Good Friday Observations on William Sloane Coffin by Mark Dankof
The British Telegraph chronicled the life of the Reverend William Sloane Coffin this week, in the wake of his final passage into eternity at age 81. Columnist Guild readers will want to access this piece on the above link.
Coffin's career was as colorful and mercurial as his impact on the American political landscape of the Sixties and Seventies. His resume included bona fides as a linguist, concert pianist, CIA agent, clergyman, and political activist at both Yale University and the Riverside Church.
It is no recommendation of my own past inadequacies as a thinker and analyst to confess that in the 1960s, I simply dismissed the Reverend as one of the decade's premier Pinkos for his opposition to the Vietnam War. This visceral judgment was made without knowledge of any of the biographical information contained in this week's Telegraph tribute. The irony of this admittedly simplistic mentality which manifested itself 40 years ago is threefold. First, Coffin's analysis of the futility of Vietnam proved ultimately correct. My own support of American interventionism in Southeast Asia at the time, however, was ultimately exposed in history as disastrously simian. Second, Coffin's dyspepsia over United States policy in the region was shared by some of the Right's leading icons of the period, including Douglas MacArthur and Robert Welch. Third, the repristination of American mistakes made from 1965-73 is now visible in the Great Mesopotamian and Persian Disaster being visited upon the Republic by one George W. Bush. To the extent that Coffin and other critics of Vietnam were proven correct, the Great Paradox of 2006 is that legitimate Paleo-Conservative critics of the Neo-Conservative tragedy being made manifest today, must acknowledge that this denizen of Yale and Riverside Church had something to tell us--then and now.
One especially poignant fact from the Telegraph tribute to Coffin must be highlighted. His own personal witness of the brutal sellout of anti-Stalinist Soviets to their evil regime in a forced repatriation scheme aided and abetted by the American and British political establishments, was seminal to his later career development and personal odyssey. The Reverend's subsequent CIA employment was dedicated to combating Stalinism and atoning for American participation in the incarceration and deaths of Soviets not enamored of Uncle Joe. He would later conclude that the American defense and intelligence establishments posed their own threat to personal liberties at home and abroad, a wry twist similarly acknowledged by my old libertarian pal, Karl Hess, who once said that any apologist for Big Government, Right or Left, ended up being an apologist for mass murder.
But as is the case with all gifted and complex individuals, William Sloane Coffin had a downside. He failed to see in his wholesale support for the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties that the Imperial Government which brought us the Vietnam War was also introducing Leviathan Tyrannies in the American Left's destruction of the Constitutional doctrine of enumerated powers in the name of collective social progress as defined by the latter. Johnson's Great Society was premised on the foundational doctrine of Statism and Centralized Government, in continuation of Roosevelt's New Deal. To the extent that the Reverend sympathized with employing State Coercion in the achievement of what he saw as the laudable social goals of the Left, he became an unwitting participant in the formulation of a Politically Correct Portside Dogma which now visits itself upon the advocate of individual liberty and Constitutionalism as a new form of either Stalinism or Fascism. The Warfare State is joined in marriage to the Welfare State. Take your pick. The endgame is identical in either case. Like Benjamin Spock, the Reverend missed this one.
On this Good Friday, I engage in one more constructive criticism of the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, this time from the vantage point of orthodox Christianity and theism. From this latter perspective, the pulpit voice of Riverside Church seemed devoid of an understanding of Biblical anthropology, linked to the doctrine of original sin through Adam. This theological weakness apparently led to a theology long on Social Gospel, and perilously devoid of preaching and teaching based upon the truths of redemption and eternal life offered to all of humanity through the active and passive obedience of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. The Theology of the Cross, the Resurrection, and the Parousia are the center of life, presently and beyond. To the extent that the Yale University activist's temporal fight for what he believed correct in the political and social arenas obscured the theological center of the Apostolic Witness, he failed to connect the dots between his own burning desire to alleviate worldly suffering, and a perception of the foundational, transcendent, and eternal significance of the suffering of the Word who Became Flesh, and Who Dwelt Among Us.
A good and faithful, if flawed Race, Pastor Coffin. May you rest in peace on this weekend which commemorates the Resurrection of your Lord and mine.
(Mark Dankof is an orthodox Lutheran pastor, paleo-conservative columnist for BATR's Columnist Guild and Old Right Topic News, and maintains his own site known as Mark Dankof's America at http://www.MarkDankof.com. His Broadcast Interview Source profile (Washington) may be accessed at http://www.ExpertClick.com/19-2281.)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Original Investigative Journalism from the
Columnist Guild News Bureau
Coffin's career was as colorful and mercurial as his impact on the American political landscape of the Sixties and Seventies. His resume included bona fides as a linguist, concert pianist, CIA agent, clergyman, and political activist at both Yale University and the Riverside Church.
It is no recommendation of my own past inadequacies as a thinker and analyst to confess that in the 1960s, I simply dismissed the Reverend as one of the decade's premier Pinkos for his opposition to the Vietnam War. This visceral judgment was made without knowledge of any of the biographical information contained in this week's Telegraph tribute. The irony of this admittedly simplistic mentality which manifested itself 40 years ago is threefold. First, Coffin's analysis of the futility of Vietnam proved ultimately correct. My own support of American interventionism in Southeast Asia at the time, however, was ultimately exposed in history as disastrously simian. Second, Coffin's dyspepsia over United States policy in the region was shared by some of the Right's leading icons of the period, including Douglas MacArthur and Robert Welch. Third, the repristination of American mistakes made from 1965-73 is now visible in the Great Mesopotamian and Persian Disaster being visited upon the Republic by one George W. Bush. To the extent that Coffin and other critics of Vietnam were proven correct, the Great Paradox of 2006 is that legitimate Paleo-Conservative critics of the Neo-Conservative tragedy being made manifest today, must acknowledge that this denizen of Yale and Riverside Church had something to tell us--then and now.
One especially poignant fact from the Telegraph tribute to Coffin must be highlighted. His own personal witness of the brutal sellout of anti-Stalinist Soviets to their evil regime in a forced repatriation scheme aided and abetted by the American and British political establishments, was seminal to his later career development and personal odyssey. The Reverend's subsequent CIA employment was dedicated to combating Stalinism and atoning for American participation in the incarceration and deaths of Soviets not enamored of Uncle Joe. He would later conclude that the American defense and intelligence establishments posed their own threat to personal liberties at home and abroad, a wry twist similarly acknowledged by my old libertarian pal, Karl Hess, who once said that any apologist for Big Government, Right or Left, ended up being an apologist for mass murder.
But as is the case with all gifted and complex individuals, William Sloane Coffin had a downside. He failed to see in his wholesale support for the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties that the Imperial Government which brought us the Vietnam War was also introducing Leviathan Tyrannies in the American Left's destruction of the Constitutional doctrine of enumerated powers in the name of collective social progress as defined by the latter. Johnson's Great Society was premised on the foundational doctrine of Statism and Centralized Government, in continuation of Roosevelt's New Deal. To the extent that the Reverend sympathized with employing State Coercion in the achievement of what he saw as the laudable social goals of the Left, he became an unwitting participant in the formulation of a Politically Correct Portside Dogma which now visits itself upon the advocate of individual liberty and Constitutionalism as a new form of either Stalinism or Fascism. The Warfare State is joined in marriage to the Welfare State. Take your pick. The endgame is identical in either case. Like Benjamin Spock, the Reverend missed this one.
On this Good Friday, I engage in one more constructive criticism of the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, this time from the vantage point of orthodox Christianity and theism. From this latter perspective, the pulpit voice of Riverside Church seemed devoid of an understanding of Biblical anthropology, linked to the doctrine of original sin through Adam. This theological weakness apparently led to a theology long on Social Gospel, and perilously devoid of preaching and teaching based upon the truths of redemption and eternal life offered to all of humanity through the active and passive obedience of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. The Theology of the Cross, the Resurrection, and the Parousia are the center of life, presently and beyond. To the extent that the Yale University activist's temporal fight for what he believed correct in the political and social arenas obscured the theological center of the Apostolic Witness, he failed to connect the dots between his own burning desire to alleviate worldly suffering, and a perception of the foundational, transcendent, and eternal significance of the suffering of the Word who Became Flesh, and Who Dwelt Among Us.
A good and faithful, if flawed Race, Pastor Coffin. May you rest in peace on this weekend which commemorates the Resurrection of your Lord and mine.
(Mark Dankof is an orthodox Lutheran pastor, paleo-conservative columnist for BATR's Columnist Guild and Old Right Topic News, and maintains his own site known as Mark Dankof's America at http://www.MarkDankof.com. His Broadcast Interview Source profile (Washington) may be accessed at http://www.ExpertClick.com/19-2281.)
Original Investigative Journalism from the
Columnist Guild News Bureau
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home