On Young, Day, Conscientious Objectors, and Tracy

"God permits these things." Humanism is a vibrant persuasion. It is particularly strange in the moments when a religion wholly concerned with learning from the revealed otherness of God can recasts Him (or Her) with a human image. I am deeply sympathetic to Day's need to make sense of what happens in the world, despite the fact that there is a good God. As we have seen previously in WWI, there is a good deal of humanism which runs through the accounts of pacifists during World War II. Here however, it goes beyond an appeal to humanism to explain the reasons for pacifism, and it ventures into to much different territory—considering the nature of the providence of God through what can only be understood as human notion of administrative capacity and/or governance. While Day alongside many religious figures in the 20th century find comfort in these concepts, I must admit that they leave me deeply disturbed.

First, it is clear how humanism can play a role in Jewish and Christian/Catholic pacifism in the shadow of the wars. Despite the obvious Old Testament appeals that would be wielded by the bureaucrats against the legitimacy of Jewish conscientious objection, there is an appeal to spiritual brotherhood in the Abrahamic religious traditions (including Islam). Post-Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism, serves as a more intuitive ground for the appeals to liberal values of fraternity and equality. This is opposed to prescriptive ethical notions of religion or God as law-giver.

However, following this, the idea that "God permits these things" (not just in Day here, but in all conversations about providence and the atom bomb up unto this day) appears to me an inversion of what began as a humanism that buttressed religious notions, into a humanism that anthropomorphized the idea of God and his relation to man. If God is God it would seem to me that he must be an implicated agent in everything. Is not the notion that an agent can be in control, but not implicated in an action born from a human conception of agency? Or even bureaucracy? While I assume that one answer to this question is implicit in Niebuhr's work. Nevertheless, if pacifists are going to build a positive framework for pacifism against militarism from religious grounds, it would seem the place to start would be a de-anthropomorphized notion of God as agent, in addition to the ethical implications tied to this refreshed understanding of whatever the relationship is between the life of God and the life of man.