This is bogus baloney on the part of Wright. The SAS tracked down IRA members in foreign countries when able. Me thinks his Lordship doth protest too much.

It would also seem a bit primature [sic, very }:)] for high members of the Episcopate to weigh in long before all relevant data has been revealed. I guess worrying about credibility isn't as much of a consideration as it once was.

Wright's commentary only gets worse if you read his entire statement. He invokes the culture of vigilante justice in the Wild West as the modus operandi of the US, and references movies and comic books favored by one president after another. What he says is laughable.

I could invoke James Bond movies and books and John le Carré's books and movies, which English PMs may have read and enjoyed, along with the real life MI5 and MI6.

And that's not to mention England's colonial history. Wright forgot to wear his thinking cap for this one.

June Butler

If you WANT to make me do what I heretofore haven't (shout "USA! USA!" and fist-pump), keep talking, Tom.

I say to Tom what I said to Rowan: why the need to (imperiously) State An Opinion on matters above your paygrade?

JC Fisher

[I think the one w/ the "exceptionalism" here is Tom, actually: "When (many) (U.S.) Americans---and ONLY when Americans---are celebrating, ergo, it MUST be a Crime Against God (and Cricket)." (See re the ordinations of +New Hampshire and +Suffragan Los Angeles.)

I'm suddenly feeling the urge to toss Tom in a harbor, w/ some tea. >;-/]

Who would have thought? Tom Wright admiting that the USA is exceptional.

Terry Pannell+
PTown

N.T. Wright neglects the pain of 9/11, including pain suffered with us by the English people at the WTC and the subsequent subway bombing in London.

With other material, I might laugh at his attempt to score cheap points about "American exceptionalism." Except he doesn't even score, and nothing about this is at all laughable.

Maybe if anyone talks again about his chances as next ABC, I'll laugh, but not tonight.

Great post, Tom. Now, since you would argue for justice for OBL, how about a little justice for gay and lesbian Christians? I wonder if he would make the same argument if OBL had been gay?

I am no fan of N. T. Wright, particularly in theology (certainly not on the resurrection) and on LGBT rights, but the question he asks is simple Kantianism. Would one will one's action into a universal imperative? Would Washington welcome other countries acting likewise? This is a legitimate question as is the cultural analysis he cites on the myth of American exceptionalism. Saying that England did similar things when it had an empire evades the question. Bringing in Wright's antipathy toward the Episcopal Church is irrelevant. Casting doubt on his character is too easy a response.

On such a complicated issue I don't think there can be easy answers. One cannot do just good. In the fight against an enemy one risks becoming like the enemy or responding as the enemy would like.

The conclusion one draws is less important than how one arrives at the conclusion. Added to the mix are the many lives which were lost in the pursuit of one terrorist as well as the money that was diverted from the American domestic economy. There are many issues to consider and we still don't have all the facts about the case. Point of view is an important question. Those who were at the World Trade Center on 9/11 may have their own reactions and trauma to relate, as if trauma could ever be told and completely healed. The families of the victims also might have an important perspective to offer, though, at the same time one might run the risk of attempting to speak for the dead, who cannot respond, as Emmanuel Levinas reminds us.

Whether one agrees with the former Bishop of Durham or not, I think that he at least raises an important question.

With postmodernism there need no longer be just one narrative. There can be many narratives, each one of which has its own particular insight as well as blindness.

Gary Paul Gilbert

I'm not an American, though I've lived there, and even with this perspective I think Bishop Wright's comparison is rather absurd.

Is the US complicit in the rise of bin Laden in the first place? Yes. But my reading of the history of the Af-Pak region is that Pakistani military intelligence, the ISI, and Wahhabi foundations in Saudi Arabia, shared much of the responsibility in fomenting and supporting fundamentalists such as bin Laden.

@JC Fisher: wrt to ++Rowan, he has an extra right to comment since he was delivering a lecture right by Ground Zero on 9/11.

As for +Tom's comments, could you all address the substance of what he's getting at?

Continuing the cycle of violence (rather than attempting to understand our complicity in it and then move on to breaking the cycle) doesn't seem to me be either moral or likely to be effective in either the medium or longer terms.

WWJD with OBL/TWAT?

Wright is a favorite of the Anglican right. Thus, I do believe it is relevant to highlight that his opposition to TEC's prophetic leadership has roots in his antipathy to the US in general.

Here's Matt Kennedy at Stand Firm expressing his displeasure:

1. Personally speaking, I would have zero problem with British commandos taking out IRA murderers in Boston. It is to our government’s shame that we ever harbored them. 2. This article seems more of an opportunity for +Wright to vent his spleen (again) against the United States than to offer any kind of Christian or scholarly insight. 3. Wright, tellingly, does not address the question of whether this action meets the biblical criteria for the use of the sword—he simply emotes and opines. 4. His “masked man” analogy is a particularly poor illustration. The UN is not the world “sherrif” despite its pretensions and Wright's assertions. And even if it were, the UN recognized in 2001 that a nation attacked by terrorists has, as a matter of self-defense, the right and authority to bring the attackers to justice as defined by the attacked nation’s own standards (see UN Security Council Resolution 1368). So, using Wright's analogy, poor as it is, the "sheriff" has deputized the masked man and given him full authority to hunt down the gangsters. 5. When other nations take action againsts terrorists—Israelis at Entebbe for example—most Americans are quite happy and supportive and wish that all nations would be so vigilant. Americans are not “exceptionalists” in that regard.

Although I am not entirely unsympathetic with questioning the morality of targeted assassinations (even bin Landen's), it is somehow strangely comforting to know that Tom Wright's antipathy toward The Episcopal Church is rooted in his anti-American bias.

Focusing on horrendous atrocities such as 9/11 tends to skew moral judgment. Bishop Wright highlights an important moral reality: the Westphalian settlement that recognizes the significance of national sovereignty for preserving peace. Unfortunately, in our increasingly globalized world, the Westphalian settlement has frayed. Criminals commit crimes in one country and then seek refuge in another, e.g., Osama bin Laden or Wright’s hypothetical terrorists. We live in an in-between time, a time when international law has not yet caught up with new realities, creating the need for occasional incidents such as the U.S. raid in Pakistan. However, these rare violations of national sovereignty should never occur lightly and always as a last resort. The British would not need to raid Boston. U.S. authorities, upon a legal request from Great Britain, would aggressively seek to capture and then extradite the alleged terrorists as effectively as the SAS could. That is not true of Pakistan.

Bruce Lawrence, an expert on Islam, said this week in Philadelphia that it was unwise to comment on this event on the basis of the very incomplete information we have about it. I happen to agree with many criticisms of American exceptionalism, but not Bp Wright's. Not his repeated comments about the Episcopal Church, nor these. His criticism of TEC reflects, IMV, a bit of the view that TEC is a province of the Mother Church and isn't free to order its own life. Given the fact that he was appointed bishop by her Majesty his wrong-headed view of TEC isn't surprising.

The myth of redemptive violence legitimizes a form of vigilantism, of taking the law into one’s own hands, which provides ‘justice’ only of the crudest sort. In the present case, the 'hero' fired a lot of stray bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan before he got it right. What’s more, such actions invite retaliation.

Popular fiction, dime novels, Saturday afternoon Westerns, are fine and entertaining, taken one by one. But flip channels on the telly any evening and it's one shooting, explosion, death after another. The moral sensibility weakens. Myths give substance to desires and philosophies. Many of the myths we've come to live by are indeed debased.

Murdoch, I agree, but this is not confined to American exceptionalism, and Wright's aspersions are a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. I do wish he would stop the anti-American bent and really start openly addressing the moral challenges we all share. It would be much more helpful and far more conducive to relating across the Anglican divides.

Any New Testament scholar surely will agree that Jesus' teaching here is most apt, and one that reminds us to get our own house in order before pointing to the mess in others'. Something as I recall about specks and logs.

@George, I agree that looking at the suffering of 9/11 can skew our moral judgment, but not always for the worse. We must remember what happens when terrorists are left to their machinations. Had the 9/11 and other Al Qaeda attacks failed, the dilemma Bin Laden posed us would clearly be much diminished.

I keep thinking of Bonhöffer and his Christian moral struggles, and have no desire to become a cowboy in the comic book sense. We can't wash our hands in moral rectitude, but I defy Wright to account for all of the facts of this particular matter before he claims to know how things would have been better handled.

One assumes that +Wright's critical faculties are equally directed at the "exceptionalism" & moral arrogance being propagated in the environs of names such as Orombi, Akinola, & Duncan.

I'm sorry, what? Oh. I see. They aren't. Hmmm. I must just have misread his comments. I thought he was criticizing *all* prejudicial violence, my bad.

After meeting and hearing N. T. Wright several years ago, I found him to be a sub-par New Testament scholar and an inadequate theologian. What is pertinent to his present comments is that he seems to me to play to whatever crowd he thinks is in ascendancy, always with his proverbial finger to the wind. His recent views on the Episcopal Church has probably reduced much of his lecture circuit in the US, so no need to deal with the serious and, indeed, tragic theological and moral complexities of the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Oversimplify for personal posturing always seems Wright’s order of the day. That Americans do often suffer from a bad dose of “exceptionalism” is hard to deny. But, at least as the president has presented it, this is not one of those times.

Joe Monti
Atlanta, GA

There are many laymen in our Church in the United States who are stuggling with this issue. Laymen and women who are not influenced by comic books or the like, or even by their views on the subject of "American exceptionalism".

We struggle instead with our responsibilities as Christians in the ambiguous world in which we live. It is seldom easy to follow Jesus and seldom easy knowing what he teaches us on these complex matters.

Bishop Wright would be more helpful providing us with more guidance on what it is that our Lord would have us do in these situations (if he even knows), in situations over which we have little or no real influence.

Herb Gray

Chomsky just outdid the Bishop of Durham -- he made a bizarre analogy between the targeting of Osama with Iraqi commandos targeting George W. Bush.

http://www.slate.com/id/2293541/