of nations, each with their own cultural integrity.36 Unlike empire, “[l]aw holds equal and independent subjects together without allowing one to master the other.”37
IV. National Responsibility to Natural Law
Let us pause and review the route taken so far, before we take a further turn. On the ground of an understanding of human being as creaturely, I have argued that it might be preferable to benefit compatriots over foreigners, and that it is justifiable to feel affection, loyalty, and gratitude toward a nation whose customs and institutions have inducted us into created forms of human flourishing. I have also argued on the ground of the doctrines of creation, the incarnation of God, and the Trinity—as well as by appeal to the consistent witness over more than a century of at least one Christian tradition—that a diversity of nations is a natural phenomenon that generates certain benefits and should be affirmed. That is the rearward view. Now let us turn around again and move forward into different but complementary territory, in order to explore the matter of moral responsibility for the common good and the limitations this places on national loyalty.
Again, our theological point of departure is the doctrine of creation. As creatures, human beings are bound not only by time and space, but also by the requirements of the good that is proper to their created and universal nature. Service of the human good is what makes actions right, and failure of such service is what makes them wrong. This good is not just private, but common; the good of the human individual—the good of each human community or nation—is bound up with the good of others, both human and non-human. Acting rightly is important, then, partly because it respects or promotes the good of others in ways they deserve, and partly because in so doing agents maintain or promote their own good—and thereby help to make themselves fit for eternal life.
So human creatures are bound by an obligation to serve the common human good; but being creatures, their powers of service are limited. No human effort, individual or collective, has the power to secure the maximal good of all human beings (including the dead as well as the living), far less of non-human ones as well. Each of us must choose to do what he can, and what he may, to advance certain dimensions of the good of some, trusting divine providence to coordinate all our little contributions and guide their unpredictable effects to the benefit of the common good. Among those whom we choose to help, it would be right for us to include our benefactors; for gratitude requires it. This is the justification for special loyalties to such communities as one’s family and nation.
But note: what one owes one’s family or nation is not anything or everything, but specifically respect for and promotion of their good. Such loyalty, therefore, does not involve simply doing or giving whatever is demanded, whether by the state, the electoral majority, or even the people as a whole. Indeed, when what is demanded would appear to harm the community—for example, acquiescence in injustice perpetrated by the state against its own people or a foreign one, or by one section of the nation against another—genuine national loyalty requires that it be refused. True patriotism is not uncritical; and in extreme circumstances it might even involve participation in acts of treason—as it did in the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose love for Germany led him into conspiracy to kill Hitler.38 National loyalty, as Christians should conceive it, shows itself basically in reminding the nation that it is accountable to God, at least in the sense of being obliged by the good given or created in human nature. By thus distinguishing between its object and God, such loyalty distances itself from the Romantic nationalism that absolutizes and divinizes the “Nation,” making its unquestioning service the route to a quasi-immortality.
It is true, of course, that the Christian Bible contains and gives prominence to the concept of a people chosen by God to be the medium of salvation to the world; and it is also true that particular Christianized nations have periodically identified themselves as the chosen people, thereby pretending to accrue to themselves and their imperial, putatively civilizing, policies an exclusive divine authority. But, as I have already pointed out, the notion of the chosen people as referring to a particular nation strictly belongs to the Old Testament, not the New; and one of the main points on which early Christianity differentiated itself from Judaism was precisely its transnational character. Full participation in the Christian religion was no longer tied to worship in the Temple at Jerusalem, and was as open to Gentiles as to Jews; for, as St. Paul famously put it, “there is neither Jew nor Greek . . . for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”39 In early, emergent Christianity, the “people of God” came to refer, no longer to a particular nation (Israel), but to the universal church. Certainly, there have been many times when the church as an institution has become wedded to a particular ethnic culture or the instrument of a particular nation-state. There have been times when the church’s relative and conditional affirmation of a particular culture or nation has lost its vital qualifiers. Nevertheless, in the light of what we have said above, we may judge that these are times when the church has betrayed its identity and failed in its calling. They are times when it has failed to maintain the distinction ironically attested by the Nazi judge, who, before condemning Helmuth James von Moltke to death, demanded of him, “From whom do you take your orders? From the Beyond or from Adolf Hitler?”40 and they are times when it has failed to observe the original priority so succinctly affirmed in Sir Thomas More’s declaration, moments before he was beheaded for refusing to endorse Henry VIII’s assertion of royal supremacy over the English Church, that he would die “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”41
A properly Christian view, then, insists that every nation is equally accountable to God for its service of the human good. No nation may pretend to be God’s chosen people in the strong sense of being the sole and permanent representative and agent of God’s will on earth; no nation may claim such an identity with God. This relativization still permits each nation to consider itself chosen or called by God to contribute in its own peculiar way to the world’s salvation; to play a special role—at once unique, essential, and limited—in promoting the universal human good. It allows members of a given nation to celebrate the achievements of the good that grace their own history and to take pride in the peculiar institutions and customs in which they have realized it. At the same time, it forces them to acknowledge that their nation’s achievement is but one among many; and so to recognize, appreciate, and even learn from the distinctive contributions of others.
But more than this, each nation must realize, not only that other nations too have made valuable contributions to the realization of the common good of all things, but also that the achievement of the good in one nation is actually bound up with its achievement elsewhere. National loyalty, therefore, is properly extrovert. As Karl Barth put it:
when we speak of home, motherland, and people, it is a matter of outlook, background, and origin. We thus refer to the initiation and beginning of a movement. It is a matter of being faithful to this beginning. But this is possible only if we execute the movement, and not as we make the place where we begin it a prison and stronghold. The movement leads us relentlessly, however, from the narrower sphere to a wider, from our own people to other human peoples. . . . The one who is really in his own people, among those near to him, is always on the way to those more distant, to other peoples.42
The point here is not that we should grow out of national identity and loyalty and into a cosmopolitanism that, floating free of all particular
attachments, lacks any real ones;43 but rather that, in and through an ever-deepening care for the good of our own nation, we are drawn into caring for the good of foreigners. This point is poignantly captured by Yevgeni Yevtushenko in “Babii Yar,” his poem about Russian anti-semitism:
Oh my Russian people!
I know you are internationalists to the core.
But those with unclean hands
have often made a jingle of your purest name.
I know the goodness of my land . . .
In my blood there is no Jewish
