Chapter 8
Ted Smith, Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics
From the ethically perplexing case of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Smith hopes to show the limits of ethics for thinking about violence.
While we still need universalizable moral obligations, these alone are insufficient to account for the sovereignty of a God who is manifest in forms of divine violence. This divine violence does not found new political orders or create new imperatives, but breaks old entanglements to create space for genuinely free responses.
Freedom fighter or fanatic? Smith rejects both.
For Smith, this framing assumes the legitimacy of the state’s monopoly on violence. Divine justice as a higher law relieves us from the imperative of state violence into “an indicative mood that serves to negate absolute obligations in this age in ways that invite a free response in history that is permeated by the presence of God” (117). In this framework, God remains present with creatures and institutions that are not identical to God, and the Golden Rule and all imperatives that follow are not blueprints for a better society, but gifts to be enjoyed (121-122).
Pardon creates not a new law, but a new polity; pardon “makes new social orders possible without determining the form they will take” (139).
It is risky and vulnerable, but perhaps necessary: to partake in the gift of forgiveness as an optional access point into an alternative engagement with politics, and with each other, not for the sake of instantiating a new world order in our image, but to still try to open our imaginations to something beyond the violence in front of us.
