The Griffin takes wing: Theology and the truth of 9/11

By Marc Estrin | Special to the Vermont Guardian

posted September 15, 2006

Review: Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action by David Ray Griffin, Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006, paper, 246 pp., $17.95

Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 is two books in one. The first is an updated summary of government actions and physical facts that contradict the official 9/11 story.

In his earlier book, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11, David Ray Griffin assembled the evidence unaccounted for by the official story, and set up a framework in which to try to understand it. He imagined eight levels of possible administration complicity, from simply capitalizing on an unexpected, external event, through intentionally allowing the expected attacks, to, finally, the possibility of active involvement in bringing them about. Disturbing questions indeed. He called for a genuine investigation.

In his subsequent The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, Griffin decimated the commission’s claim to be, in the words of its chairman, “independent, impartial, thorough, and nonpartisan,” and demonstrated its conscious attempt to misdirect public concern away from both the “disturbing questions” with their possible administration involvement, and toward the putative incompetence of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and intelligence agencies which, according to the commission, gave Bush the bad information he had acted — or not acted — upon.

His newly published third book expresses Griffin’s now even greater certainty that 9/11 must have been “an inside job”: Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 is a clear indictment of government entities for having planned and executed the events of 9/11, and orchestrated a cover-up incompetent enough to enable much 9/11 research, but brilliantly effective nonetheless — largely through the complicity of the mainstream media and the secrecy brought to its highest level by this administration.

Because of the efforts of Griffin and other “9/11 truthers,” many of the problems with the official story are now known to members of the public who wish to know: the almost certainty of controlled WTC demolitions, and the improbability of a 757 crash into the Pentagon are the two most salient. I will not review the evidence here as the Guardian, along with other weeklies, a few dailies, and many bloggers (see st911.org) have made this material available. Rather, I want to comment on Griffin’s directing his third book at the religious community.

A once and future Griffin

In the second part of his book, Griffin emerges in his birthright costume of theologian. For 30 years prior to his appearance as one of the chief critics of the 9/11 official story, he was a professor of theological studies, and the author or editor of several important books in the field, often focusing on the process philosophy of Whitehead and Hartshorne, and its application to the longstanding “problem of evil.” “Part Two: A Christian Critique of 9/11 and American Imperialism” directs the reader’s attention to that dimension of what might otherwise seem a purely secular problem.

Griffin’s opening move is to establish the US’s “imperial motives for ‘A New Pearl Harbor,”’ and the fact that the government had both the means and the opportunity to plan and execute the events of the attacks. In his history and critique of the neocons, he shows that 9/11 can surely be understood as a means to turn their agenda into policy.

He then shifts focus to examine Jesus’ revolutionary relationship to the Roman Empire as a model for authentic Christianity today, introducing the theologically crucial notion of “the demonic” in a “non-mythological” form — i.e., not anthropomorphized as “the devil” or “Satan.” His view is that the demonic is “a real power with genuine autonomy, that is driving the world in a direction that is diametrically opposed to divine purposes.” How is such a power possible in a universe created by an omnipotent, all-knowing, beneficent God? Ah — the “problem of evil” arises.

Griffin’s answer centers on a reading of Genesis which postulates not God’s creation of the universe from nothing, but rather God’s shaping of a pre-existing chaos, a material with its own properties, some of which is resistant to divine values, and capable of developing, in its multi-billion-year evolution, the capacity to threaten divine purpose. Thus, he arrives at the idea of two opposing forces — not the standard, simplistic “good and evil,” but rather a divine force pitted against the emergence of a human civilization capable of being demonic. The question then arises: To which force is our contemporary Western culture, and its most force-filled representative, the U.S., committed? Griffin demonstrates in no uncertain terms that the United States must be seen as “the chief embodiment of demonic power,” acting in almost every arena in ways completely at odds with the divine teachings of Christ.

The implication for a Christ-inspired church is clear: the church must take the lead in an attempt to break free from our gathering, planetary catastrophe, to teach and preach the disparity between U.S. actions and Christian goals, using the 9/11 attacks on its own people as the most instructive example of the demonic in action.

Separation of church and ...?

Secular thinkers and activists may find the second part of Griffin’s book at best irrelevant. There is, they might say, already enough religious language out there clouding the grossly military-political activities of the country and its allies, and inviting the world into a crusade of religious war. Whatever one’s private religious beliefs or traditions, 9/11 truthwork is best kept secular. And if this book is to be called anything, it should be titled The Truth Behind 9/11 and Christian Faith, rather than the other way around, since that is the order in which the material is presented, and the order of its practical usefulness. In fact, why not publish it as two separate books, since “Christian Faith” at the head of the title may keep many from picking it up at all? Let the general public buy the 9/11 truth book, they might say, and the Christians buy the Christian faith one.

But Griffin has a savvy tactic here, titling the book the way he does, publishing it with a major Presbyterian publisher in a “political/religious” market niche. Not only does such reflect his long-held, and deeply-developed, personal beliefs, but this strategy looks to, and may, open up a powerful new ally for the secular activist attempt to change our political trajectory. The various Christian church denominations include hundreds of millions of people who might be brought to see the tension between governmental action and the core beliefs to which they subscribe.

In the 80s, the churches were in the forefront in Latin American, anti-imperialist battles: liberation theology, the preferential option for the poor. Politically, Griffin is hoping to encourage a reemergence of an activist church by framing the current struggles in church-crucial terms.

Regardless of what secularists might think of the ultimate “truth value” of such framing (if there is no God who made the world, etc.), the mobilization of mainline churches in political struggle, in the potentially transformative 9/11 truth movement, is likely to be an important, positive addition, especially as a contrast to the fundamentalist movements seeking to hasten the apocalypse.

Nietzsche once observed that “the last Christian died on the cross.” If that has been too much the case till now, Griffin would change it by using this book to challenge mainline churches to engage full tilt on the side of their professed values.

The griffin was a beast with the front of an eagle and the hindquarters of a lion, depicted in medieval iconography as a guardian of the road to salvation. Though long extinct in the imagination, I’m hoping this particular reincarnation may fly — at least as well as a 757.

Marc Estrin is a novelist and political activist from Burlington.