Rescinding Absolutes
Photo by Dustin Humes on Unsplash
The “Doctrine of Discovery” is a papal bull issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, one year after Columbus’s “big discovery.” Entitled Inter caetera, the papal edict gave Spain (and subsequently other European powers) free rein and complete access to the “New World” with a right to its natural resources (gold!) and with authorization to convert, enslave, or kill the indigenous populations.* Forerunners to this papal declaration were Dum diversus in 1452 and Romanus Pontifex, both by Pope Nicholas V, in 1452 and 1455.Thus the Vatican had a longstanding interest in the authorization of colonization completed in 1493. The doctrine reflected the assumed superiority and entitlement of white Europeans to indigenous populations, and authorized wholesale violence against the “new land,” its resource, and its populations. It was a declaration that opened the door to complete exploitation of the “new world” by the “old powers” of Europe. The doctrine was, moreover, incorporated into US law by the US Supreme Court and Chief Justice John Marshall in 1823 that would serve well the aggressive violence of President Andrew Jackson against native peoples.
It is easy enough to see that the doctrine served to advance the ideological claims and interests white, Western male power. That ideology, moreover, has persisted and has been variously utilized to justify much US foreign policy, including the guise of “the white man’s burden” and eventually “the Manifest Destiny of the United States with its readiness to intrude upon and invade other nation states according to our perceived national interest from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. That ideology has gone, for the most part, unquestioned in the councils of policy-makers, though there has been a long-running protest against the doctrine among indigenous peoples and their allies. Clearly the ideology continues to flourish among us with its most recent expression in the broadly based assault against LGBTQ persons in our society. It is all of a piece!
There has been, to be sure, a long advocacy among indigenous peoples to have the doctrine revoked. It was not, however, until March 30, 2023, that the Vatican finally took the action to repudiate the doctrine and its inherent violence. In a reversal of its own “infallibility,” the Vatican in its repudiation, declared:
It [the Vatican for the church] renounces the mindset of cultural or racial superiority which allowed for that objectification or subjection of people, and strongly condemns any attitudes or actions that threaten or damage the dignity of the human person…The Vatican’s nullification was too late to stop the destructive impact of colonialization, as European expansion was fueled by a sort of missionary sense the Western monarchies had a right to go these new lands and to take from them the resources and if necessary to put down people, including enslaving them (Rev. David McCallum, executive director of the Program for Discerning Leadership in Rome).
The cry against this doctrine has revolved around the tag-phrase, “Rescind the doctrine.” The long-running outcry against the doctrine is based on the insistence that such a brutal immorality as the doctrine must fully give way to the reality of human suffering and human possibility. The ground for refusing rescinding this claim has been the assertion that such claims by the church are immutable and must be kept in place. But of course the reality that all such “absolutes” are historically conditioned and are filtered through vested interest and the gains to be made for the people who control the processes of decree-making. It turns out, through the repudiation of the doctrine by Pope Francis, that no “absolute” that stands against human dignity and human wellbeing is a sustainable absolute. All such claims are relative to time, place, circumstance, and vested interest. Thus the repudiation by the pope is a recognition that no such ideological claim can stand against the will of the creator for human wellbeing.
This action by Pope Francis set me to thinking about the revocation of absolutes. The phrase captures the irony of an illusion. The phrase requires us to see that our most cherished “absolutes” are readily seen to be less than absolute. Indeed, it may be suggested that our present so-called “culture wars” in our society are conflicts and adjudications concerning old absolutes that are widely seen to less than absolute. Thus many so-called “conservatives” are advocates for old absolutes, including white male superiority. The opponents of such absolutes operate on the assumption that all such old ideological claims are less than absolute, and can and must be modified for the sake human flourishing. Specifically, the brazen assault on the rights and wellbeing of LBGTQ persons is an unmistakable example of defending old absolutes of white hetero-sexual privilege and preference, an old absolute that in the long run will not stand because it is morally reprehensible, and denies protection to the most vulnerable among us. Thus the work is to show that all such old absolutes are flawed and ideologically tilted in a way that musts be seen for what it is.
As I thought further on this matter of repudiating absolutes, it occurred to me that as we age and mature, we often have awareness of the absolutes of our childhood given us by authority figures (parents, teachers) that we have readily accepted as absolute. The process of maturation, among other things, is a process of recognizing such long-standing absolutes are all too often ideological imports that in our maturity must be repudiated. Thus “father knows best” or “teacher said” (or any such formulation) is a clue to ideological formulation. And of course it is no less so for the claims imposed through the privilege of class, race, or gender. For all of us the work is to attend to social reality with reference to pain and to test every absolute in terms of the pain it may cause or the pain it may alleviate. Thus I suggest that every absolute that causes or condones human suffering cannot stand as an absolute. It is for that reason that a lively faith must include a “culture of interpretation” that is tirelessly at work in an appropriation of the past that is critically informed. When the past is embraced without critical awareness, hurtful ideological claims are sure to follow.
As I write these lines, I have at my elbow the words of challenge addressed poetic formulation to a company of displaced people:
Do not remember the former things,
nor consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it (Isaiah 43:18-19)?
The poet addressed a community of faith that delighted, in its displacement, to reiterate old faith claims, most importantly, a memory of the Exodus event. The poet, to the contrary, wants to insist upon attention to present historical reality in which “a new thing” is happening. The new thing, in the Book of Isaiah, is a new Exodus of God’s people to be wrought by appeal, to the Persians under the leadership of Cyrus who is recognized as a messiah (Isaiah 45:1). Of course it requires a certain perspective to be able to see the defeat of Babylon by Persia as a new Exodus for Israel. But that is exactly the point! That perspective is one that affirms that YHWH, the Lord of the Exodus, continues to do emancipatory work in the world for powerless people. That perspective permits us to see that the God of emancipation is not “back here” in the book of Exodus, but here and now present doing emancipatory work. A move beyond the “old absolute” of the Exodus memory permitted the poet to perceive his own time and place as one occupied by God’s liberating presence and purpose. It is particularly from II Isaiah that we get testimony to the God who creates newness, who makes possible a way out of no way.
This accent by Isaiah on newness amid displacement is echoed by the prophet Jeremiah. In the exile Israel could readily remember the old covenant of Sinai. In the face of that old memory Jeremiah could declare God’s new covenant that is grounded in God’s ready forgiveness:
No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin on more (Jeremiah 31:34).
And while the phrase “new covenant” was readily appropriated by the early church, there is nothing “supersessionist” about “new covenant,” for the God of Moses is endlessly making new covenants. In like manner Ezekiel can anticipate a “new temple” that will be perfectly symmetrical, from which the Glory of the Lord will not depart (Ezekiel 40-48):
This gate shall remain shut; it shall not be opened, and no one shall enter by it; for the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut (44:2).
Along with “new temple,” Ezekiel can anticipate a new people propelled by a new spirit:
Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed against me, and get yourself a new heart and a new spirit (18:31)!
A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh (36:26).
Israel is endlessly summoned from its old absolutes to the newness God is doing among them. And of course the new regime that Jesus proclaimed as “the kingdom of God” is a summons to new discipleship and new obedience, a summons that mandates departure from old “absolutes. Thus we may formulate a rule of prophetic thinking:
Occasions of displacement and disorientation both require and permit the formulation and embrace of new promises and new responsibilities.
Or as the poet, James Russell Lowell has it:
New occasions teach new duties,
time makes ancient good uncouth.
It turns out that the repudiation of Inter caetera by Pope Francis is fully congruent with the new-making God who is always calling us out beyond old settlements to new possibilities and new demanding obediences. The church is in witness-bearing community to the newness God is doing among us. It is of course possible for the church to wallow in its old absolutes. That, however, is not required. It is also possible for us to notice newness, even when it pushes against our settled treasured comfort zones.
*The most accessible discussion of the papal encyclical known to me is A special edition of Intotemak, a study of Indigenous Relations by the Mennonite Church of Canada, Yours, Mine, Ours: Unraveling the Doctrine of Discovery ed. by Cheryl Woelk and Steve Heinrichs. In the issue, see especially Robert L. Miller, “The International Law of Colonialism” pp. 21-27.
