and you need to look at the countries that are contiguous to Afghanistan, particularly when we’re looking at Pakistan, we’re looking at China, and we’re looking at Iran. This is extremely important to understand, especially if we are going to deem that Afghanistan is the state that has been most supportive of the terrorist organizations.

Finally, let’s look at a map of the world. You can begin to see where this configures in our world. If you are not real familiar with geography, I’d recommend that you get an atlas or come by my office and get a map packet. We can fill it out and have a good time. (more chuckles from audience)

Horn Could you also talk a little about this act of terrorism that has now been called an act of war. What is the purpose, the cause of terrorism? Why does it occur?

Livingstone Terrorism is not new in the world. We’ve engaged in it for a very long time, so I wanted to very briefly articulate the purpose of terrorism, the causes of terrorism, and the effect of terrorism.

We talk about the purpose of terrorism. Any terrorist act is to influence political action of a particular government or particular body of people. It is not necessarily about taking over a nation state. It also is to create an “echo effect.” An echo effect happens when we continue to reverberate and talk and highlight a particular idea or a particular people. If a terrorist act is so small that it doesn’t have an echo effect, it’s useless.

If a terrorist act is so big that the echo effect goes beyond what we can tolerate, it is equally useless. That’s why we are looking at this event very carefully in terms of “Is there more to come, and are there more targets?” And I think within the next 12 months we probably will see some more targets. But for the immediate, these targets have been sufficient.

Third, the purpose of terrorism is to have a sense of retribution against past wrongs, perceived or actual, by communities, or by states, or by groups of people against others. So that’s the purpose of terrorism.

We talk about the causes of terrorism, we’re looking at ideology. We can look at a sense of belief about being disenfranchised from the rest of the world. We look at a history. In the case of the Middle East, we have a long history there. A colonial history. A U.S. support of Israel at the expense of moderate Arab states and the Palestinians in particular. It’s about economics.

It’s about the abuse of resources. For example, one of the interesting comments that has been made is why do the Israelis have water fountains and beautiful green yards when I as a Jordanian can only have a few glasses of water every day?

Religion is a cause of terrorism in the case of any fundamentalist religion. The need to purify, the need to destroy that which is in opposition to a particular religious belief is a cause. And if we talk about trial by fire or cleansing fire, we certainly saw an indication of that on Tuesday.

What’s the effect of the community that’s the recipient of such an act? It is a sense of disbelief. It can’t happen to us. How could this happen to America? There is a sense of insecurity. Should I fly? Should I go up in an elevator? Do I ever want to be around anybody who looks different from me? There is a consequent modification in a lifestyle in terms of law and civil rights, which may be antithetical to the foundation of that particular country. It is a profound fear. And fear, as you know, is a very powerful tool to manipulate and destroy. One of the effects that we have begun to see in the United States, which needs to stop immediately, is the lashing out against people who are perceived to be in support of the activity. We want to be careful in our reactions.

It’s impossible to stop terrorism, and I think for the first time we are seeing something far bigger than we’ve ever seen before. I’m calling this, for lack of a better vocabulary, a multi-national, corporate-like consortium of terror. This is not one person, this is not one group, this is massive when you look at the kind of time it took to plan it.

I was also asked to give a definition of a declaration of war--what war is. So I got my international law books out, and there is no one definition, because we have declared wars, undeclared wars, civil wars, low-intensity wars, medium-intensity wars. But, generally, a war can be defined as the breaching of a sovereign state’s boundaries, an attack on its civilian population. So that sort of gives us a geographic framework and a little bit of a sketch of how terrorism works in the international community. Thank you.

Horn Dr. Evans, can you talk a little bit about the American side of all this, as far as what was the significance of the structures that were attacked? Why where they were attacked, themselves?

Dr. Sean Evans The terrorists were very careful in the methods they pursued and in the targets that they chose. America’s power comes basically from three things: our economy, our military, and our ideas--the idea of freedom and democracy. Each attack was aimed at a symbol of these powers.

The economic power was represented in the World Trade Center; the idea that our economy touches every corner of the earth. Our military power--there’s no better example of that than the Pentagon. And as far as the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, it was most likely aimed at the White House or the Capitol, which is the symbol of freedom and democracy to everyone around the world.

And it’s not just the target; it’s also the methods that they chose. They used American planes. They used training by Americans, and they used Americans on board those planes in the attack. It was their way of showing that it was our system that allowed this attack to occur. It’s our freedom that was threatened, and it’s our freedom in that respect which needs to be defended as President Bush talked about.

Horn What about the American intelligence? Authorities are saying that they had no idea that this was going to take place. What does that say about our American intelligence? How is that going to change in the future?

Evans As far as our intelligence capabilities, it’s very difficult to infiltrate terrorist organizations, especially something such as Osama bin Laden’s organizations, because they operate in cells which are individual units which have very little connection to anybody else. They have one person in that unit who is in contact with someone else, and this person doesn’t have contact with all the other different groups, so each cell is given a specific task to prepare for, such as learning to fly a plane. They don’t really know what it’s for.

These cells are also hidden most of the time. It’s not like they can put people on the ground and say “Hey, I want to take out the Great Satan. Where do I join up?” It’s very difficult for that to occur. It’s hard to infiltrate those organizations to see if that is possible.

What they need to do, and what they are doing at this time, is that they are beginning to engage in a little bit more international cooperation in the intelligence community. Most of the Arab states, and other states such as Russia and China, understand the consequences for them of this getting out of control, and so they are going to be more willing to work with us in this instance to make sure things do not get out of control.

The big question, the big challenge for President Bush, is how we can continue this cooperation six weeks from now, six months from now, one year from now. Because the different spy agencies do not want to give out information about how they collect information because they don’t want other people finding out what their secrets are and how they spy, which gives them help in stopping us from spying against them.

Horn You mentioned Osama bin Laden. Dr. Livingstone, can you please explain to us just who this person is? We’ve heard him in the news for years. Give us his background, his connection with the U.S., what this person is all about, and what he represents.

Livingstone Osama bin Laden is a Saudi. He is a son of the bin Laden family, who owns construction. His father is a billionaire. He was disowned by his family when he began to behave in radical fashions. His citizenship in Saudi, Arabia was denied, and he took his inheritance of several hundreds of millions of dollars and left.

During the Soviet-Afghani war, the United States supported Osama bin Laden as part of the Mujah Hadim who was fighting the Soviet Union. We trained him, we armed him, we educated him in many ways, and we supported him until it was determined that that war was almost over with, and then we dropped our support of Osama bin Laden and the Mujah Hadim in general. He remembers that very clearly. We did not understand, because we typically do not understand some of his thinking, but for Osama bin Laden in particular, his antipathy towards the Russians was the same antipathy he holds for the United States. He views us both as being impure, decadent, immoral, violators of Islam. We didn’t get that, and in many ways this is the snake that has risen up and bitten.

Horn Dr. Jayne, can you give us a little bit of an idea of what the Islamic culture is all about? We’ve seen children in various parts of the Middle East at the news that America had been attacked jumping in the streets, celebrating. It’s supported and encouraged by their parents. What is it about the U.S. that this area of the world hates, resents? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Dr. Cynthia Jayne I think it’s very important for us to remember that when we talk about Islam it’s very easy to simply lump all the people who hold that faith into one group. Yet, we must remember that these people are as diverse in their beliefs as we are in ours as Christians.

Islamic beliefs run the full gamut from extreme fundamentalism to extreme liberalism. In working with people in some of the Arab countries, I had an occasion about a year ago to visit the University of Jordan and listen to a group of scholars there discuss Arab-U.S. relations. I was astounded by the breadth of difference in their opinions about us, about policies that their states have toward us, and their opinions of our dealings with Arabic people--the way we portray both countries and individuals in our media, the way we react to countries and individuals as a community.

I think it’s very important to remember that for as many images of people celebrating this event that you see, there are an equal number who bemoan it, who suffer with us. I received this morning e-mail from a friend of mine who is in contact with some of the partners we work with in educational institutions in several of these countries. I want to read a couple of those to you.

“You are like pillars of stone, doing good in the world with your wisdom and work in education.” This was a government official sharing his concern for us with others in our community. A faculty member from another partner institution wrote “To express my deepest regret and sympathy for the tragedy suffered by your country yesterday, which has affected us all.” And another: “Yesterday’s atrocities make the need for our mission that much greater.” I think we need to hear that as we talk about how this has affected us so deeply and so personally--that there are thousands of people who feel exactly this way.

Horn Thank you. Dr. Thomas, can you put this into a historical perspective for us? We’ve already heard comparisons of when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Is this bigger than Pearl Harbor? Is this equal? What are your thoughts on this?

Dr. David Thomas Yes, I’ve heard a lot of parallels with Pearl Harbor, as well. It seems to me that the scale of this, compared with the scale of Pearl Harbor, this is a much smaller event that Pearl Harbor, it seems to me, for a couple of reasons.

Pearl Harbor, for instance, had behind it the weight of the Japanese empire. Pearl Harbor essentially was an attack--you could call it a terrorist attack, except that it opened up a war intending to free the South Pacific of the American influence so the Japanese could establish an empire. In this terrorist attack I don’t see any empire behind it; I don’t see any long-term imperial goals, and so in terms of prompting something like World War II, where fifty million people died, I think there isn’t any parallel of scale, to be quite honest.

If you do like the Pearl Harbor parallel, there is one thing to remember about Pearl Harbor, and that is that six months later, with the battle of Midway--the battle of Midway, in case you don’t remember, June of 1942, was an overwhelming American victory which turned the tide of World War II in the Pacific. After Midway, the Japanese launched no more offensives. They were on the retreat from there until they surrendered in 1945. In other words, one bad event does not inevitably lead to a series of increasingly worse events. The American military and political system is pretty resilient.

Parallels with World War I have come to mind occasionally. World War I was sparked by a terrorist event in which the crown prince of Austria, Hungary was assassinated. But again, that one event was then pushed into war by the large powers; particularly, Germany had a very strong hand in escalating that one radical event into a worldwide confrontation. Again, eight and a half million people or something died in World War I. A historical parallel that might be a little closer to home, might be a little bit closer in scale, perhaps--I don’t know, I’m just talking here--perhaps the war in Panama in the early nineties--I’m sure that some of you remember that.

The leader of Panama declared war on the United States early in the nineties. He has his own interesting history, like bin Laden does. The United States sent in about 25,000 troops and took this man out in about two months, and captured him, which it seems to me is the strength of the American system. We didn’t send in commandos to assassinate him. We instead extradited him and put him on trial.

So which of these is the better parallel? I suggest that Pearl Harbor is not, because Pearl Harbor led to this absolute cataclysm of World War II, and this was a terrorist raid. A significant terrorist raid, absolutely. I’m not denigrating it. People are fighting with knives, and 200,000 pounds of aviation fuel. The Japanese were fighting with aircraft carriers and battleships and machine guns. It’s a different world.

One thing that comes to mind, too, from the historical past. The question has been raised--”What do we do now?” The historical past would suggest that this isn’t the time to go to K-mart and buy ammunition. The historical past would suggest that one of the best things to do, we’ve already done, and that is vote for people to represent us. Hire these people--we call them congressmen--give them the expertise, the time, the money they need to solve these problems. That’s what our representatives are hired to do. They’re hired to solve these problems. And they’re working on that. They’re doing that. And if the past is any indication, these other big wars, we have every reason to be confident they will solve this problem, as well.

Horn Let’s talk a little about our faith and the moral implication of everything that has happened. Dr. Gushee, Dr. Poe, what has occurred here as far as with our faith? What do we need to remember as Christians? Do we have a specific responsibility at this point? Do we have specific opportunities now? What are the theological implications?

Dr. Hal Poe A number of things. In a sense, as an American I have a double allegiance. I’m a part of a country, a country that I love. My family has lived here since the early colonial period, and when we arrived here we met the other half of my family. So there is a deep involvement here. I have a number of ancestors who fought in different wars for American freedom and things we believe in, and yet at the same time I belong to a kingdom--a monarchy, ruled over by the Lord Jesus Christ, and I am His slave. I am also His brother, and a son of God. And so, double alliances here.

One of the things we’ve seen over the last 50 years is a decline of spiritual vitality in the United States. We’ve seen a decline of denominations, of involvement in churches, in active Christian life. If we went across the ocean to Europe we would see that Christian presence is around two, maybe three per cent of the population.

So many have speculated that we are at the end of Western civilization, and is this the last death groan of Western civilization? But if we look at it in historic perspective, over the last 2,000 years we have seen Christianity get so muddled with its culture and preoccupied with our own involvement in sin, that the church has gone on hard times before, and yet time after time after time God has brought spiritual revival, awakening, to His people. I think this is ultimately the hope for the United States rather than our military strength.

I have no doubt that we can mount an incredible offensive. I think the U.S. economy will withstand this. I think our democracy will continue. But in eternal perspective, will the United States turn away from God or will there be a renewal of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ? Not just religion in general, but will there be an allegiance to Christ in all of this, or will we try to invoke Christ as our talisman who will help us go out and kill as many people as we can possible kill, and maybe kill the wrong ones?

We have a history, over the last 5,000 years, of doing that sort of thing. So there’s a tremendous challenge, I think, spiritually, to decide where our first loyalty is, and one that we need to consider this morning.

Dr. David Gushee I would say that for Christians the challenge is spiritual and theological and moral. At the spiritual level, a situation like this in some ways can challenge our faith, but it can also tempt us to turn away from God rather than going deeper with God. To me, on the Tuesday night news coverage, the best moment of CNN’s coverage was when they interviewed the Cardinal of Los Angeles--the Roman Catholic Cardinal--and the reason they asked him, I think, to come on was, they wanted a Christian presence, they wanted a spiritual response.

After all the talk of death tolls and retaliation and security and all that, one of the things that Christians can and should do, and be--at one point the Catholic Church described this role as being the soul of the world, that presence that goes deep, that takes the pain and sorrow into itself and intercedes before God in solidarity with suffering people.

I think that theologically, an interesting challenge is avoiding common, almost quasi-superstitious, certainly erroneous kinds of tendencies--the tendency to see everything like this as a harbinger of the last days--Jesus is coming back, this was prophecy by Nostradamus, all this kind of thing. That kind of talk is always out there in time of crisis. Jesus said “No one knows the time, or the day, or the hour,” and I don’t think speculations are helpful in that sense.

I also think we have theological challenges related to the issue of Divine sovereignty over against human freedom. Whenever I hear anyone attribute everything that happens in the world to God’s direct command or authorization, I believe that’s unbiblical. I believe that the people who orchestrated mass murder were representing sin and evil, and reflecting, if anything, Satan. It was permitted by God but it was not orchestrated by God. God can bring good out of it, and is already doing so, perhaps.

There is another tendency, I think, to retreat into a kind of a complacent--you know, there was a quote in the newspaper where somebody said “Well, I’m not really all that concerned about it because I know God has His angels watching over me.” That kind of response is inconceivable to me, from a Christian perspective. We need to enter into the experience of other people and their suffering the way that God entered into our experience in Jesus Christ--suffered with us, on behalf of us, and as a result of our sin.

There are other issues. I think probably the main moral issue is this issue of vengeance over against peace and justice. Perhaps there will be some questions there. I would just say this: if the only word we have to say is “Nuke ‘em, kill ‘em, track ‘em down, kill as many of them as we can,” then I don’t sense that we are being taught by Jesus, the Prince of Peace, anything at all. And there are questions as to whether Jesus is really functioning as Lord for us.

Horn What can we expect next? Bush has declared this is an act of war, not an act of terrorism. What does that mean?

Livingstone To make a statement that this is an act of war is one thing; to decide against whom to ask for a declaration of war is something else entirely. And I think to say that this is an act of war on one hand is very true--you have breaching of sovereignty, you have an attack on civilian populations. But this is very different. This is faceless, and this is nameless. This is amorphous. We can’t wrap our hands around it at this point. So we need to be very careful about understanding the sentiment that this is an attack--this is war. But it means something else when we begin a declaration.

If you think about the geography and you decide you’re going to have a declaration of war and you decide it’s going to be Country X, you realize that when you begin to engage in that behavior, you ask for a declaration of war, then your allies have to get involved, and all their allies have to get involved, and the long-term consequences and the short-term consequences of that are profound. I don’t know that we have thought through that yet, because we’re still reacting. We’re grieving--we’re in disbelief, and we need to sit with that for a while before we carry on this notion of nuke ‘em ‘til they glow.

Horn Let’s open it up for questions.

Question from the audience First of all, I’d like to say that I also disagree with the Pearl Harbor analogy that most people are seeming to use. The world was already in crisis at that time. The war was already in progress, so we did have a face at that point. With this incident, as you say, we do not have a face. However, we do clearly have tactics. Military tactics.

I believe it was the author named Shin Su in The Art of War who used the premise, or who built on the premise that you use your opposer’s assets against them as well as demoralization of a nation or a people in order to destroy them ultimately. I honestly feel that that has been done.

My question is, we hear President Bush speak many times on the fact that they will be hunted down and that they will be brought to justice. My question is this: this is a new type of war. Honestly, it frightens me. The reason it frightens me is because I wonder--I wonder what are the hearts of this nation, and I wonder what we will do next. My question is, what do any of you feel the correct next step would be? What level should we combat against these people?

Poe Could I speak to that just from one perspective, certainly not the breadth that it needs to be addressed, but Dr. Gushee and Dr. Livingstone have said something about retribution and vengeance. I think we are in a very dangerous situation if we act like the brute that initially responds to this insult, danger, of course it’s much more than that.

If you can imagine the bull in the bullfight--the red flag is flashed in front of its face and it continually follows the red flag until it’s completely exhausted, and then the bullfighter takes a sword, while it stands there, immobile, and strikes it through the heart. So we don’t want to just react in brute force, nor simply react out of vengeance.

We have a command from God not to do that. I’m reminded of a novel written by C.S. Lewis in which the hero of the story is contemplating this viciously evil man, and he’s thinking “This can’t go on. This cannot be allowed to continue.” So I think one of our most important issues here is not how do we get vengeance for what was done to us but how do we make sure this group cannot do it again?

Dr. Livingstone told us on television the other night that she fully expects that this is not the end of this particular escapade. It’s not the point of it. It’s the first of something more. So I think we need to be very careful to use one of our greatest advantages, which is the ability to reason.

Livingstone I want us to understand that at the World Trade Center there were 430 businesses renting space from 26 different nation states. This is not just an attack against us; this is an attack against the human family, and the response, therefore, has to be a very integrated, international, reasoned response.

We’re going to have to share information specific to this event; we’re going to have to pay attention to patterns of behavior; we have to look at thumbprints of other terrorist activities; this all takes time. The response will need to be a coordinated response, because if the United States is this vulnerable, then everybody else is this vulnerable, too.

For the first time perhaps, we are going to have to disabuse ourselves that we can take care of everything by ourselves and begin to incorporate ourselves into this broader community of people of information, of feelings, of beliefs, and say “Gosh, this wasn’t just about me, this was about us.” And that’s hard to do.

DT? If I could put that back into military terms, I think you were asking a tactical question, right? I think, to put their answers in those terms, I don’t think yet it’s time for a tactical answer. I think it’s time for a strategic answer.

Jayne I was just going to add, I think from another perspective, we need to be very careful that we realize that we have a very different idea of nation-state because of who we are and the way that we live. In a situation like this it behooves us to think about how other people perceive themselves as groups. Sometimes what we so clearly see on the map as a national boundary simply does not exist that way because of the way people determine their cultural identity. And this is very much a part of a situation like this. We must learn to think differently about how we perceive and how we determine who we are.

Horn Any other questions?

Question from audience Just looking at the things the government has done so far, like telling all the airplanes to land in different cities and diverting from places and everything, and then yesterday delaying again the re-start of airline service so they could put in new security measures, I have a question that probably a lot of people are thinking about.

How far is the government going to go, and how far are we going to go, into people’s rights and their liberties as U.S. citizens before, you know, we can stop these people?

I mean, a lot of things that we find as things that we do every day, people might take in a different way, and they might, you know, use it against us or whatever. So what do you think, you know, how far are they going to go and how far can we expect our liberties to be taken away?

Evans In think that’s one of the big questions that we will face. When we’re dealing with these type of issues we’re dealing with the three values of freedom--versus order, versus equality, where order impinges upon both freedom and equality. What makes America great is that you can walk up to the Capitol, open the door, and walk in. You can meet with your elected representatives. You can walk down the street unmolested.

The question is, how much of our freedom are we willing to give up to feel safe? Increased airline security is a must, and it’s something that right now we’re going to have no problems with. But six months from now, one year from now, how are you going to feel if your plane is delayed? Are you going to want to have to go to the airport two hours early instead of one hour early to do that? What kind of inconveniences will you be willing to deal with? There have been calls about closing the borders, about denying foreign nationals the ability to study at universities such as Union. Identity cards, random searches. I even heard something about--we complain about racial profiling, but people are saying “Should we profile Arabs when they get on planes now?” The question is, where are we going to draw these lines in violating people’s equal rights and their freedom?

I think, to a certain extent, if we give in to these impulses, we are allowing the terrorists to win and we ruin what is great about America, and to a certain extent it no longer makes us what we have been called before – as that shining city set on a hill.

Gushee It’s certainly true that our commercial air system was very vulnerable to this. I fly all the time, and the kinds of security measures that are in place, or have been in place in the past, seems sometimes ridiculous.

“Did anybody give you anything to carry on this plane?” As if, “Yeah, yeah they did. Yeah, I’m a terrorist, and they put it over there in the bag, you know?” (laughter from audience.) Let’s face it. Half the time, inattentive people who don’t look very well trained, necessarily, are doing the security checks when you go through. So somebody wisely said they found the weakest point in our system and turned our commercial airliners into guided missiles, and that is exactly true.

It seems to me that we need to recognize that even if we address the problem, then there will be another weak spot that will be found. And there’s only so much you can do before you stop being a society that you want to be, in mean, in terms of the constraints that may be placed upon us.

Poe In the year 410, Aleric of the Visigoth sacked the city of Rome, the center of culture, of government, of economics, a powerful city, the golden city. Rome had no walls around it. They didn’t need walls around it. It was Rome, the center of the greatest empire in the world. The fact that Rome could be sacked had a tremendous psychological impact on the ancient world.

The new capitol of Constantinople was not like the city of Rome. Constantinople had a great wall, and the emperors of Constantinople spent the next thousand years strengthening the wall and guaranteeing the security of the city. Bit by bit, the culture changed. The senate of the people of Rome disappeared. The last vestige of the old republic and the freedoms, and in its place was the autocracy--the absolute despot, the emperor of Byzantium. So we stand, I think, at a pivotal moment in American history, and we have to decide what will our response to this crisis be. We can choose what the republic will look like, but we must do so quite deliberately and think through the implications of our actions.

Question from audience Over the past two days we hear the authority talking about that they are going to find those who are responsible and bring them to justice. My question is that God taught us to love our enemies, so where does the love of God and forgiveness come in with all this?

Gushee What a fun question. Is it time to go yet, Sara? (audience chuckles)

It is the ultimate question. I would say that in political life the application of the love command is complex, but it is still relevant. It’s the right question to ask. One way you apply the love command is by being willing to ask this question: What is it that we have possibly done as a nation, in our interactions in the world, that has generated this level of rage?

One of the things that Jesus taught was a command that we be willing to go to our enemy and seek to make peace. It may not be possible to make peace with everyone, certainly not with the people who organized this. But the principle that says “I will listen to my adversary, the one who considers me an enemy. I will affirm his or her valid interests. I will look for opportunities to find common ground. I will work toward justice in terms of my own behavior or the behavior of my nation so as to defuse this kind of hatred and violence and turn an enemy into a friend if at all possible.” This is the application of the principle of love.

So I am looking for that ultimate kind of response on the diplomatic front from our own government, quietly. It would be very hard to do this very noisily, but quietly saying “OK, we’re ready to listen. We’re ready to understand how people perceive the impact of our country and our culture on others.” But still, those who perpetrate mass murder still need to be prevented from doing so again and need to be, I think, punished if they can be found.

And that is also within the mandate of government as we see it for example in Romans 13, to deter and punish evil and advance the common good.

So I think both those emphases need to be balanced. Sometimes Christians lose any ability to think in terms of justice because we are so struck by the love and forgiveness commands. Other times we ignore the love and forgiveness commands and we just want blood. We want vengeance or justice. Both themes are there in scripture and both need to be recalled and practiced.

Livingstone I think this idea of loving your enemy, which is so very difficult, does offer us an opportunity to slow down the process and to think very carefully. It also offers us an opportunity to be very circumspect about the targets that we designate so that we don’t become the very thing that we hate. To randomly say we’re just going to go and nuke ‘em ‘til they glow doesn’t help us in our response to this. And there will be a response, make no doubt. There will be a response in time. But I think this idea that is dear to us of loving the enemy offers us this chance to have an integrated, international, reasoned response that is appropriate.

Horn That’s all the time we have for now. If you do have further questions, please feel free to e-mail them to news@uu.edu. We will try our best to get them answered for you. We may possibly put something on our web site that you can see your question and answered response. We want to thank our distinguished panel. Please join me. (clapping from audience)