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Weber reviews 'A Cautious Patriotism: The American Churches and the Second World War' by Gerald L. Sittser.

On June 9, 1968, the New York Times Magazine published an article by Dr. Michael Halberstam that raised and examined the question, "Are You Guilty of Murdering Martin Luther King?" The question was addressed to all white Americans, and it presupposed a concept of collective or corporate white guilt. It was prompted by a. particular event, but its application was not limited to that event. As the question itself implied and Halberstam's argument made clear, the question applied to problems of white guilt and white racism as collective phenomena in the whole history of black-white relationships.The question was not unique at that time, for collective guilt had emerged as a fairly common aspect of social protest.

Political authority is the right to exercise the power of the polis, the political community, over and on behalf of the members of the community. It implies the obligation of the members to obey those who exercise power by right when they act within the limits set by the criteria of authorization. Every political society this side of the eschaton must embody viable relationships of authority and obedience. If not, the society must either be sustained by tyranny, which is arbitrary force and not authoritative power, or else dissolve into anarchy, which surely then will lead to tyranny.

The primary ethical problem for United States policy in regard to "wars of national liberation" is that of intervention, not war. To be sure, the morality of war must be faced together with the morality of intervention. But the basic question for the intervention is not whether morally it may use force and take human life, but whether morally it may exercise power where it has no authority. By what right does the United States seek to influence the relationships, structures, and focus of authority of another political entity—or evert of a nonentity in process of becoming an entity?Justifiable intervention is an admissible—although limited—concept except to those persons who reject every unilateral use of national power, and to those who take an absolutistic stand in favor of the principle of non-intervention (and that stand also requires an ethical defense).

Whether there is any excitement in the otherwise unimaginative Article 25 ("On Making Lasting Peace") of Schema XIII depends on the meaning of a reference to nuclear arms. The relevant passage reads:Although, after all the aids of peaceful discussion have been exhausted, it may not be illicit, when one's rights have been unjustly hampered, to defend those rights against such unjust aggression by violence and force, nevertheless the use of arms, especially nuclear weapons, whose effects are greater than can be imagined and therefore cannot be reasonably regulated by men, exceeds all just proportion and therefore must be judged before God and man as most wicked.

There are two principal elements in Christian faith which underwrite and require the attention of Christian ethics to problems of foreign policy. First, the Christian is convinced that God is sovereign over all the world and therefore over all the areas of the common life—not the least of which is political society. On these terms no political engagement is ever a mere power struggle and no Christian in politics is ever merely or even primarily political man, for the engagement is understood through faith to be a locus of divine activity and the politically-involved Christian is above all a man seeking to make his action correspond faithfully to the action of God. Divine sovereignty imposes a qualification on political sovereignty and thereby requires the recognition of limits to the exercise of political power and to the exaltation of national existence. But it also strengthens legitimate political authority by means of the explicit declaration that the powers that be are ordained of God. Second, the vocation of the Christian in the world is to serve the neighbor in love.