Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

They Died in Vain; Deal with it - by Ray McGovern

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

August 08, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- Many of those preaching at American church services Sunday extolled as “heroes” the 30 American and 8 Afghan troops killed Saturday west of Kabul, when a helicopter on a night mission crashed, apparently after taking fire from Taliban forces. This week, the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) can be expected to beat a steady drumbeat of “they shall not have died in vain.”

But they did. I know it is a hard truth, but they did die in vain.

As in the past, churches across the country will keep praising the fallen troops for protecting “our way of life,” and few can demur, given the tragic circumstances.

But, sadly, such accolades are, at best, misguided — at worst, dishonest.  Most preachers do not have a clue as to what U.S. forces are doing in Afghanistan and why.  Many prefer not to think about it.  There are some who do know better, but virtually all in that category eventually opt to punt.

Should we fault the preachers as they reach for words designed to give comfort to those in their congregations mourning the deaths of so many young troops?  As hard as it might seem, I believe we can do no other than fault — and confront — them.  However well meaning their intentions, their negligence and timidity in confronting basic war issues merely help to perpetuate unnecessary killing.  It is high time to hold preachers accountable.

Nuremberg Trial Prosecutor weighs in on OBL

Ben Ferencz website: http://www.benferencz.org/

Ben Ferencz Interview: http://www.cbc.ca/video/news/audioplayer.html?clipid=1921021571

Benjamin Ferencz is a 92-year-old U.S. citizen and American combat soldier during World War II. He served as prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, where he tried many Nazi war criminals. The above link directs readers to a controversial 13-minute interview on CBC Radio Canada on Bin Laden's death, the Nuremberg principles, and the role of America. An excerpt from the interview:

Q: What should we have learned from Nuremberg that we still haven't learned"?  His answer:

A: I'm afraid most of the lessons of Nuremberg have passed, unfortunately.  The world has accepted them, but the U.S. seems reluctant to do so.  The principal lesson we learned from Nuremberg is that a war of aggression -- that means, a war in violation of international law, in violation of the UN charter, and not in self-defense -- is the supreme international crime, because all the other crimes happen in war.  And every leader who is responsible for planning and perpetrating that crime should be held to account in a court of law, and the law applies equally to everyone.

 These lessons were hailed throughout the world -- I hailed them, I was involved in them -- and it saddens me to no end when Americans are asked:  why don't you support the Nuremberg principles on aggression?  And the response is:  Nuremberg?  That was then, this is now.  Forget it.

 

The Year Begins with War -- Wendell Berry

From A Timbered Choir, 1991:1 (p. 125-6).

The year begins with war.
Our bombs fall day and night,
Hour after hour, by death
Abroad appeasing wrath,
Folly, and greed at home.
Upon our giddy tower
We’d oversway the world.
Our hate comes down to kill
Those whom we do not see,
For we have given up
Our sight to those in power
And to machines, and now
Are blind to all the world.
This is a nation where
No lovely thing can last.
We trample, gouge, and blast;
The people leave the land;
The land flows to the sea.
Fine men and women die,
The fine old houses fall,
The fine old trees come down:
Highway and shopping mall
Still guarantee the right
And liberty to be
A peaceful murderer,
A murderous worshipper,
A slender glutton, or
A healthy whore. Forgiving
No enemy, forgiven
By none, we live the death
Of liberty become
What we have feared to be.

-Wendell Berry, 1991

The Children of Cain - by Brian Zahnd

This post consists of an excerpt from chapter nine of All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.

Remarque was a German veteran of World War I. (He later became an American citizen.) Remarque published All Quiet On The Western Front in 1929. It sold two and half million copies in the first eighteen months. Some have describe it as the most honest account of war ever written. German soldiers would simply say of Remarque’s book, “So ist es gewsen!” (That’s the way it was!)

And if you ask me what this post has to do with Holy Week, I will simply answer, much!

Read it thoughtfully.

I have entitled this excerpt as…

The Children of Cain Have a Conversation Concerning the Legacy Bequeathed Them.

Thomas Merton: Peacemaker by Ron Dart

Thomas Merton: Peacemaker

I think that Thomas Merton could easily be called the greatest spiritual writer and spiritual master of the twentieth century in English speaking America. There is no other person who has such a profound influence on those writing on spiritual topics, not only on Catholics but non-Catholics, as Merton has.

Lawrence Cunningham, Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton p.183          

With Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton (1915-1968) personified the potential of the Catholic peace tradition in America. Merton stands out as one of the most brilliant peacemakers in the entire Catholic tradition.                               

 Ronald Musto, The Catholic Peace Tradition p. 249

Merton never fully embraced pacifism. Like Thomas More and Erasmus, he believed in the theoretical applicability of the just war. Yet, like the Renaissance Humanists, he looked at the horrors of contemporary warfare and concluded that the just war theory was irrelevant in practice. He was, in fact, one of the first “nuclear pacifists”.                                         

Ronald Musto, The Catholic Peace Tradition  p. 250

 

 I   Merton: War and Peace 

Thomas Merton began his best selling first autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), with these poignant and telling words:

On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of great war, and down in the shadow of some mountains on the border of Spain, I came into the world.

Merton, indeed, came into the world ‘in a year of great war’.  WW I dominated Europe when Merton was born, he lived through the carnage of WW II, the Korean War, McCarthy-Cold War years and the emergence and devastating nature of the Vietnam War. Merton’s social conscience became more public with the civil rights movement in the late 1950s, the nuclear threat, the rise of ecological consciousness and much American domestic violence in the 1950s-1960s. In short, Merton lived through a period in 20^th century history in which war and violence were the order of the day, and he sought, through a variety of means, to be a moderate and peacemaking voice and presence. How did Merton become the significant peacemaker that he did, and what was Merton’s understanding of peacemaking? This short paper will, in a suggestive and historic way, answer these questions.

Revelation and the Violent "Prize Fighting Jesus" by Greg Boyd

In an interview several years ago for Relevant Magazine, Mark Driscoll (well known pastor of Mars Hill in Seattle) said,

“In Revelation, Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is the guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.” (You can find the original interview here). 

I frankly have trouble understanding how a follower of Jesus could find himself unable to worship a guy he could “beat up” when he already crucified him. I also fail to see what is so worshipful about someone carrying a sword with “a commitment make someone bleed.”  But this aside, I’m not at all surprised Driscoll believes the book of Revelation portrays Jesus as a “prize fighter.”  This violent picture of Jesus, rooted in a literalistic interpretation of Revelation, is very common among conservative Christians, made especially popular by the remarkably violent Left Behind series.

"Little Annie's Treasure" - Napoleon's Armies and the Czech Exiles (from the Jersak memoirs)

Karl Jersák, Paměti [Memories] (Bohemia, 1954, William Jersak’s collection in Sulejovice) cited in Edita Štěříková, Země Otců [Land of our Fathers] (Prague: The Society of Exiles in Prague, 1995), 110-113. Translated by Lloyd Jersak.

On February 1, 1803, the first Czech colonists settled in Zelov. Fourteen farmers came from Tábor and thirteen joined them from Erdmansdorf. Among them was Jan Jersák and Jan Stehlík. Eleven families came from Sophienthal and Bachowitz: one of these was also a Jan Jersák and another was a Jiří (George) Jersák.

From 1803-1804, eight of their newborn children were baptized.

Beside the landowners, there were also some poor families who came with the colonists to help with labour. Most of the land was sandy and unproductive, but they began to grow flax. They formed a local government and in 1807, they established a Czech school.

In the same year (1807) the French war entered Zelov life. In June, the boundary was pushed back from the Prussian kingdom. Overnight, the colonists found themselves under new Warsaw governorship. The former Prussian privileges were now overlooked and the Zelov population was forced into labour, building roads and bridges.

The Czechs hoped in a Russian victory. Eventually, their wish was fulfilled. After the end of the war, they became subject to the Russian Czar. Within thirty years of the founding of Zelov (by June 1, 1830) there were 149 properties listed in settlement.

What has been told later about this period, Karl Jersák, the Zelov chronicler and re-immigrant of Nejdku, records in his memoirs:

Tolstoy's War and Peace -- Reflections by Fr. Michael Gillis

This year I read the ultimate summer read, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. But I’m a slow reader, so I got started in April--But I finished before the end of summer. I read the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.  The translation is so good that I seldom noticed that it was a translation. The conversation flows smoothly, for the most part, although there are occasional awkward expressions, mostly in the speech of Pierre, that left me wondering if this awkwardness is something reflected in the Russian original--after all, Pierre is an awkward character. Some of the descriptive passages, however, especially the battle scenes, have such vivid force that several pages seemed to disappear and I saw only the image created in my mind. 

Tolstoy and the Mennonites -- by Brad Jersak

As part of the centenary of Lev Tolstoy’s death, I was been asked to reflect on Tolstoy and the Mennonites. Levi Miller wrote a fine article on the Tolstoy-Mennonite connection twelve years ago,[1] reviewing those Mennonite leaders in Russia and America who interacted with Tolstoy’s work. My article will rather compare and contrast the roots and reasons of Mennonite and Tolstoyan communalism and nonviolence.

Mennonite and Tolstoyan Communalism

1. New Testament foundations: We necessarily begin by considering the New Testament teachings that inspired both movements. Both the early Anabaptists and the Tolstoyans looked to the New Testament for their communalism and nonviolence, but as we shall see, for quite different reasons.

'Lev Tolstoy: Peace, War and Politics' -- A UFV Symposium

Lev Tolstoy, one of Russia's greatest authors and peace advocates, passed away one century ago. A four-time Nobel nominee, Tolstoy was known through his literature and activism as a proponent of nonviolence and communalism; a critic of militarism and hierarchy; and is regarded by some as the father of Christian anarchism. He was also an inspiration and guide for a young Gandhi, with whom he corresponded regularly and shared a common commitment to actually living the Way of the Sermon on the Mount.

Tolstoy's life work has recently been commemorated in a variety of mediums, including the acclaimed film, The Last Train Station. His remarkable contributions to literature and society were also celebrated on Sept. 22 at the University of the Fraser Valley Tolstoy Symposium. The day was initiated by Professor Ron Dart (see photo with Tolstoy) and facilitated by Scott Fast (both serving in UFV's philosophy and political science dept).

Hadji Murad: A Tale for our Time by Ron Dart

War and Peace (1869) is the Mount Everest of all novels, and Anna Karenina (1877) and Resurrection (1899) stand tall and stately within the towering Himalayan peaks of world literature. It is 100 years this year since Lev Tolstoy died (1910-2010), and many is the event that is being put on to celebrate the life of this literary genius and prophetic visionary. Tolstoy is very much a man for all seasons, and the perennial themes he grappled with in his novels, short stories, plays and parables are as relevant today as they were when written and published.  

There is little doubt that one of the finest short stories that Tolstoy wrote in his latter years was Hadji Murad (viewable online). Hadji Murad was written between 1896-1904, and published after Tolstoy had died in 1912. The tale told is probing, evocative and apt. We often hear in the news about the clash between the Russian state and the Muslim Chechens and Grozny. The Chechens are viewed as the terrorists and the Russians the law abiding citizens. The contemporary clash between Russia and the Chechens has a much longer history, of course, and Hadji Murad tells part of that older tale. The young Tolstoy was in the Russian army in the 1850s when the Russian state and military had launched a campaign to colonize, dominate and control the Muslim Chechens. Needless to say, such an aggressive stance by the Russians created much opposition and resistance by the Chechens. The conflict led to the deaths of many lives, and one of the leading Muslim liberation fighters was Hadji Murad. It would have been natural for Tolstoy, as a Russian, to view Murad as a terrorist. But, did he? Murad led many attacks on the Russians, won many a campaign and was a living myth and legend to the Russians. He was the Osama Bin Laden of the time. The Russians hunted him down like a fox, and any true and patriotic Russian was expected to see Murad as a Muslim terrorist in the same way the West views the Taliban or Al-Qaeda.Tolstoy was never, though, an uncritical or patriotic Russian.

Cambodia Transfigured -- by Bob Ekblad

Last week I spent three unforgettable days with my family in Cambodia.  There we saw signs of Jesus’ Kingdom shining in a land still under the shadow of death.  I now find myself thinking daily what it would look like for the light of Christ to shine even stronger there and here-- so people can really see it.

        Gracie and I were invited by Servants of Asia’s Urban Poor—a team of people from New Zealand, the Philippines, Australia, Japan and Canada called to live and minister in slum communities in Phnom Penh.  The first day I led a short retreat for the staff and Gracie and I prayed for each of them. We visited some of the families in their homes amidst the squalor of the slum communities where they are seeking to live humbly among the poorest of the poor, bringing Jesus’ light.

God sees the truth, but waits - Leo Tolstoy

 In the town of Vladimir lived a young merchant named Ivan Dmitrich Aksionov. He had two shops and a house of his own.

Aksionov was a handsome, fair-haired, curly-headed fellow, full of fun, and very fond of singing. When quite a young man he had been given to drink, and was riotous when he had had too much; but after he married he gave up drinking, except now and then.

One summer Aksionov was going to the Nizhny Fair, and as he bade good-bye to his family, his wife said to him, "Ivan Dmitrich, do not start to-day; I have had a bad dream about you."

Aksionov laughed, and said, "You are afraid that when I get to the fair I shall go on a spree."

His wife replied: "I do not know what I am afraid of; all I know is that I had a bad dream. I dreamt you returned from the town, and when you took off your cap I saw that your hair was quite grey."

The War Prayer by Mark Twain

The following is both the written text and an animated adaptation of a short story by Mark Twain (see details at the bottom). 

For the Common Good by Brian Zahnd

For the Common Good

posted by Brian Zahnd on June 14, 2010 at 5:50 PM

I have drafted a statement which explains the friendship and cooperation I have with Ahmed El-Sherif (an Arab-American Muslim) and Samuel Nachum (an Israeli-American Jew) as we work together in the Let The Children Play for Peace project. It goes like this:

For the Common Good

We are Jews, Christians and Muslims.
And we are friends.
We seek to follow our respective religions faithfully.
We do not believe all religions are the same.
We recognize the reality of our religious differences.
But we are friends.
We are devout in our faith and respectful of our friendship.
Our faith and friendship need not be mutually exclusive.
We recognize that we share common space—the common space of a shared planet.
For the sake of the common good we seek common ground.
We do not share a common faith, but we share a common humanity.
In our different religions we do not practice the same rituals or pray the same prayers.
But in our shared humanity we hold to a common dream: Shalom, Salaam, Peace.
We hold to the dream that our children may play in peace without fear of violence.
And so...
We pledge not to hate.
We pledge not to dehumanize others.
We pledge to do no harm in the name of God.
As individuals we do not compromise the truth claims of our respective religions—
But we will not use truth claims to fuel hate or justify violence.
We will practice our respective faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
But we believe our faith can be practiced in the way of peace—
We believe our faith truly practiced need never be at odds with humanitarian ideals.
Our religions share a complex and intertwined history—
A history of interaction that has too often been tumultuous and bloody.
We believe there must be a better way and we seek that better way.
The way of peace.
We are Jews, Christians and Muslims.
And we are friends.
We seek common ground for the common good.
Shalom, Salaam, Peace.

Ahmed El-Sherif
Samuel Nachum
Brian Zahnd

To build up arms - by Brian Zahnd

To build up arms
(And such arms!)
Bombs that unleash hell
The fire of Gehenna
On faceless enemies
From a safe distance
At the push of button
Cutting edge technology
To kill a million at time
Cain's club to the hundredth power
And to want their existence at all
Worse, to revere these monstrous inventions
Yea, to love them as guarantors of "Freedom"
To reject the welfare state
And embrace the warfare state
To choose the rage of Achilles
Over the peace of Immanuel
To worship Mars and the horrid drums of war
While claiming to be a follower of the Lamb
Is almost more than I can stand
I belong to a different faith
Than the religion of "shock and awe"
Because I do not love
The "nuclear option"
Nor the trumpets of Mars
Nor the rage of Achilles
And I will not accept that these "practical men"
Know what's best
For they do not
They know how to kill and destroy
And call it by benign code names
But you can't call it Christianity!
I guess I was just to stubborn
To ever be governed
By enforced insanity
And this passion for the Big Bombs
Well, it's...
Not my faith
Not my hope
Not my love

Editorial: Fasting from Blown Metaphors by Brad Jersak

I write this as a reflection on Eric Janzen’s “Prophetic Culture of the Kingdom” (part 4).

In pondering your well-thought, well-stated articles on the Kingdom of God, part 4 gave me pause to consider your admittedly biblical use of military and imperial metaphors.

I 

Military Metaphors

Re: military metaphors, you describe Christians as living ‘upon a spiritual battleground where a very real battle is underway.’ You continue,

The kingdom of heaven opposes the kingdom of darkness and opposes the powers of this world that do not worship Jesus as their lord, their savior, or their king...  We are the presence of the kingdom wherever we gather and we are to express that presence on the battleground.

All of this is familiar territory to Biblicists who read about spiritual battles, armies, and weapons in New Testament passages like Eph.6, 2 Tim. 2, Rev. 19, etc. And of course, you acknowledge that while this battle is ‘real,’ it is also ‘spiritual.’ The weapons of our warfare are not the literal weapons of the world (swords, scuds, and lawsuits); they are metaphors for the Christian practices of love (as you explained), forgiveness (Rom. 12), and prayer (2 Cor. 10). In other words, the military metaphors are not merely spiritual counterparts to the physical realities. They also function ironically. Christ did not simply talk about overpowering evil forces by means of more lethal, spiritual ammo. He calls his followers to disavow violence, harm, hatred, and force altogether. Our new weapons are upside down kingdom traits like meekness, mercy, and mourning. An entirely new set of actions is called for: turning the other cheek to the enemy that strikes you; blessing the enemy that curses you; praying for the enemy that abuses you. These aren’t just spiritual symbols … it’s irony, virtually sarcasm if we’re talking about ‘armor.’ The disciples eventually got that.

Am I Missing Something by Joe Beach

'Christian' Militia in the News

This morning, I read about the arrest in Michigan of eight "patriotic Christians" who had plotted to bomb a funeral service of a policeman. On the same day, I received another email about the "pray for Obama" bumper sticker - this time from my sister (who's really a very committed Christian, intelligent, etc. A wonderful person). So I wrote down these thoughts:

Most of us, by now, have heard of the bumper sticker going around which reads: "Pray for Obama - Psalm 109:8”. It’s may be a trivial example of how ugly some of us Christians have become in recent years – but it’s also a horrific example. The full passage, which is supposed to elicit satisfying chuckles from us when we look it up, reads “May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership. May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow." As my friend likes to say, “yeah, funny… but not in a HA-HA way.”

"The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil" and "Exiles from Nowhere" - Reviews by Brad Jersak

Book Reviews by Brad Jersak 

    E. Jane Doering and Eric O. Springsted, The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil (Notre Dame: UND Press, 2004.

     Alan Mendelson, Exiles from Nowhere: The Jews and the Canadian Elite (Montreal: Robin Brass Studio, 2008). 

In reviewing these two scholarly gems, I read them from a particular perspective. I am at the fledgling stage of George P. Grant research, with a special interest in enucleating the animating core of his life as a contemplative theologian and Canadian ‘prophet.’ One cannot hope to understand Grant’s work as a philosopher, political scientist and activist apart from the context of his Weilian Christian Platonism, for in his spiritual journey out of the dark cave of modernity (think Plato), Simone Weil was truly his ‘Diotima.’[1] Further, Grant’s emergence as one of Canada’s preeminent thinkers must be understood in light of his progressivist liberal pedigree. From that point of view, a book of essays on Weil’s Christian Platonism and a history that situates him among Canada’s intellectual elite are must-reads.

Kairos Palestine: A word of faith, hope and love from the heart of Palestinian Suffering

On December 11, 2009, a group of Palestinian Christian leaders went public with a declaration on behalf of peace in Palestine/Israel, and on behalf of a truly Christian witness. The result was this document. See also the website at http://www.kairospalestine.ps

PATRIARCHS AND HEADS OF CHURCHES JERUSALEM

WE HEAR THE CRY OF OUR CHILDREN

We, the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem, hear the cry of hope that our children have launched in these difficult times that we still experience in this Holy Land. We support them and stand by them in their faith, their hope, their love and their vision for the future. We also support the call to all our faithful as well as to the Israeli and Palestinian Leaders, to the International Community and to the World Churches, in order to accelerate the achievement of justice, peace and reconciliation in this Holy Land. We ask God to bless all our children by giving them more power in order to contribute effectively in establishing and developing their community, while making it a community of love, trust, justice and peace.

Military Chaplain Repents by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy (Must-Read 25 years later)

This interview was given 25 years ago and is reprinted from http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/mccarthy5.html. Those who read it today ask, Why did I never hear about this? Now we must! Its prophetic elements have proven true in the post 9-11 world.

In August of 1945 Rev. George B. Zabelka, a Catholic chaplain with the U.S. Army Air Force, was stationed on Tinian Island in the South Pacific. He was assigned to serve the Catholics of the 509th Composite Group. The 509th Composite Group was the Atomic Bomb Group. He served as a priest for those who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After 22 years as a military chaplain he retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. What follows is an interview with him by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy. Rev. George B. Zabelka went to meet his God on April 11, 1992.

Fr. McCarthy: Father Zabelka, what is your relationship to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945?

Fr. Zabelka: During the summer of 1945, July, August and September, I was assigned as Catholic chaplain to the 509th Composite Group on Tinian Island. The 509th was the Atomic Bomb Group.

With God on Our Side (with Kevin Miller and Ron Dart)

We believe in MLK. But we still don't believe him.

Excerpt from "Beyond Vietnam," an address by MLK, April 4, 1967.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."

For the entire text, click here.

Counter-Terrorism: Building Bridges with a Nation’s Diaspora -- by C. Kerr

The nature of terrorism in the contemporary world has attachments to cultures, faiths and people groups.  It is important to recognize that not all members of these communities associate, and at times, distance themselves from such ideologies.  It is vital for nations to be able to build bridges with its various diaspora communities.  Doing so will ensure these communities are not painted with the same brush as terrorists and lessen the chance of radicalization.  Therefore, building bridges of understanding will only aid in the development of national security for all. 

Peace

"If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer war is war...  War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it...  War is hell." - Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman

"You can't get to a good place in a bad way -- EVER." - Molly Baldwin

"We must recognize... that the means used determine the end achieved." - Mildred Fahrni

"The means are the ends in embryo.  As you choose your means, you get your ends.  That is the iron law of the moral universe." - Mahatma Ghandi

"There is no way to peace.  Peace is the way." - A.J. Muste

The history of punishment is in some respects like the history of war; it seems to accompany the human condition almost universally, to enjoy periods of glorification, to be commonly regarded as justified in many instances, and yet to run counter to our ultimate vision of what human society should be. - Deirdre Golash

The Shape of Modern Torture by John T. Parry

The Shape of Modern Torture: Extraordinary Rendition and Ghost Detainees
by John T. Parry

Parry, John T., "The Shape of Modern Torture: Extraordinary Rendition and Ghost Detainees" . Melbourne Journal of International Law, Vol. 6, p. 516, 2005 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=829345

‘Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point’, said Scrooge, ‘answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?’[1]

I INTRODUCTION

My goal in this commentary is to combine two ways of thinking about torture and related forms of coercive treatment and interrogation. The first of these ways is a legal analysis of some of the issues surrounding torture, with particular reference to the practice of extraordinary rendition (the use of force, rather than legal process, to take suspected ‘terrorists’ from one country to another for purposes of detention and interrogation), and the existence of ‘ghost detainees’ (people who are secretly held and interrogated by the United States or its allies in undisclosed locations and who are outside the protections of domestic or international law in any practical sense). Although some of my arguments and conclusions on these issues may be surprising or at least debatable, they will be set largely within a familiar context of legal argument and analysis.

Assassination and Call to Prayer for Burma

Dear Friends,

Firstly Partners wishes to express our sadness over the loss of the KNU (Karen National Union) General Secretary, Padoh Mahn Sha Lah Phan who was assassinated at his home on the 14th February 2008.

We mourn the loss of a great, passionate and inspirational leader of the Karen people.

P'Doh Mahn Sha not only inspired the Karen people but stood for a united Burma and will be deeply missed by all. His vision, strength, and understanding will be greatly missed throughout the Karen community and Burma as a whole. Although he is no longer with us, his memory lives on and he will not be forgotten as a man that stood firmly by his beliefs and who's life works was for a free and democratic Burma.

Tolstoy on Non-resistance

Q.  But if that is the true meaning of the rule of non-resistance, can it always be put into practice?

A.  It can be put into practice like every virtue enjoined by the law of God.  A virtue cannot be practiced in all circumstances without self-sacrifice, privation, suffering, and in extreme cases loss of life itself.  But he who esteems life more than fulfilling the will of God is already dead to the only true life.  Trying to save his life he loses it.  Besides, generally speaking, where non-resistance costs the sacrifice of a single life of some material welfare, resistance costs a thousand such sacrifices.

Non-resistance is salvation; Resistance is ruin."

Q.  But so long as only a few act thus, what will happen to them?

A.  If only one man acted thus, and all the rest agreed to crucify him, would it not be nobler for him to die in the glory of non-resisting love, praying for his enemies, than to live to wear the crown of Caesar stained with the blood of the slain?

(Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, Translated by Constance Garnett [Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984], 14-15).

Kant on War and Peace

Now, as a matter of fact, the morally practical reason utters within us its irrevocable veto: There shall be no war. So there ought to be no war, neither between me and you in the condition of nature, nor between us as members of states which, although internally in a condition of law, are still externally in their relation to each other in a condition of lawlessness; for this is not the way by which any one should prosecute his right. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real. We must work for what may perhaps not be realized, and establish that constitution which yet seems best adapted to bring it about (mayhap republicanism in all states, together and separately). And thus we may put an end to the evil of wars, which have been the chief interest of the internal arrangements of all the states without exception. And although the realization of this purpose may always remain but a pious wish, yet we do certainly not deceive ourselves in adopting the maxim of action that will guide us in working incessantly for it; for it is a duty to do this.

Immanuel Kant. 1790. The Science of Right.

A Prophecy Unheeded III: Erasmus, 1514

Excerpts from an open letter written by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam to Abbot Antony Bergen (addressing Emperor Maxmillian), 1514. Cited in Erasmus and our Struggle for Peace, by Jose Chapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950).

I see great movements arising. . . . May the favor of God calm this tempest in Christendom. . . . I often wonder what drives—I will not say Christians—but men to exterminate one another like madmen at the price of such effort, such expense, and such risks. What do we do all our life long but wage war? Not even all animals fight, except some wild species. And even they fight not among themselves but with animals of a different species. Besides, they fight with their natural weapons and not with machines in the invention of which we employ an ingenuity worthy of the devils. . . .

The Myth of Proportional Violence by Brad Jersak

Just War Theory: “Just War” is a idea and tradition developed by philosophers (e.g. Aristotle and Cicero) and theologians (e.g. Augustine and Hugo Grotius) in an effort to establish a platform of ethics for war and peace. “Just War theory” seeks to define ethical parameters of justice in the context of war. I.e. the justice of resorting to war (jus ad bellum), just conduct during war (jus in bellum), and justice in the peace agreements which terminate a war (jus post bellum). 

War and Hell by Wayne Northey

War and hell are inextricably interlinked in Christian history and theology.  Below are some thoughts about both, with relation to a movie and a book.

I.  The Christian and War: Reflections on “Saving Private Ryan”

“War is hell”, observed Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman.  And Steven Spielberg dipped us right into its fiery midst in his 1998 summer release.

War is indeed hell.  Yet, in the long history of the Christian Church, apart from the earliest era, every war engaged in throughout Christendom has been supported by the Church on both sides of the conflict.  How in the name of Jesus can this be? What, for starters, of Christ’s express words?: “Love your enemies (Matt. 5, Luke 6).”  Further, how can Christians do an end run around Jesus’ explicit teaching by reverting to Old Testament endorsement of war when Jesus flatly said?: “So in everything [except war?], do to others [except your enemies? - see Matt. 5:43ff] what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets (Matt 7:12).”; and “... ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor [except your enemies?] as yourself.’  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments (Matt 22:37-40).”   

The Mumbai Bombs by Wayne Northey

July 12, 2006
21780 18th Ave.
Langley  BC
V2Z  1P8
wnorthey@peacesummit.com
(604)533-9767 (home)
(604)859-3215 (work)

Dear Editor:

    Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Peter MacKay predictably was the pot that called the kettle black in (otherwise legitimately) condemning the bombing horror in Mumbai this week.
            Last July Prime Minister Tony Blair likewise as hypocritically called the London bombings “barbaric attacks.” On September 1, 1939, President Roosevelt similarly wrote to the major powers that aerial bombing of civilians had “profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity” and was “inhuman barbarism.” He later as disingenuously referred to the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbour as a “date, which will live in infamy.” President Bush joined the pharisaical chorus in designating the September 11, 2001 attackers “evildoers.” 

Islam: A Religion of Peace? by Gord Nickel

-Gordon Nickel has a PhD in the earliest commentaries on the Koran and teaches in British Columbia.

Published: Tuesday, June 13, 2006 in National Post

The problem of Muslim radicalization has been on the agenda of all nations since 9/11. But Canada faces a unique dilemma because the doctrine of multiculturalism is seen as intrinsic to our national identity. The recent disruption of an alleged homegrown Islamist terror plot has caused many Canadians to ask: How can multiculturalism -- which preaches tolerance above all else -- be squared with a militant, intolerant creed that demonizes non-believers? This week, the National Post presents a week-long series of articles examining this question. In today's second instalment, Gordon Nickel examines the claim that Islam is inherently a 'religion of peace.'

Anglican Letter to the P.M.

June 20, 2006

The Rt. Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario  K1A 0A6

Dear Prime Minister Harper:

The Justice and Peace Unit of the Anglican Church in the Diocese of New Westminster would like to add our voice to those who call for the role of the Canadian military in Afghanistan to turn from military involvement to active support for peacemaking and reconciliation.

The areas in which the Canadian military is making a positive difference in Afghanistan seem to be in police training, rural development, land mine clearing and repatriation of refugees. These are practical and useful to the Afghan people. The other part of Canada's mission in Afghanistan, of military combat, is the destructive aspect that will not bring peace, and will not help the people re-build their lives.

Canada has got to move our military away from participation in combat and move it actively to support the Afghan Government's initiative: "National Peace and Reconciliation Commission." The Afghan government needs enhanced technical support to make such an initiative meaningful.

Our Canadian military could support such a national peacemaking initiative in helping concretely with the mechanism to make these meetings happen. There are many groupings in Afghanistan who have national concerns and they are being lumped in with terrorists. They are not terrorists. They do have national and regional grievances and want a way for these to be heard.

Canada is in the position to invest in peace in Afghanistan as part of our contribution to peace and stability in the country. The National Peace and Reconciliation established by the Afghan govenment is poorly resourced and does not have the technical capacity to run peace dialogues between various groups. Canada could help this to happen, and do what needs to be done to create an atmosphere of trust by helping in this way and getting out of the combat role.

This gap which exists right now in Afghanistan, in which very little is happening to get a peace and reconciliation initiative on a national level off the ground and working means more deaths every day. Canada could make a real difference for peace and save lives of Canadians and Afghans.

As Christians we believe that we cannot do violence to create peace. Jesus showed us in his life that violence needed to stop. We teach our children that they must solve their differences with words, and then we take our country into military combat. There can only be lasting peace when we do the long and hard work of peace. We are not helping the Afghan people at this time by having our Canadian soldiers be part of combat.

We can serve the real needs of peace with the direction of the Afghan government, by giving the technical and logistic support and the leadership needed to help bring people together in regional meetings across Afghanistan for peace and reconciliation talks.

Canada needs to live into the contribution we can make to peace in our world in Afghanistan and Darfur and other regions in the world. There, our presence as peacemakers and peacekeepers will make a long lasting difference to the lives of many.

"Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence of cemeteries. Peace is not the silence of violent repression. Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all the good of all. Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is right and duty."  Archbishop Oscar A. Romaro.

Sincerely,

The Rev. Margaret Marquardt
Chair, Justice and Peace Unite
Dioceses of New Westminister

The Rev. Don Johnson
Chair, Social Justice Committe
Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada

CC: The Hon. Bill Graham, MP
The Hon. Gilles Duceppe, MP
The Hon. Jack Layton, MP

"But I say to you..." Reflective book review of Deepak Chopra's "Peace is the Way"

Deepak Chopra’s Peace is the Way: Bringing War and Violence to an End (New York: Harmony Books, 2005). Review by Brad Jersak.

What troubled me most about Deepak Chopra’s Peace is the Way is not that the author gives no pretence of being Christian. Nor was I surprised that his deep respect for Jesus of Nazareth did not extend to a high Christology that would acknowledge Jesus as the divine Son of God. I didn’t expect that of him. No, what really bothered me was that in spite of this, Chopra sounded much more like the Jesus of the Gospels than many purportedly Christian teachers.

The Government's God-given Right to Bear the Sword by Brad Jersak

Random thoughts on Romans 12-13 with no pretence of cohesiveness...

Romans chapter 13 is often quoted by those who uphold “just war theory” in debates with those who argue for a pacifist position. Pacifists tend to dismiss this passage too easily and militarists often employ it too broadly. I’d like to revisit this difficult passage with a view to reassessing its many layers of context.

The Victorious, Weaponless King of My Heart by Brad Jersak

During the last presidential elections in the US, I was facilitating a discipleship training school on “Listening to God.” About half of these college-age students were Americans, evenly split by Republican and Democrat polarizations.

One evening, we were watching the movie video, “The Mission,” a story of colonialism, missions, and exploitation in South America. Issues of social justice and spirituality drew us into a debriefing afterwards. I asked, “What were the turning points in the faith journey of Rodrigo?” (A character played by Robert Deniro who converts from mercenary slave-trader to Jesuit missionary).

The Mother of All Heresies by Wayne Northey

“The king asked the fellow, ‘What is your idea, in infesting the sea?’ And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, ‘The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I’m called a pirate: because you have a mighty navy, you’re called an emperor.’”(1)

The war just fought against pirate Saddam Hussein and Iraq, with recently reported Iraqi civilian casualties of over 37,000 (2), is another classic instance of the pot calling the kettle black; of Emperor Bush demonstrating moral equivalency to Saddam Hussein with one strategic difference: America’s might was unparalleled, and hence, as always throughout most of history, “right.” And my fellow Evangelicals, particularly in America, backed President Bush’s War on Iraq and War on Terrorism all the way!

My biggest quarrel with my fellow Evangelicals is that, astonishingly, they teach as gospel that one may ardently evangelize “the world” and simultaneously slaughter the enemy! The “Great Evangelical Exception Doctrine,” as I like to call it, is that somehow, perhaps by divine casuistry but certainly without a shred of biblical warrant, those whom God loves—our enemies—are excluded from “the world” for which Christ died. Evangelicals flagrantly teach—against all Christian biblical witness and evangelistic call—that we may cheerfully (or sadly, it doesn’t matter in the end) do to our enemies the absolute inversion of The Great Commission: literally bomb them to hell! Not good seed indiscriminately sown in love for a harvest of life and peace; but bombs, bullets, and missiles fired for a holocaust of death and destruction.

Can anyone tell me where Jesus asked us to do this? Do Evangelicals really have in their King James Bibles (or whatever) version of John 3:16 the footnote “except our enemies” after “world,” “believeth in him,” “should not perish,” and “everlasting life,” adding to the last two: “and they must be slaughtered,” and “and they can go to hell”? Do they really practice such a blatant footnote theology?

What is most breathtaking about Jesus and the New Covenant he established is that it states in the starkest most non-negotiable and exception-less terms that “Love of God” is not a stand-alone! It is entirely predicated on “Love of Neighbour.” And Jesus repeatedly delivered the coup de grâce (Grand Evangelical irony in that term!) by teaching, modelling, and eliciting the New Testament witness that “Love of Enemies” is the final test case of “Love of Neighbour” (which is the ineluctable litmus test of “Love of God”). To deny or ignore this fact is to reject the only “Evangelical essentials” so designated by Jesus (Mark 10:21; Luke 6:27–36, 10:25–37, 42): Love God/Neighbour/Enemy indivisibly.

Søren Kierkegaard nailed this teaching when he said “Love to God and love to neighbour are like two doors that open simultaneously, so that it is impossible to open the one without opening the other, and impossible to shut one without also shutting the other.”(3) Yet when it comes to that special biblical test case of the neighbour dubbed “enemy,” the vast majority of Evangelicals—from Billy Graham to C.S. Lewis to John Stott to Charles Colson to J. I. Packer to James Dobson to Charles Swindoll (the list of noted Evangelical leaders is endless) to the average worshipper in the pew—have locked and bolted the door! They have grasped hold of the Cross—the ultimate symbol of divine/human peacemaking and reconciliation—inverted it, and thereby turned it into the very sword with which the state executed the Lord of Glory. The incongruity is utterly stark and unprecedented. A powerful potion, whose recipe is tradition, reason, and experience—but not Scripture—makes Evangelicals teach and do exactly opposite to univocal New Testament peace witness (as Jesus said more generally of the Pharisees in Matthew 23:3 and 23).

And most Evangelicals do not bat an eye! Worse, when called to account on it, “the lords of the bedchamber, our Evangelical leaders, take greater pains than ever to appear to be holding up a biblical oxymoron, namely “just war”(4) doctrine, although, in Christian biblical reality, there was no such doctrine to uphold at all.” (The Emperor’s New Clothes, Hans Christian Andersen, slightly paraphrased.)

Evangelicals normally call such deliberate rejection of Scripture and invention of extra-biblical text “Liberalism.” Jesus called it “Pharisaism.” Saddam Hussein, the West’s current “Public Enemy Number One,” might legitimately call it “the Mother of All Christian Heresies.”

(Footnotes)
(1) St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson, New York: Penguin Books, 1984, IV, 4, p. 139.

(2) Twelve times the civilian casualties of September 11, 2001, in America! See http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/083103A.shtml for more details.

(3) Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 3, 1851, p. 2434.

(4) “During the fourth and fifth centuries, the church adopted from classical thought the teaching of the just war (“War,” The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, J.D. Douglas, General Editor, p. 1029.) Saint Augustine of Hippo first developed this understanding when confronted with the horrors of a disintegrating Roman Empire. His original three criteria were: “just cause,” “legitimate authority” and “right intention.” Eventually, to these were added another three: “proportionality,” “probability of success” and “last resort.” A seventh criterion is sometimes included: “non-combatant immunity.” Of course, other criteria have been added over the years. John Howard Yoder (When War is Unjust: Being Honest in Just-War Thinking, Maryknoll, N.Y., Orbis Books, 1996) argues convincingly there has never been a “just war” fought according to Augustinian or subsequent variations on his standards in the history of the church! In any event, Augustine developed the doctrine from entirely extra-biblical sources. Lee Griffith points out that Augustine, an empire loyalist, never developed a theory of “just piracy” (see opening story by Augustine nonetheless), or “just terrorism,” or “just revolution.” Griffith cites Charles Villa-Vincencio (“Introduction”, Theology & Violence: The South African Debate, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988, p. 1): “The dominant tradition of the church has… tended to bless the state’s use of violence while condemning violent revolution against the ruling authorities.” Interesting! A biblical pox on all their houses! (See Lee Griffith, The War on Terrorism and the Terror of God, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002, p. 20.)

A Christian Reflection on War: A Response to Steven Spielberg's Movie, Saving Private Ryan by Wayne Northey

“War is hell,” observed Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman. And Steven Spielberg dips us right into its fiery midst in his 1998 Summer release.

The opening and closing scenes in particular are riveting. Says Jamie Portman of Southam Newspapers (Vancouver Sun, July 24, 1998, F1 - 4): "In Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg wanted to show the true atrocity of war, so he created one of the most brutal and graphic battle scenes ever filmed." For his part, Spielberg is quoted saying: "I've seen all the World War II movies, and with few exceptions I've never felt that they were anything more than propaganda tools." This movie puts the viewer right into the action. Adds Spielberg: "I'm asking a lot of an audience - I'm asking them to participate in the real experience of those soldiers who had to do these jobs." Tom Hanks, who plays the central character, Captain John Miller, upon viewing the movie alone in the screening room, commented: "I have never cried harder at the end of a motion picture, I was completely undone." (My dad fought in the last War. He never breathed a word of his experience to us kids. He did all his crying in private too.) The CBC movie reviewer, Rick Staehling, commented that because the movie is so incredibly graphic, it is ipso facto anti-war. The audience with which my sons and I viewed the movie laughed only once during the nearly three hours of running time, and was palpably subdued upon exiting the theatre.

War is indeed hell. Yet, in the long history of the Christian Church, apart from the earliest era, every war engaged in throughout Christendom has been supported by the Church on both sides of the conflict. How in the name of Jesus can this be?

What, for starters, of Christ's express words?: "Love your enemies (Matt. 5, Luke 6)." Further, how can Christians do an end run around Jesus' explicit teaching by reverting to Old Testament endorsement of war when Jesus flatly said?: "So in everything [except war?], do to others [except your enemies? - see Matt. 5:43ff] what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets (Matt 7:12)."; and "...'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor [except your enemies?] as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments (Matt 22:37-40)."

Or how can Christians ignore other New Testament voices such as the Apostle Paul's?: "Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another [except your enemies?], for he who loves his fellowman [except his enemies?] has fulfilled the law. The commandments, 'Do not commit adultery,' 'Do not murder,' 'Do not steal,' 'Do not covet,' and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: 'Love your neighbor [except your enemies?] as yourself.' Love does no harm to its neighbor [except your enemies?]. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law (Rom 13:8-10)." Or what of James' pithy statement?: "If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, 'Love your neighbor [except your enemies?] as yourself,' you are doing right (James 2:8)." And John's witness?: "We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother [except his non-Christian enemies?], he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother [except his enemies?], whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother [except his enemies?] (I Jn 4:19-21)." What kind of exegetical gymnastics are utilized to dodge such overwhelming and consistent New Testament testimony?

Is it possible that all these witnesses, Jesus included, did not read their Old Testaments? Or is it likelier that many Christians have not read their New Testaments? Are John 1 and Hebrews 1 not really in the Bible, both of which point to the primacy of Jesus as the final revelation of God's will?: "In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe (Heb 1:1-2)."

Like Timothy, I was raised on Scripture. From a child I could recite volumes of it, including the all-time favourite verse of evangelicalism, John 3:16 - in my case in the majestic King James Version: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

I discovered only later to my shock that apparently John 3:16 has a footnote inserted into many Christians' Bibles. It is never quoted out loud, however. But it is obviously no less binding dogma. After "world", "whosoever", and "perish" the footnote reads: "Except our enemies!". They must in fact yield or indeed "perish"! Yet, I always was told it was the "Liberals", masters of the exception clause, who played fast and loose with Scripture...

Watching Spielberg's film, with the overwhelming random slaughter and maiming, it occurred to me again that war is the most complete inversion of evangelism imaginable! Not good seed, but bullets and bombs are scattered with abandon, thereby utterly inverting the evangelistic mandate. One means "life abundant", the other delivers "death indiscriminate". In excess of 110 millions have been annihilated in largely Church-endorsed wars this century alone. I doubt if all evangelists worldwide for the entire 20th century could add up their collective catch to match that harvest of death. Yet, many evangelists in their work of "saving souls" have supported the unspeakable carnage. Is this not profoundly disturbing?! What could be more blatantly anti-Christian? Why has no major evangelistic voice spoken out? On the contrary, many evangelists, and all military chaplains, have preached to the troops at war in hopes to see them "made right with God" since tomorrow they might die. But when have those same evangelists and chaplains heeded Jesus by preaching the Gospel, lest tomorrow they might kill? How can their converts possibly be right with God when they destroy the neighbour (I John 4)? Or can "love of brother" somehow be twisted to mandate "slaughter of enemies"? And is such twisting the work of God or the work of the evil one ("Did God really say... (Gen. 3:1ff?"))? Do evangelists and chaplains know better than Jesus? Did not Jesus always call for death of self, never death of the other? Are there not two "greatest commandments", not just one? Is not love of God only half the Gospel?

What of the Apostle Paul's declaration?: "For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds (2 Cor 10:3-4)." Is war not the ultimate worldliness, a "total depravity", according to the New Testament? How can something so patently anti-Christian be so blessed by so many Christians throughout so many centuries? What kind of awesome brainwashing, what potent spell, is at work here? Dare we call it, simply, sin?

Is it possible that on this issue we have for centuries tended to be equally blind as another group of believers to whom Jesus said?: "Why is my language not clear to you? [How could Jesus' language about "love of enemies" be any clearer?] Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me (John 8:43-45)!"

Now the truth that sets us free (John 8:32) is obedience to God's will summed up in the two greatest commandments (Matt. 22; Mark 12; I John): love of God and love of neighbour. As believers, failure to love in this way is to invite Jesus' warning: "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!' Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock (Matt 7:21-24)."

Can it be, that after all, many proclaimed followers of Jesus are in fact not? Is it possible that many Christians who claim "...not I, but Christ... (Gal. 2:20, KJV)" on the contrary embrace religious nepotism, of which patriotism is its most hideous expression? For all our protestations, despite our reputed allegiance to what "The Bible says!", do we in the end deny it like the "Liberals"? Have many Christians been far closer to the spirit of Pharisaism, one of murderous prevarication, than we ever dare to admit (John 8)? Does this spirit not directly contradict the "weightier matters of the law": love of God and neighbour (Matt. 23:23, echoing Micah 6:8)? Was Gandhi right?: "The only people on earth who do not see Christ and His teachings as nonviolent are Christians." Is it thinkable that we Bible-believing Christians stand in danger one day of hearing Jesus' words: "...'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels (Matt 25:41).' ", for "... 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these [except our enemies?], you did not do for me (Matt 25:45).' " Is that not hell: the failure to love (Jesus in) the neighbour and the enemy (Matt. 5 - 7, Luke 6, I John 4)?

War is indeed hell. In the movie, Captain John Miller comments: "For every man I kill, the further I get from home." Of course! A Nazi defendant at the post-War Nuremberg Trials said: "You have defeated us Nazis. But the spirit of Nazism has arisen like a Phoenix amongst you." Precisely! We always become what we hate. When the U.S. dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, and obliterated instantaneously 100,000 lives, then three days later thousands more were slaughtered in Nagasaki (in sheer death-dealing magnitude utterly dwarfing this decade's Oklahoma City bombing), President Harry Truman declared: "That was the greatest event in human history!" This from a lay Baptist preacher and Sunday School teacher... Astounding! What, in God's name, could be a more blatant denial of the Resurrection than those bombs and that statement?! The Resurrection alone is the greatest event in human history! And it means everything war does not: life abundant and everlasting. What business did that Bible-believing Christian have in so utterly contradicting the very centrepiece of Christian faith? And did not the majority of Bible-believing Christians at the time cheer Truman on? Do not the vast majority of Bible-believing Christians still applaud the continued development of post-War weaponry and its deployment, which, in 1996 dollars in the U.S. alone, has amounted to 5.5 trillion dollars and countless lives for whom Christ died snuffed out? Where are the leading Christian voices opposing this anti-Christ obscenity? Why, in Jesus' name, are they silent? Why?! "In God we trust"? Balderdash!

"Home" (Captain Miller) ultimately is where love is. Where God is. Its opposite is hell. So hell is also war! For hell is in the end the obstinate refusal to love God and neighbour; the endless attempt at doing end runs around the two greatest commandments (Matt 25). The biblical witness is: the only test case for love of God is love of neighbour (I John 4). And the test case for love of neighbour is love of enemies (Matt. 5 - 7, Luke 6). Failure to love the enemy is failure to love God is hell.

Spielberg gets it right: war is hell, and (in this case) hell is war. The question begs asking: What business have Christians ever had propagating hell?

Protecting the Neighbourhood by Andy MacPherson

I have heard the call. I have accepted the responsibility, and I thank God my family has been chosen to be a model of justice in my neighborhood. We are a light that shines in the darkness, and darkness shall not overcome us. There is a wonder working power in the goodness, the idealism, and the faith my family possesses. We will use whatever means necessary to defend our freedom and to make our neighborhood secure. We are here to defend the hopes of all mankind and to eliminate evil.

The other day I saw my neighbours moving some stuff around in their house, and I said to myself, “Dear God, they are making a bomb!” I knew this, because these people had towels wrapped around their heads, and we all know what those people are like. I called some of my friends over and showed them, but they weren’t too sure. They suggested I wait and see before I busted in their front door and started shooting. I told them I was confident we would find all the evidence we needed once we were inside.

“Are you with me?” I yelled in an inspiring shout for freedom.

“No, it’s illegal!” They yelled back, then went home.

“If you’re not with me, you’re against me,” I shouted after them. One British guy and his family from across the lake stuck around, but that was it. “We are fighting evil here ,you bunch of cowards. We are fighting for peace,” I said to no one.

We armed our children and surrounded our neighbour’s house then demanded they let us in to check the place out.

“No bombs here,” the leader of that household said in broken English. He was lying, because, as we all know, people who can’t speak English properly are habitual liars. I insisted a neighborhood delegation be allowed in to check it out. Finally they agreed, but we couldn’t find much. All this proved was that they had lying down to a fine art.

“No bombs here” he lied again, obviously insulting my intelligence. So we blew in his front door, back door, windows, and roof. I was proud to watch my boys rock the neighborhood with massive explosions. Our wonder-working power put on a hell of a good show. We shattered his house with technical precision, although, unfortunately, we had to shoot some of his children who got in the way. It was good chance to try out some new guns though.

“It’s like a giant video game!” My youngest shouted with delight as the front porch disappeared in a ball of fire. Some of my sons carried video cameras instead of guns to keep us all updated as to what was happening. Another son compassionately edited out the really gruesome scenes, because if there is anything I hate, it’s gratuitous violence on TV. Once the house was secure, we turned the place inside out. We tore out walls and dug up floors.

“No bombs here,” one of my sons reported in perfect English after the dust settled and we had the head of the house under citizens’ arrest.

The neighborhood had all gathered to watch the show. “We haven’t found any of the bomb stuff yet, but we’re sure it is here somewhere,” I assured them. “What we have found though is evidence that he was beating his children.” Unfortunately, just at that moment, some of the children we had just killed to restore peace to this suffering household were carried past. This seemed to distract our neighbours from fully appreciating the safer neighborhood we had created for them. Their ungratefulness really hurt, and I just could not understand why they hated us so much. I figured they were feeling guilty for not helping, so I offered them a second chance. “How would you guys like to help with the cleanup, repairs and perhaps some childcare? I don’t think it’s fair that we have to do everything. After all, we’ve made the neighbourhood a safer place for everyone, not just our family.” But they just shook their heads and went home.

“What would Jesus do?” I called after them as Jesus’ smashed body was carried past to be stacked with the rest of the collateral damage.

Andy MacPherson is a writer who also serves as a care worker for people with disabilities at Bethesda Christian Homes.

Reflections on Gettysburg by Brad Jersak

There are no enemies, only mortals forced to make critical decisions of allegiance and survival amid the horrors of armed conflict (Cf. the back cover of "Gods and Generals" by Jeff Shaara). The American civil war, which sacrificed more American lives than both world wars combined, was an orgy of bloodshed performed under banners of freedom, liberty, honour, and duty. Brother slew brother as the American dream was melted down and refashioned into a meat-grinder, churning out widows and orphans while opposing sides continued to worship one God while serving quite another.

Is Violence Master of Us All?: Fight, Flight or Just Peacemaking (Part 1) by Wayne Northey

Introduction “Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world (Wink, 1992, p. 13).”, writes one contemporary cultural observer and New Testament theologian, Walter Wink. More than any religious spirituality, including Christian, violence is the cultural air we breathe. This past century has seen more people slaughtered than all previous centuries combined - 107 millions in wars and regional conflicts by the mid-90’s. And Christians have led, blessed, and participated in the vast majority of this killing, and continue to do so into the third millennium. Yet this massive slaughter has been carried on in a world ostensibly dominantly under the sway of Christian spirituality. Is it therefore to be concluded that a Christian worldview and praxis lead ineluctably to an ultimate bloodthirsty spirituality, and therefore the sooner eradicated from the human cultural landscape, the better? Or is there “something rotten in the state of Denmark?” - in the worldwide expression of Christianity that is profoundly aberrant from the way and teachings of its Founder? That is the thesis of brilliant 19th century Danish theologian and social theorist Søren Kierkegaard, founder of existentialism. He wrote: “My position is that the whole prevailing official proclamation of Christianity is a conspiracy against the Bible - we suppress what does not suit us (quoted in Bellinger, 2001, p. 98).” There is doubtless a mixed group here tonight in terms of faith background and commitment. I shall nonetheless unapologetically spend a significant part of tonight’s presentation on Western understandings of violence and peacemaking with reference to Christianity. The defining religious ethos of Western spirituality historically has been Christianity. Christianity has also been the reigning ideology in the West until into the nineteenth century. While it is salutary to discuss other world spiritualities with reference to violence and peacemaking, no other religion or spirituality has remotely impacted the formation of the West like Christianity. While one cannot wish away the past, can it be too much to hope that the twenty-first century for Christian spirituality world-wide will be marked by a profound renewed impulse towards peacemaking? Such a world-transforming spirituality has never been more needed! It is the contention of this paper that the Christian story offers a dramatically alternative narrative to that of resort to violence, seen unfortunately so predominantly in Christianity’s long history. I will argue that the story the Christian faith tells is eternal wellspring for the spirituality of nonviolence, however massively unfaithful Christian adherents have been to the plot-line down through the ages (1). I shall return to the issue below of the “massive faithlessness” of the church. Pre-Christian Origin of Contemporary Ethos of Violence Walter Wink traces Western history’s central ethos of violence to the Babylonian creation myth in existence well over a thousand years before Christ. Creation is seen in Babylonian religion as a fundamentally formative an act of violence. “The creation myth, Enuma Elish, tells the story of Apsu (the male, primeval sweet water ocean) and Tiamat (the female, primeval salt water ocean). From the commingling of the two waters came divine offspring, who in turn gave birth to more generations of gods. The young gods, however, disturbed the peace of Tiamat and Apsu, who decided to destroy the younger generation of gods. Apsu was killed before he could carry out his evil plans. Tiamat, enraged, planned evil against her offspring to avenge Apsu. The young gods then asked the young upstart, Marduk, to lead them in battle. Marduk agreed, defeated Tiamat’s forces and sliced her carcass in two, creating from the one half the firmament of heaven and from the other half the foundation of the earth. Thus, Marduk created order out of the chaos of the waters. With the cosmos now in place, the gods started to complain to Marduk that they had too much work to do in the newly created universe. Marduk, therefore, created humans to do the work. He created the first human beings out of the blood of Tiamat’s second husband and captain of her army, Kingu. “This story shows that in the Babylonian worldview there was no absolute preference for good over evil. ‘Evil’ is already planned by Apsu and Tiamat before the universe has come into being (I.52; II.3). It is a normal part of the universe, not a later, alien intrusion into a fundamentally good world. Power is the ultimate morality. It is only ‘by violence that the youngest of the gods establishes order (Ricoeur, 1969, p. 179).’ Moreover, the violence among the gods in turn justifies human violence. The Babylonian king receives his authority from the gods. Paul Ricoeur, in his analysis of the Babylonian creation myth, makes the point that the king represents the god who in violence has overcome chaos. This means that the king’s enemy represents the forces of evil, the resurgence of chaos (Ricoeur 1969, p. 196). ‘Heavenly events are mirrored by earthly events, and what happens above happens below’ (Wink, 1992, p. 15). Polytheism here does not offer a solution to violence; rather, it covers the origin and life of both gods and humans with the blood of violence (Boersma, 1999).” Creation is a violent victory over an enemy older than creation. Evil is prior to good. Violence is in the godhead itself. Humanity is created out of bloody violence, and hence humans are seen to be violent to the very core. “The distinctive feature of the myth,” explains Walter Wink, “is the victory of order over chaos by means of violence. This myth is the original religion of the status quo, the first articulation of ‘might makes right’.” He continues: “Peace through war, security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion (Wink, 1992, pp. 16 & 17).” With rare exceptions, this myth permeates contemporary culture the world over. This “religion” is at the heart of Western culture, in particular North American society, like no other rival such as Judaism or Christianity. It is pervasive in children’s comics and cartoon shows. “In a period when Christian Sunday schools are dwindling, the myth of redemptive violence has won children’s voluntary acquiescence to a regimen of religious indoctrination more exhaustive and effective than any in the history of religions. Estimates vary widely, but the average child is reported to log roughly thirty-six thousand hours of television by age eighteen, including some fifteen thousand murders. In prime-time evening shows, our children are served up about sixteen entertaining acts of violence (two of them lethal) every night; on the weekend the number of violent acts almost doubles (thirty). By age sixteen, the average child spends as much time watching television as in school (Wink, 1992, p. 23).” On my wall at work used to be a poster which read: “If ‘prison is a school for crime’, is television its kindergarten?” Christian Origin and History of Contemporary Christian Ethos of Violence There is no question that Emperor Constantine, who first legalized Christian worship in the early fourth century, also caused the Church to embrace for the first time an ethic of state violence which Christians have largely endorsed ever since. This began particularly to emerge after the “Papal Revolution” of the 11th century. In this century, Saint Anselm of Canterbury wrote a famous treatise, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), on the atonement. The “atonement” is about the effect of Christ’s death on the cross. There have been four discernible views of the atonement in the history of the church, of which the second chronologically, the “satisfaction theory”, has been the most dominant in Western history since the 11th century. “The second group of theories may be said to have originated with Anselm, who saw sin as dishonor to the majesty of God. On the cross the God-man rendered satisfaction for this dishonor. Along similar lines the Reformers thought that Christ paid the penalty sinners incurred when they broke God’s law (Morris, “Atonement”, p. 83).” Without elaboration, Anselm’s theory created a cultural “structure of affect” (2) that understood God’s justice in primarily violent terms: God clearly demanded blood satisfaction for wrongs against him, like feudal lords did in the society of the time. It was and is consequently not a big step for Christians who believe the satisfaction theory of the atonement to employ violence in the pursuit of justice. This pursuit has dominated Western Christendom ever since. 1. A Short History of Christian Violence (3) a. As Christianity expanded in the Roman Empire during its first three centuries it met with significant resistance from the governmental authorities, which often took the form of direct persecutions resulting in Christian martyrdoms. During this period, Christians were, generally speaking, the recipients of violence rather than perpetrators. After Christianity became a tolerated and then an official religion, however, it became much more common for violent acts to be carried out by Christians. b. A notable example is the execution of Priscillian, a Spanish ascetic. His enemies in the Spanish church lobbied the Emperor Maximus, and succeeded in obtaining his condemnation for heresy. Priscillian and one of his followers, the noblewoman Eucrotia, were beheaded in 384. This was the first case in which heretics had been formally tried, convicted, and executed through the cooperation of church and state, foreshadowing the extensive powers of the Medieval Inquisition (Dowley, 1995, 150-151). c. In the year 390, the people of Thessalonica murdered the military commander of the city. The Christian Emperor Theodosius ordered a massacre of the city’s inhabitants, which resulted in more than 7,000 deaths. Under pressure of excommunication, exerted by Ambrose, Theodosius publicly repented of his sin (Dowley, 1995, p. 151). d. The Crusades were a series of military expeditions organized by Western European Christians, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in an effort to recover the Holy Land from the Muslim “infidels.” The first Crusade was very successful militarily, achieving several victories over the “Turks” as the Western armies advanced toward Jerusalem. On July 1, 1097, one of the main Muslim armies was defeated and almost completely decimated by the Crusaders. Two years later the Crusaders reached Jerusalem and captured it after a relatively brief siege. In the course of taking the city they massacred most of the inhabitants—men, women, and children. Jerusalem was described by observers as being “awash in a sea of blood.” The Crusaders saw their actions as being an expression of God’s righteous judgment on the Muslim “infidels” who deserved to die for their rejection of Christ and their “desecration” of the Holy City. Various subsequent Crusades were carried out during the next two centuries, most resulting in military failure or short-lived Latin kingdoms in the East. The net result of the Crusades was to further separate the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity from each other and to ensure the alienation of the Muslim world from Christianity—an alienation which to a large extent has continued up to the present day (Dowley, 1995, pp. 278 - 279). Between 1209 and 1229 a Crusade was organized against the Albigensian heretics in southern France. Because a significant portion of the nobility of that region had sided with the Albigensians, the fighting was long and drawn-out, resulting in tremendous loss of life. The Roman Catholic bishop of the city of Bézier, when asked by the besieging soldiers how to tell the heretics from the orthodox, is reported to have said: “Kill them all, God will sort them out.” e. The Inquisition was the internal European institution which corresponded to the external Crusades. Its main function was to identify and punish the “infidels” within the Western world who were perceived as a threat to society. The Inquisition was organized in the first half of the thirteenth century, largely in response to the Albigensian heresy in France, but its power was soon extended into many areas of Europe. Typically, the Inquisitors would enter a city and establish a court. They would summon all heretics to come forward and confess their heresy. Those who did so were treated with relative leniency. Those who were accused of heresy by others and found guilty were punished more severely, sometimes with death (at the hands of the civil authorities, not the Inquisitors themselves). In 1252 Pope Innocent IV officially approved the use of torture by the Inquisition to extract “the truth” from defendants. Justification for this procedure was found in the tradition of Roman law. Methods of torture included the rack and placing hot coals on the soles of the feet. At the close of the court proceedings, the sentences of those found guilty were announced publicly in a ceremony referred to as an auto-da-fé—an “act of faith (Dowley,1995, pp. 321-324).” In 1478 a relatively autonomous branch of the Inquisition was established with papal approval in Spain. It carried out a campaign against Jews and Muslims whose conversions to Christianity were thought to be insincere, against “witches,” and in later decades against those accused of Protestant leanings. Tomás de Torquemada, the notorious Grand Inquisitor of Spain, burned at the stake thousands of alleged heretics between 1487 and 1498. The Spanish Inquisition was not formally dissolved until 1834 (O’Malley, 1996). The Dominican order provided most of the key inquisitors during the thirteenth century, and their leading theologian, Thomas Aquinas, attempted to justify the practice of executing heretics in his Summa Theologiae. To establish the legitimacy of executing heretics he quotes Titus 3:10-11: “After a first and second admonition, have nothing more to do with anyone who causes divisions [a heretic], since you know that such a person is perverted and sinful, being self-condemned.” Thomas assumes that the phrase “have nothing more to do with” legitimates the killing of human beings. He argues that since forgers of money are put to death by the civil authorities it is even more imperative for heretics to be killed because “it is a much graver matter to corrupt faith (Aquinas, 1988, p. 256).” The Church hopes for the conversion of the heretic, thus allowing him to respond to a “first and second admonition.” But if he remains unrepentant, then the Church ceases to hope for his conversion and “looks to the salvation of others by excommunicating him and separating him from the Church, and furthermore delivers him to the secular tribunal to be exterminated thereby from the world by death.” Aquinas quotes Jerome in support of this course of action: “Cut off the decayed flesh, expel the mangy sheep from the fold, lest the whole house, the whole dough, the whole body, the whole flock burn, perish, rot, die.” The Waldensians were one of the groups particularly targeted for persecution by the Inquisition. Their principal crime was questioning the claim of the Roman Church to be the true Church of Christ. They sought to distinguish themselves from what they perceived as the avarice and moral laxity of the Roman Church by living lives of strict poverty and obedience to scripture. They went from town to town preaching sermons from biblical texts. Their success in gaining converts in many areas of Europe alarmed the papacy and led to official attempts at repression by the Inquisition. These attempts did not succeed in wiping out the Waldensians, however, but only in forcing them into an underground or a rural existence, which they maintained from the thirteenth century until the sixteenth, at which time many of their ideas entered into the mainstream of the Protestant Reformation (Dowley, 1995, pp. 327 - 329). f. In the early fifteenth century, a somewhat similar reforming movement came into existence in Bohemia: the Hussites. Jan Hus, their leader, was greatly influenced by the writings of John Wyclif. He thus stressed scripture as the supreme authority over popes and cardinals. He criticized corruption in the clergy, worship of images, and “superstitious pilgrimages.” He was called before the Council of Constance in 1415 to defend himself against charges of heresy. Although he had been promised “safe passage,” he was burned at the stake without being given a full opportunity to defend his views (Dowley, 1995, p. 336). During the sixteenth century, many Protestants were killed by the Roman Church for holding views similar to those of the Hussites. William Tyndale, for example, was burned at the stake by imperial authorities in 1536, his crime being unauthorized translation of the Bible into vernacular English. g. The magisterial reformers, Luther and Calvin, were not much different from the Roman Catholic leaders of the day with regard to their attitudes toward violence. Luther’s teachings had indirectly contributed to the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany in the 1520s. Luther called for suppression of the rebellious peasants in these well-known words: “Let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog (Porter, 1974, p. 86).” In 1525, about 50,000 peasants were slaughtered by the German princes, urged on by Luther. The Consistory in Calvin’s Geneva burned at the stake the anti-Trinitarian heretic Michael Servetus in 1553. Calvin is reputed to have favoured beheading as a more humane form of execution in this case. Nevertheless, he approved of the Consistory’s decision, and said that Servetus “cried like a Spaniard” as he was being burned. h. The Catholics and the Protestants were united in their fear and loathing of the Anabaptists (forerunners of the Mennonites), who had the audacity to proclaim that Christians should not be in the business of killing. For teaching this they were killed. The following transcript of the trial of Anabaptist leader Michael Sattler conveys the atmosphere of the time very effectively. After giving a speech to the court outlining the basic points of Anabaptist doctrine, Sattler concludes: “Whereas, then, we have not acted contrary to God and the gospel, you will find that neither I nor my brethren and sisters have offended in word or deed against any authority. Therefore, ministers of God, if you have neither heard nor read the Word of God, send for the most learned men and for the sacred books of the Bible in whatsoever language they may be and let them confer with us in the Word of God. If they prove to us with the Holy Scriptures that we err and are in the wrong, we will gladly desist and recant and also willingly suffer the sentence and punishment for that of which we have been accused; but if no error is proven to us, I hope to God that you will be converted and receive instruction.” Upon this speech the judges laughed and put their heads together, and the town clerk of Ensisheim said: “Yes, you infamous, desperate rascal of a monk, should we dispute with you? The hangman will dispute with you, I assure you!” … One of the prisoners also said: “We must not depart from the truth.” The town clerk: “Yes, you desperate villain, you arch heretic, I say, if there were no hangman here, I would hang you myself and be doing God a good service thereby.” … The judges having returned to the room, the sentence was read. It was as follows: “In the case of the attorney of His Imperial Majesty vs. Michael Sattler, judgment is passed that Michael Sattler shall be delivered to the executioner, who shall lead him to the place of execution and cut out his tongue, then forge him fast to a wagon and thereon with red-hot tongs twice tear pieces from his body; and after he has been brought outside the gate, he shall be plied five times more in the same manner….” After this had been done in the manner prescribed, he was burned to ashes as a heretic. His fellow brethren were executed with the sword, and the sisters drowned. His wife, also after being subjected to many entreaties, admonitions, and threats, under which she remained steadfast, was drowned a few days afterward (Hunston, 1957, pp. 141 - 144). Scenes such as this were repeated many times during the sixteenth century, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Anabaptists, who were perceived as dangerous heretics attacking the very foundations of Western Christian culture. Indeed, the Anabaptists were attacking these foundations, insofar as they were generated by a scapegoat mechanism rather than the teachings of Christ. i. Violence between Catholics and Protestants occurred sporadically during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, erupting finally on a grand scale in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) (Dowley, 1995, p. 427). During this period the Catholic armies of the Holy Roman Empire entered into battles with the Protestant armies of Bohemia, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. Success and defeat ebbed and flowed for both sides for many years. Most of the fighting took place in Germany, resulting in widespread devastation. Historians estimate that the overall population of Germany was reduced by fifteen to twenty percent. Later in the war the Catholic armies of France entered into war with the Catholic armies of the Empire, for motives that were more political than religious. j. The American Civil War took place between 1861 and 1865. Historians estimate that 620,000 persons died in the war (Litwack, 1996). On both sides there were Christian soldiers ministered to and encouraged by chaplains who claimed that God was on their side. k. In the 20th century, about 110 millions were slaughtered in two Great World Wars, and hundreds of lesser conflicts. Christian chaplains were found in all countries under Christian sway fully supportive of their nation’s war efforts. When for instance President Truman watched the detonation in the Nevada desert of the world’s first nuclear bomb, he declared it was the greatest event in the history of the human race! Now Truman was a Baptist Sunday School teacher who supposedly believed in the Resurrection… Shortly after the first test explosion, two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, under Truman’s authority, and with subsequent full blessing of American Protestant, Evangelical, and Catholic churches, instantly killing about 120,000 civilian men, women, and children in those cities. A few months earlier, with similar support by Allied Christians the world over, 100,000 civilian men, women, and children were slaughtered in one night of a conventional incendiary bombing raid on Tokyo, Japan. In addition, over eighty Japanese cities, and forty-two German cities, for several years, were bombed regularly. The targets were primarily residential and civilian, not military and industrial. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children lost their lives. Father George Zebalka was the Catholic chaplain with the US Army air force who blessed the men who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. He said this in a Sojourners interview 21 years ago (August, 1980): “The mainline Christian churches still teach something that Christ never taught or even hinted at, namely the just war theory, a theory that to me has been completely discredited theologically, historically, and psychologically. “So as I see it, until the various churches within Christianity repent and begin to proclaim by word and deed what Jesus proclaimed in relation to violence and enemies, there is no hope for anything other than ever-escalating violence and destruction.” Richard Hays has written: “One reason that the world finds the New Testament’s message of peacemaking and love of enemies incredible is that the church is so massively faithless. On the question of violence, the church is deeply compromised and committed to nationalism, violence, and idolatry (1996, p. 343).” If the essence of the “law” - of how we should live -, according to Jesus is justice, mercy and faithfulness (Matt. 23:23 - compare to Micah 6:8, high water mark of OT spirituality), the church stands overwhelmingly guilty of faithlessness on the issue of violence. Spiritual Origin of Violence Violence is not necessarily found in all human societies past or present. It is possible that widespread violence, developing into what one author calls a “Domination System” (Wink, 1992), emerged in human history only after a certain degree of societal density, complexity and conflict had been reached. According to René Girard, however, who has been studying violence and its cultural origins during the past 40 years, violence is basic to human society from its earliest beginnings. In fact, Girard presents a convincing case that the origin of all culture, past and present, no exceptions, is violence, or what he calls “the founding murder”. Violence is in fact what creates social cohesion, indispensable for human culture to emerge. Violence within a given society, argues Girard, builds up to a certain point, then erupts into uncontrolled mayhem. The impetus towards violence arises from what Girard calls “mimetic desire”: imitating the desire of another. So for example, a child in the nursery picks up a toy, and suddenly another child in the nursery wants it, and only it. And violence erupts! This is how Tom Sawyer in Mark Twain’s classic got his fence painted, and how Madison Avenue entices the world to part with its money! Violence generally follows from this “mimetic desire” - this covetousness. As the biblical writer James puts it succinctly: “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but you don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight (4:1 & 2).” According to Girard, the origin of violence is as simple, yet as profound, as our desires going unchecked until they explode into violence. The biblical story of the first murder is a classic illustration of this: Cain desires what his brother has – God’s favour. And he kills for it. But of course alienation, not relationship, results. Girard argues convincingly that all culture arises from a “founding murder” that is preserved for us worldwide in all cultural mythologies. And the guardian of this violence has been the “sacred” institutions in any given society. In a secular society, the “sacred” is simply more hidden, though no less there. The most apparent is the criminal justice system in any Western liberal democracy – and elsewhere! Universal Responses to Violence: Scapegoat Mechanism Girard goes on to explain that, once violence has erupted, it threatens the well-being of the community. So a scapegoat must be found to siphon off the violence. In most societies, religious institutions traditionally served to create and/or oversee a “scapegoat mechanism” by which the scapegoat could be identified and sacrificed. All according to a strict ritual. “Religion is therefore, according to Girard, organized violence in the service of tranquillity. Religion covers up the sacrificial mechanism by means of myth, ritual, and prohibition (Wink, 1992, p. 146).” And humanity is thereby inescapably religious, even in this present Western most “secular” of all eras. As said, in our secularized West, with the demise of religious institutions widely influencing society, the criminal justice system in fact usually takes the place of religion in operating the scapegoat mechanism (Redekop, 1993). The courthouse may be seen as the modern cathedral, perpetuating myths about crime, following elaborate rituals, and acting on legislative prohibitions of certain behaviour. But “‘Everybody Does It!’”: crime is in fact opportunistically committed by the vast majority of Canadians, according to a major study by a Canadian criminologist (Gabor, 1994.) So the scapegoating of only certain criminals for punishment is extremely selective. (For instance, only one to three percent of all criminals who actually commit Criminal Code of Canada offences go to prison.) A further problem is, the scapegoat mechanism only siphons off the violence for a time. It in no way is capable of removing violence altogether, for violence in fact is foundational to it. This is the dilemma of all human cultures built upon a scapegoat mechanism. It is the ongoing participation in the Babylonian creation myth that violence is legitimate: so long as it is appropriately channelled through a religious mechanism or a secular means such as criminal justice, with all its prohibitions, rituals, and myths. Violence never removes, rather it breeds, violence. Jesus’ Alternative to Violence Jesus offered and modelled a ‘third way’ in response to violence that takes one from a flight or fight response, to transformative “just peacemaking” initiatives in the face of violence. Paul Anderson sums this up well in an essay entitled, “Jesus and Peace”. “Finally, [Walter] Wink argues that these instructions [about turning the other cheek, etc.] must be read in light of Matt. 5:39a, which is often mistranslated “Do not resist an evildoer.” Wink judges that a more correct interpretation of the text does not negate resistance, but only violent resistance; what Jesus forbids is ‘to resist violently, to revolt or rebel, to engage in an insurrection [1987, p. 185]’. One might also amplify the sentence to read, ‘But I tell you, do not counterstrike the evildoer; but if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn and face him, offering also the other.’ The implication is that evil cannot be overcome by evil means. When one responds violently to violence, evil wins a double victory. First, its essential nature remains unexposed and thereby it prolongs its life. Second, it succeeds in seducing those with good intentions into its way. History is full of examples of revolutionaries who became what they had originally hated: oppressors. Jesus’ strategy brings true reform and avoids this tragic end. Says Wink, His way aims at converting the opponent; failing that, it hopes for accommodation, where the opponent is willing to make some changes simply to get the protesters off his back. But if that fails too, nonviolence entails coercion: the opponent is forced to make a change rather than suffer the loss of power, even though he remains hostile. But Jesus’ way does not employ violent coercion [1987, p. 192]. “The strength of Wink’s interpretation of Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence is that it clearly portrays the third way Jesus instructed his disciples to follow. Jesus advocated neither a fight nor a flight response to domination, but a nonviolent, redemptive engagement of the powers that be. While he did not aspire to be a political leader in the popular sense, his teaching was thoroughly political in its implications. It aimed at nothing short of creating a new earth in which God’s just and loving will would be done as perfectly as in heaven (Anderson, 1994, pp. 118 & 119).” But there is a profound tension, as indicated, between this way of Jesus lived and taught, and the ensuing New Testament documents in line with that way, and church history that unfolded since in response to Jesus. Richard Hays, in a major work entitled The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996), puts the issue pointedly: “This is the place where New Testament ethics confronts a profound methodological challenge on the question of violence, because the tension is so severe between the unambiguous witness of the New Testament canon and the apparently countervailing forces of tradition, reason, and experience (p. 341).” In an entire chapter devoted to whether New Testament teaching in any way warrants Christians to support violence to achieve justice, Hays concludes: “Our exegetical illustration of Matthew 5:38—48 has led to the conclusion that the passage teaches a norm of nonviolent love of enemies…. The question that we must now consider is how Matthew’s vision of the peaceful community fits into the larger witness of the canonical New Testament. Do the other texts in the canon reinforce the Sermon on the Mount’s teaching on nonviolence, or do they provide other options that might allow or require Christians to take up the sword? “When the question is posed this way, the immediate result—as Barth observed — is to underscore how impressively univocal is the testimony of the New Testament writers on this point (p. 329).” There is one consistent New Testament voice on the theme of violence: its rejection! Why then, if the New Testament is so consistent in its witness for nonviolent peacemaking, should commitment to nonviolence be the overwhelming minority position of the Christian church? Hays again: “One reason… is that the church is so massively faithless. On the question of violence, the church is deeply compromised and committed to nationalism, violence, and idolatry. (By comparison, our problems with sexual sin are trivial.) This indictment applies alike to liberation theologies that justify violence against oppressors and to establishment Christianity that continues to play chaplain to the military-industrial complex, citing just war theory and advocating the defense of a particular nation as though that were somehow a Christian value (p. 343).” What ever happened to following Jesus on the issue of violence? What About Violence in the Bible? Once, when I was teaching a Sunday School class on the Luke 6 passage, which specifically enjoins love for the enemy, and indicates that God is merciful to the wicked every bit as much as to the good, a man in exasperation said that Jesus may say that in this passage, but there are lots of other passages where he could get the kind of message towards criminals he wanted: retribution pure and simple! Another time, in an evening forum on capital punishment organized by a criminology class in a community college, I was asked to present a Christian perspective. Three others gave varying views. During the response time, a man indicated he was directing his remarks towards me. He began by quoting the King James Version of Matthew 23:23: “ye... have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment...!” He fairly thundered the last word, then proceeded with a diatribe against me and my ilk so full of invective that, had capital punishment been on the books for misinterpretation of Scripture, I think by his reckoning I would have been on death row. The point is, both these people are right. They are drawing on wellsprings of violence attributed to God in the Bible. (Though Matt. 23:23 actually continues with the words “mercy, and faithfulness”, drawing on Micah 6:8, which specifically calls God’s people to practise “justice” - the preferred translation, not judgment - for the poor, the widow, etc. - instead of scapegoating!) There are, for instance, “six hundred passages of explicit violence in the Hebrew Bible, one thousand verses where God’s own violent actions of punishment are described, a hundred passages where Yahweh expressly commands others to kill for no apparent reason... Violence... is easily the most mentioned activity and central theme of the Hebrew Bible (Wink, 1992, p. 146).” And there are portions of Revelation and other texts scattered about the New Testament with a violent tinge or avowal. The sacrificial system of the Old Testament embraces the scapegoat mechanism. The beginning of the Hebrew religion is the scapegoating of an animal instead of a human being, in the surrogate sacrifice of a ram instead of Isaac. Animal sacrifice in the Old Testament is never far from human sacrifice. There is a move away from this scapegoat mechanism, especially during the time of the later prophets (Barbé, 1989, pp.24ff.) For instance Micah identifies animal sacrifice as child sacrifice disguised in the very passage Jesus draws on in Matthew 23. Hosea rejects all sacrifice except sincere conversion of the heart. The New Testament however teaches in John 1 and Hebrews 1 that we read the Bible through the work and words of Jesus. Jesus is our “hermeneutical” or interpretative lens enabling us rightly to understand God’s Word. And it is in Jesus that we meet sacrifice only to find in his teaching and through the Cross its complete rejection. “It is mercy I desire and not sacrifice” Jesus says straightforwardly, quoting from Hosea 6:6 (Matt. 9:13). Jesus moves “from the logic of the scapegoat - that of the compulsory sacrifice - to the logic of the Lamb of God - that of the freely offered sacrifice of the innocent one, the righteous one (Barbé, 1989, p. 6).” According to the book of Hebrews, Jesus is the last scapegoat sent to reconcile us, once for all, to God (Hebrews 10:5 - 10 and others). According to I John, Jesus was the “...atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world (2:2).” No one ever need atone for sins - his or hers - again! Hays says: “This is the point at which one of the methodological guidelines proposed in Part III must come into play: the New Testament’s witness is finally normative. If irreconcilable tensions exist between the moral vision of the New Testament and that of particular Old Testament texts, the New Testament vision trumps the Old Testament. Just as the New Testament texts render judgments superseding the Old Testament requirements of circumcision and dietary laws, just as the New Testament’s forbidding of divorce supersedes the Old Testament’s permission of it, so also Jesus’ explicit teaching and example of nonviolence reshapes our understanding of God and of the covenant community in such a way that killing enemies is no longer a justifiable option. The sixth antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount marks the hermeneutical watershed. As we have noted, the Old Testament distinguishes the obligation of loving the neighbor (that is, the fellow Israelite) from the response to enemies: [B]ut I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” Once that word has been spoken to us and perfectly embodied in the story of Jesus’ life and death, we cannot appeal back to Samuel as a counterexample to Jesus. Everything is changed by the cross and resurrection. We now live in a situation in which we confess that ‘in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us’ (2 Cor. 5:19). Those who have been entrusted with such a message will read the Old Testament in such a way that its portrayals of God’s mercy and eschatological restoration of the world will take precedence over its stories of justified violence (pp. 336 & 7).” Jesus shatters for all time the legitimacy of the scapegoat mechanism. From his time on, no enemy may ever be put outside the circle of God’s or our love. Love in the New Testament in fact means the concrete embracing of the other to make that person a friend. The Biblical Interpretation Dilemma An unusual picture was once circulated around our Church when I was a kid. I remember it well. The brief notation below the picture explained that a man had been travelling along the highway after a pristine snowfall sparkled its brightness everywhere under a glorious sun. At one point he stopped, and noticed an unusual play of shadow against the backdrop of the freshly fallen snow. Being an amateur photographer with his own dark room, he took out his camera and snapped a few pictures of the strange phenomenon. He was astounded when, upon developing them, one in particular displayed an amazing likeness to the traditional artists’ depictions of the face of Jesus. We all were invited to see what he saw. What I saw first however, as did most, were dark blotches against a snow-white background. There was no face of any kind to see. Except there was! It took some doing, some adjusting, some intense looking, but finally I got it! Then, what was fascinating after that was, no matter how I looked at the picture, sidewards glance, upside down, back to front even when held against a clear window, in a mirror, etc., I never failed immediately to recognize the face of Jesus in that photo. We all know this phenomenon.  There is a technical term for it that escapes me. But some never did see the face.  Their eyes simply never adjusted.  They even doubted that we who saw really “saw”. Theology means literally, a word, or words about God. What theology really is concerning is creating for us, the believer, an accurate word-picture of God’s face. Unfortunately – or fortunately! - there are no artists’ drawings of the real face of Jesus that have come down to us. So we have to discover the face of Jesus, and thereby the face of God, we Christians say, somehow in the written word - the Bible. The data of Scripture, in ongoing dialogue with Christians’ interpretations through the ages and our faith community’s understandings today all help us throughout our lives to form an ever sharper image of God. Once an editor (in his 50’s) of a theological piece I had written and was publishing said to me as the task was completed: “I have never been able to shake a picture of God I have had since my childhood. That picture is one of a God who is stern, harsh, totally demanding, punitive, a ‘Hangin’ Judge’ ready to condemn me severely for anything I do wrong, and likely to relegate me to hellfire should I ever so slightly step out of line.” He was a Christian, to be sure, and a faithful church-goer, he acknowledged, but he wasn’t entirely sure that spending an eternity with such a “god” would not be more like his understanding of hell! The dilemma we are in can be put as an analogy. The Bible is like a monstrous jigsaw puzzle, with a vast number of individual pieces to it. It’s in fact the Ultimate Cosmic Jigsaw Puzzle, we Christians believe! I have seen once in my life the kind of jigsaw puzzle I am comparing the Bible to: one with identically shaped pieces. In the puzzle I saw, they were all squares. Now, it was a daunting enough task to put the puzzle together that I saw with the original box and the picture on it. Try doing an identically shaped pieces jigsaw puzzle sometime! But what if there were rival box cover pictures, and debate about which was the authentic one? I am suggesting that the biblical data is precisely like that kind of jigsaw puzzle with identically shaped pieces – and lots of date about the authentic box cover picture! I’m suggesting further that we would have no hope of putting it together at all were it not for the face of Jesus we discover in the New Testament revelation, which becomes for us the ultimate picture of the face of God. I am suggesting that all other box covers than that of Jesus as seen in the New Testament revelation, are inadequate or wrong. But I am suggesting further that it is nonetheless difficult to see the face of Jesus properly. For some who say they “see”, what is seen are “dark blotches”: the face still of violence. And I think that one in that case does not really “see”. Piece together the jigsaw puzzle when one only sees dark blotches instead of the New Testament portrait of Jesus, and one’s picture of God will turn out entirely differently from doing it with the face of Jesus seen aright! But that begs the very question, does it not? ENDNOTES (1) “Stanley Hauerwas has suggested that the only thing that makes the Christian church different from any other group in society is that the church is the only community that gathers around the true story. It is not the piety, or the sincerity, or the morality of the church that distinguishes us (Christians have no monopoly on virtue). It is the story we treasure, the story from which we derive our identity, our vision, and our values. And for us to do that would be a horrible mistake, if it were not a true story, indeed the true story, which exposes the lies, deceptions, and half-truths upon which human beings and human societies so often stake their lot (Marshall, 2000, p. 13.)”   (2)  This is Timothy Gorringe’s term (1996). (3)   I am drawing on The Genealogy of Violence (Bellinger, 2001), much of it verbatim. (4)  See Redekop (1993).

Is Violence Master of Us All? Fight, Flight, or Just Peace-Making (part 2) by Wayne Northey

The Christian and War: Reflections on “Saving Private Ryan”

“War is hell,” observed Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman. And Steven Spielberg dipped us right into its fiery midst in his 1998 Summer release.

War is indeed hell. Yet, in the long history of the Christian Church, apart from the earliest era, every war engaged in throughout Christendom has been supported by the Church on both sides of the conflict. How in the name of Jesus can this be?

What, for starters, of Christ’s express words?: “Love your enemies (Matt. 5, Luke 6).” Further, how can Christians do an end run around Jesus’ explicit teaching by reverting to Old Testament endorsement of war when Jesus flatly said?: “So in everything [except war?], do to others [except your enemies? - see Matt. 5:43ff] what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets (Matt 7:12).”; and .”..’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor [except your enemies?] as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments (Matt 22:37-40).”

Or how can Christians ignore other New Testament voices such as the Apostle Paul’s?: “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another [except your enemies?], for he who loves his fellowman [except his enemies?] has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not covet,’ and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: ‘Love your neighbor [except your enemies?] as yourself.’ Love does no harm to its neighbor [except your enemies?]. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law (Rom 13:8-10).” Or what of James’ pithy statement?: “If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor [except your enemies?] as yourself,’ you are doing right (James 2:8).” And John’s witness?: “We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother [except his non-Christian enemies?], he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother [except his enemies?], whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother [except his enemies?] (I Jn 4:19-21).” What kind of exegetical gymnastics are utilized to dodge such overwhelming and consistent New Testament testimony?

Is it possible that all these witnesses, Jesus included, did not read their Old Testaments? Or is it likelier that many Christians have not read their New Testaments? Are John 1 and Hebrews 1 not really in the Bible, both of which point to the primacy of Jesus as the final revelation of God’s will?: “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe (Heb 1:1-2).”

Like Timothy, I was raised on Scripture. From a child I could recite volumes of it, including the all-time favourite verse of evangelicalism, John 3:16 - in my case in the majestic King James Version: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

I discovered only later to my shock that apparently John 3:16 has a footnote inserted into many Christians’ Bibles. It is never quoted out loud, however. But it is obviously no less binding dogma. After “world,” “whosoever,” and “perish” the footnote reads: “Except our enemies!.” They must in fact yield or indeed “perish”! Yet, I always was told it was the “Liberals,” masters of the exception clause, who played fast and loose with Scripture...

Watching Spielberg’s film, with the overwhelming random slaughter and maiming, it occurred to me again that war is the most complete inversion of evangelism imaginable! Not good seed, but bullets and bombs are scattered with abandon, thereby utterly inverting the evangelistic mandate. One means “life abundant,” the other delivers “death indiscriminate.” In excess of 110 millions have been annihilated in largely Church-endorsed wars this century alone. I doubt if all evangelists worldwide for the entire 20th century could add up their collective catch to match that harvest of death. Yet, many evangelists in their work of “saving souls” have supported the unspeakable carnage. Is this not profoundly disturbing?! What could be more blatantly anti-Christian? Why has no major evangelistic voice spoken out?

On the contrary, many evangelists, and all military chaplains, have preached to the troops at war in hopes to see them “made right with God” since tomorrow they might die. But when have those same evangelists and chaplains heeded Jesus by preaching the Gospel, lest tomorrow they might kill? How can their converts possibly be right with God when they destroy the neighbour (I John 4)? Or can “love of brother” somehow be twisted to mandate “slaughter of enemies”? And is such twisting the work of God or the work of the evil one (“Did God really say... (Gen. 3:1ff?”))? Do evangelists and chaplains know better than Jesus? Did not Jesus always call for death of self, never death of the other? Are there not two “greatest commandments,” not just one? Is not love of God only half the Gospel?

What of the Apostle Paul’s declaration?: “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds (2 Cor 10:3-4).” Is war not the ultimate worldliness, a “total depravity,” according to the New Testament? How can something so patently anti-Christian be so blessed by so many Christians throughout so many centuries? What kind of awesome brainwashing, what potent spell, is at work here? Dare we call it, simply, sin?

Is it possible that on this issue we have for centuries tended to be equally blind as another group of believers to whom Jesus said?: “Why is my language not clear to you? [How could Jesus’ language about “love of enemies” be any clearer?] Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me (John 8:43-45)!”

Now the truth that sets us free (John 8:32) is obedience to God’s will summed up in the two greatest commandments (Matt. 22; Mark 12; I John): love of God and love of neighbour. As believers, failure to love in this way is to invite Jesus’ warning: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock (Matt 7:21-24).”

Can it be, that after all, many proclaimed followers of Jesus are in fact not? Is it possible that many Christians who claim .”..not I, but Christ... (Gal. 2:20, KJV)” on the contrary embrace religious nepotism, of which patriotism is its most hideous expression? For all our protestations, despite our reputed allegiance to what “The Bible says!,” do we in the end deny it like the “Liberals”? Have many Christians been far closer to the spirit of Pharisaism, one of murderous prevarication, than we ever dare to admit (John 8)? Does this spirit not directly contradict the “weightier matters of the law”: love of God and neighbour (Matt. 23:23, echoing Micah 6:8)? Was Gandhi right?: “The only people on earth who do not see Christ and His teachings as nonviolent are Christians.” Is it thinkable that we Bible-believing Christians stand in danger one day of hearing Jesus’ words: .”..’Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels (Matt 25:41).’ ,” for .”.. ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these [except our enemies?], you did not do for me (Matt 25:45).’ “ Is that not hell: the failure to love (Jesus in) the neighbour and the enemy (Matt. 5 - 7, Luke 6, I John 4)?

War is indeed hell. In the movie, Captain John Miller comments: “For every man I kill, the further I get from home.” Of course! A Nazi defendant at the post-War Nuremberg Trials said: “You have defeated us Nazis. But the spirit of Nazism has arisen like a Phoenix amongst you.” Precisely! We always become what we hate. When the U.S. dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, and obliterated instantaneously 100,000 lives, then three days later thousands more were slaughtered in Nagasaki (in sheer death-dealing magnitude utterly dwarfing this decade’s Oklahoma City bombing), President Harry Truman declared: “That was the greatest event in human history!” This from a lay Baptist preacher and Sunday School teacher... Astounding! What, in God’s name, could be a more blatant denial of the Resurrection than those bombs and that statement?! The Resurrection alone is the greatest event in human history! And it means everything war does not: life abundant and everlasting. What business did that Bible-believing Christian have in so utterly contradicting the very centrepiece of Christian faith? And did not the majority of Bible-believing Christians at the time cheer Truman on? Do not the vast majority of Bible-believing Christians still applaud the continued development of post-War weaponry and its deployment, which, in 1996 dollars in the U.S. alone, has amounted to 5.5 trillion dollars and countless lives for whom Christ died snuffed out? Where are the leading Christian voices opposing this anti-Christ obscenity? Why, in Jesus’ name, are they silent? Why?! “In God we trust”? Balderdash!

“Home” (Captain Miller) ultimately is where love is. Where God is. Its opposite is hell. So hell is also war! For hell is in the end the obstinate refusal to love God and neighbour; the endless attempt at doing end runs around the two greatest commandments (Matt 25). The biblical witness is: the only test case for love of God is love of neighbour (I John 4). And the test case for love of neighbour is love of enemies (Matt. 5 - 7, Luke 6). Failure to love the enemy is failure to love God is hell.

Spielberg gets it right: war is hell, and (in this case) hell is war. The question begs asking: What business have Christians ever had propagating hell?

In response to the above material, I received this terse response from a Christian editor I know:

“Hi, Wayne-sorry to take so long to get back to you this time around. We decided not to use your article for reasons of length (too long!), style (too many rhetorical questions) and tone (too harsh).

Thanks for going to the trouble of thinking this through and writing down your thoughts.

[The Editor]

My simple addition to why it was rejected: “And argument: too true?”

The Christian and Hell: Theological Moorings of Violence in the Image of God

The doctrine of hell necessarily arises in the context of a Christian consideration of violence. For a theological discussion of violence inevitably brings us to the most extreme instance of violence in God, if the traditional, most dominant, doctrine of hell is indeed biblical - eternal conscious punishment of the unbeliever. I will do this by interacting with a recently published book, The Other Side of the Good News, by Larry Dixon.

The central conclusion of the book in the author’s words is that there is an “adequacy [in] the traditional view of hell... and that alternative views do not adequately reflect the scriptural data concerning hell... Pointing out the weaknesses in the three alternative positions to hell does not in itself prove the truth of the traditional eternal conscious punishment view (pp. 172 & 173, emphasis added).” Dixon continues at that point to “set out four areas in which the traditional position enjoys biblical, as well as rational, support.,” after allowing that the traditional view “might also be erroneous (p. 173).” I shall return to that possibility.

Widely read evangelical author J. I. Packer in the Foreword underscores the author’s conclusions: “To believe what the Bible appears to say about human destiny apart from the grace of God is a bitter pill indeed, and no one should wonder that attempts are made to explore alternative understandings of God’s revelation on this topic. It is suggested that the Bible is unclear, or incoherent, or inconsistent, or untrustworthy, when it speaks of the outcome of judgment after death, or alternatively that virtually the whole church has for two thousand years misunderstood the texts. I do not think so, nor does Dr. Dixon... For one I am grateful for his work, and commend it to all who are willing to be biblically rational on this sombre subject (p. 7).” The implication is clear throughout the book and from Dr. Packer’s words: one is simply unbiblical to deny the traditional view that hell is eternal conscious punishment for all unbelievers who fail to accept Jesus Christ as personal Saviour this side of death. As the author says at the end of the Introduction: “May we be ready to pay [the] price to bring lost people to Christ so that they won’t spend eternity on The Other Side of the Good News (p. 14).”

Dixon spends the bulk of the book refuting three alternative views so designated by him. In his words: “Some today suggest that all without exception will be saved, whether they want to be or not (universalism, discussed in chapter 2). Others argue that hell is God’s consuming of the wicked (annihilationism, addressed in chapter 3), not His eternally tormenting them. Still others hold forth the hope that death is not the end of opportunity for redemption, but perhaps a door to future chances for salvation (post-mortem conversion, the subject of chapter 4) (p. 13).”

The author does not wince at taking on theological heavywieghts such as Karl Barth, C. H. Dodd, and Nels Ferré (all described by Dixon as outside evangelical orthodoxy). He also challenges evangelical heavyweight theologians such as Clark Pinnock, John Stott, and Donald Bloesch. Dixon in particular bemoans the erosion of evangelical theology as seen in these and other evangelical leaders’ views of the traditional doctrine of hell. He writes: “The evangelical Christian, who can’t forget hell, often seems, in boxing terms, to be up against the ropes.” He describes the buffeting such an evangelical Christian endures from the cults who scorn hell, and says, “He then returns to his corner for some encouragement and promptly receives several left hooks from his own manager.... One is hardly surprised that some young fighters for the faith seem ready to throw in the towel (p. 149).” His plea is poignant; one can feel his pain as a “fighter for the faith” at this sense of betrayal. Throughout much of the final chapter, he critiques in particular Clark Pinnock, whom Dixon quotes on p. 149: “[E]verlasting torment is intolerable from a moral point of view because it makes God into a bloodthirsty monster who maintains an everlasting Auschwitz for victims whom He does not even allow to die.” Dixon’s dilemma is clearly stated: “Obviously, no follower of Christ wants to be guilty of presenting God as one more heinous than Hitler. However, if the Bible is clear on this issue, the Christian must not throw in the towel (pp. 149 & 150).” And the author proceeds to present God in his holy hatred of sinners precisely in those terms: as one more heinous than Hitler.

The crucial conditional fulcrum for the entire thesis is Dixon’s statement: “if the Bible is clear on this issue.” Dixon and Packer, and indeed a host of Christian voices throughout the ages (though with significant exceptions in every age - some of whom are adduced by Dixon), say the Bible contains indeed precisely such clarity about hell as a place of eternal conscious punishment.

I am compelled to respond to Dixon’s work because of my own vocation: for over 25 years I have ministered in criminal justice, and have wrestled from the outset with thinking biblically God’s justice thoughts after him, in particular with reference to judgment and punishment, including the doctrine of hell. I have become convinced over the years that “God’s justice is predominantly, and normatively, redemptive or restorative in intention (Marshall, 1991, p. 1). “

How can one presume to fault this book’s conclusions shared, as Packer rightly indicates, by majority Christians throughout church history? I do so aware of the danger that my critique in part can be turned on me too. We are all inclined to wrongly “handle the word of truth.” (See II Tim. 2:15.)

I will allude to the dark blotches analogy I have already mentioned, and one other below. Dixon seems to look at a “dark blotches” violently punitive picture of Jesus on a box cover that was the wrong choice (a heresy in its original Greek meaning), a failure to “see” the real face right before his eyes. That differs, in the end profoundly, from the picture of Jesus who exemplified and said: “But love your enemies, do good to them... Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful (Luke 6:35-36, emphasis added).”

(Interestingly, Dixon does not once in his book refer to this clarion call of Jesus based upon this “box cover” portrait of who God fundamentally is: love.)

Dixon says: “One’s doctrine of the final judgment of the wicked is a direct reflection of one’s doctrine of God (p. 165).” Indeed. And one’s doctrine or picture of God - the box cover - is ultimately seen in Jesus (John 1 and Hebrews 1).

Gandhi said of Christians and nonviolence generally, “The only people on earth who do not see Christ and his teachings as nonviolent are Christians.” As Richard Hays has been quoted earlier, it is possible for “virtually the whole church” (contrary to J.I. Packer) to be wrong. With all due respect, and with profound sadness, it has been wrong about Christian nonviolence.

Dixon’s “traditional doctrine of hell” is a special category of that same majority Christendom error. The picture on the box of God in Christ for Dixon is sadly one of ultimate violence. I suggest that only if “Jesus” is a “dark blotches” box cover can one agree with Dixon’s assertion: “Jesus is our primary source for the [traditional] doctrine of hell (p. 147)” The nub of the issue is our picture or vision of God in Christ.

One evangelical New Testament theologian, in a significant draft manuscript on hell in a forthcoming book on biblical restorative justice (my area of ministry), writes: “Jesus shows that those who think of God in terms of strict distributive or retributive justice fundamentally misunderstand God (Matt. 20:1 - 16) (Marshall, 1999, p. 17, emphasis added).” Yet, I suggest, this is the central “dark blotches” misunderstanding of the picture on the puzzle cover of God in the book under review. God is depicted as ultimately violently retributive towards the wicked. On the contrary, Marshall, in surveying the biblical evidence, writes in the conclusion of his paper: “For our purposes the point to notice is that God’s final word is not retribution but restoration, the re- creation of heaven and earth so that sin, suffering, sickness and death are no more (1999, p. 21).” God’s ultimate word biblically is, indeed, nonviolent, all-inclusive love, which subsumes all biblical categories of wrath, judgment and punishment! I submit gently, but firmly that, to miss that is to miss, simply, the Good News.

The second analogy I mentioned to Dixon is of a document written in Roman script so that an English speaker can read the letters, but the reader does not know a word of the language. It is crucial nonetheless that the reader understand the message in the document. So she phones a friend who speaks the language fluently and reads the document out loud over the phone, seeking an accurate translation. The native language speaker in exasperation finally says that she can barely understand anything at all, for all the accents seem to fall on the wrong syllables! In reading Dixon’s fifth chapter years ago, and later the entire book, I respectfully submit that he consistently puts the accents on mainly the wrong biblical syllables.

One example suffices: Dixon’s central, I believe, misuse in Chapter Five of the story of the rich man and Lazarus to discern explicit details about the nature of eternal punishment for the wicked. He quotes approvingly one author who says: “while it was not Jesus’ primary intent here to teach us about the nature of the intermediate state, it is unlikely that He would mislead us on this subject (p. 133).” Really? One could likewise say (and some amazingly do!) that Jesus’ teaching in Luke 14:31 [“Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand?”], endorses war despite his repeated nonviolent call to “love your enemies,” or his words to the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane about two swords being enough (Luke 22:38) was a call for disciples to take up arms despite Matt. 26:52 where Jesus tells Peter to sheathe his sword (thereby disarming the church forever, commented Church Father Tertullian!)

Repeatedly, in this reviewer’s estimation, Dixon (and yes, most Christians throughout the ages!) puts the accents in the Scriptures he adduces in mostly the wrong places.
In this respect, Chris Marshall says: “But it is crucial to recognize... the figurative, parabolic nature of the language used to describe realities which, ex hypothesi [in accordance with the stated thesis], lie outside human experience (p. 14).” He then quotes one writer who says: “Such language is ‘figurative and connotative rather than denotative and literalistic’.... To imagine some kind of cosmic torture-chamber where the lost suffer endless or prolonged retribution is to miss the figurative, apocalyptic nature of these utterances, as well as the paraenetic or pastoral intention behind them (p. 14).” I contend that Dixon sustains just such a profound misreading of biblical texts throughout his entire book.

So Marshall urges with reference to specific details about the fate of those who reject God that “Perhaps a humble agnosticism is the wisest option...” Neither Jesus nor Paul supply specifics about the fate of the wicked, concludes Stephen Travis (1986). Neither should we. And therefore I will not speculate further. I do not have an alternative view. God knows, and that is enough! That Dixon presses the biblical texts beyond what they were meant to bear seems a singularly consistent fault of his hermeneutic. It is so often what non-Christian cults do - ironically enough given his critique of the cults’ critique of traditional Christian teachings on hell!

But Dixon will have none of this, and writes an entire treatise based upon a consistent misreading of the founding texts. How can this be? A book-length treatment of precisely this issue with reference to misguided Christian retributive views in criminal justice is Timothy Gorringe’s God’s Just Vengeance (1996). At one point Gorringe asks, with reference to a pervasive and lengthy Christian tradition of retributive views towards “criminals”: “How is it that the question whether the law might be wrong, or even wicked, does not arise for these good Christian people (p. 5)?” Likewise, Father George Zabelka, Chaplain to the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb squadrons, upon repentance for blessing the murder of hundreds of thousands in an instant, wrote that the just war theory is “something that Christ never taught nor hinted at.” Yet almost all Christians have embraced just war and retributive justice theories throughout much of the Christian era. Why, when it is biblically so unfounded?

Similarly, while we both acknowledge that we follow the same Lord and equally take seriously the Bible, I could wish that Dixon would ponder more what he allows is at least possible, that biblically the traditional view of hell “might also be erroneous (p. 173).” In Jesus’ direct allusions to hell, not once are “unbelievers” in view, but always the religiously self-righteous. Disturbingly, Douglas Frank, an evangelical author (1986), characterizes evangelicalism as centrally prone towards being pharasaical. “We are the Phasrisees of our time, if anyone is.,” he writes (p. 229). A Baptist pastor friend puts it tellingly: “Every Sunday in the pulpit I stand in danger of leading my flock to hell!”

In this reviewer’s estimation, what is lacking in Dixon’s reading of the biblical texts is a Gospel imagination overwhelmed by grace, which leads to a consequent theology of the subversion of all retribution and violence in God and humans. In short: Christian conversion is wanted. Like the White Witch in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, Dixon seems unaware of the “deeper (James called it “royal” - James 2:8) law” of love on which “hang all the Law and the Prophets (Matt. 22:34 - 40).” We sing after all “Amazing Grace,” not “Amazing Justice,” Debbie Morris points out at the end of her gripping story, Forgiving the Dead Man Walking (1998). She gets it, Dixon does not. It is apparently that stark. This is what Jesus often spoke of such as in Matt. 13:13ff (and elsewhere): “This is why I speak to them in parables: ‘Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.’.”

In Dixon’s reading, grace seems to have been arrested mid-stream in favour of a horrible retributive justice for the wicked - which is exactly mercy’s inversion. The author in interpreting Scripture on hell looks like the man in Matt. 18 who was forgiven an overwhelming debt, yet doesn’t get it at all, and withholds forgiveness at the first opportunity! In reality, the text shows that the “forgiven” man apparently didn’t really experience forgiveness. Or he would have been forgiving towards even the “ungrateful and wicked (Luke 6:35).” Again, Dixon presents like Jonah who becomes furious at God for showing mercy to Ninevah. Yet, Jesus taught, a “greater [in mercy] than Jonah is here {Matt. 12:41)!” Or the author sounds like the elder brother in the “Prodigal Father” story (Luke 15:11ff) who just cannot fathom the Father’s unconditional mercy towards the wicked son.
Dixon seemingly has no categories for a consistent hermeneutic of grace. In his theology, God’s grace is for a moment, but his wrath endures forever, to invert Psalm 30:5. Sadly, he, and many interpreters like him, appear, like Saul, to have “given approval (Acts 8:1)” to the same sacrificial violence that Jesus castigated in Matt. 23:33 - 35: “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? Therefore I am sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.” Jesus also fell victim to this same violence!

As Marshall says: “Throughout Christian history, the fear of being consigned to hell by a truly merciless God has fuelled and justified all manner of horrific violence (p. 6).”

Dixon writes, in apparent approval of one such instance of “horrific violence,” the Gulf War: “A brave journalist who was in Baghdad when the bombs landed, cried out in his television report, ‘I have been in hell!’ As horrible as war is we would have to say to him, ‘No, you haven’t. If we understand Jesus correctly, war is only a small foreshadowing of that final condition of the forsaken (p. 14).”

The grand and joyous paradox of the Gospel, for those with eyes to see the wildly liberating “picture on the box cover” is: God’s final judgment is his mercy! - just as the doctrine of original sin is a post-resurrection Christian doctrine of grace and forgiveness.

No contemporary biblical theologian this reviewer has read captures this eschatological insight better in fact than James Alison in Raising Abel (1996). The book is a sustained call for Christians through conversion to acquire an “eschatological imagination” that subverts ultimately an unchristian “apocalyptic imagination” such that “The percpetion that God is love has a specific content which is absolutely incompatible with any perception of God as involved in violence, separation, anger, or exclusion (p. 48).” Therefore, “The commonly held understanding of hell remains strictly within the apocalyptic imagination, that is, it is the result of a violent separation between the good and the evil worked by a vengeful god. It seems to me that if hell is understood thus, we have quite simply not understood the Christian faith; and the Christian story, instead of being the creative rupture in the system of this world, has come to be nothing less than its sacralization. That is, the good news which Jesus brought has been quite simply lost (p. 175).”

In the end, the greatest critique of Dixon’s thesis is simply this: there is biblically no “other side of the good news”! There is Good News, period! Hell too is embraced by God’s love. Dixon presents a “gospel” without good news that reads, à la Four Spiritual Laws, thus: “God loves you, and has a wonderful plan for your life... But if you don’t buy in before death, God hates you, and has a horrible plan for your after-life!” No genuine love affair human or divine is imaginable with that kind of time-limited vicious threat hanging over one’s head.

I could wish Dixon on this issue would return to Scripture with eyes to see and ears to hear - and recover a truly Gospel-soaked “eschatological imagination.” Chris Marshall, in personal comment to me wrote similarly: “I did have a look at Dixon’s book …. What a depressing piece!! It illustrates the problems in pulling out a single theme for analysis in isolation from the larger context of the biblical story (May 9, 1999, E-mail correspondence).”

There is ultimately no room for Dixon’s thesis in the biblical Good News that is shot through with God’s “Amazing Grace” - how sweet the sound! Dixon consistently gives grace a terribly sour note! I suggest he is not compelled to his view by biblical evidence but by a misguided hermeneutic: the wrong “box cover.” Biblically, God’s love is the ultimate word, and judgment and redemption equally are subsumed under that love. In the end, “mercy triumphs over judgment (James 2:13)!” in an amazing paradox of grace whereby God is both “just and justifier” (Rom. 3:26). For, as Jesus said repeatedly (Matt. 9:13 and 12:7): “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”
I call on Dixon, Packer, and all who hold to an ostensibly sub-Christian, though longstanding “traditional doctrine of hell”: “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ (Matt. 9:13).” Such a call is above all a call to conversion.

Story: I feel a personal sadness in critiquing Dixon’s conclusions. On p. 178, he writes: “A former missionary friend, who has since moved away from the traditional doctrine of hell, said to me that ‘God’s penultimate word is wrath, but His ultimate word is love.’” I am that “former missionary friend.” We served together doing evangelism in West Berlin from 1972 to 1974. The author’s rejoinder to my statement was: “We would have to disagree (p. 178).” “We” did disagree at the time he was writing his book when I visited him; we disagreed after he gave me Chapter Five to read in manuscript form; we still disagreed in subsequent correspondence.

Finding Our True Selves and Jesus Invariably in the Other

The trinitarian doctrine of God’s creation of humanity suggests a self connected always to the other. Not an “autonomous self,” rather a “person-in-community” is the biblical view of who humans are. An “individual self” is in fact a biblical oxymoron, a contradiction. We are not ourselves until we find ourselves in the other is the biblical perspective. Jesus simply upped the ante: he said finding ourselves in the other is still heresy (a false choice) if it does not move beyond nepotism (me and mine first). The test case for Jesus of a person’s becoming a true self is love of enemy. Failure in this is, he taught, metaphysical suicide. Further, Jesus made it clear that becoming our true selves happens only as we discover Jesus in the other. Put differently: finding Jesus means finding our true selves. It also means it is impossible to find Jesus if we do not find ourselves in the other, supremely in the enemy. Failure to love the neighbour/enemy therefore is failure to love Jesus and ourselves.

The biblical view is that we are created in God’s image as persons-in-community, as God is a community of dynamic love between Father, Son, and Spirit from before creation. When we are called to “love our neighbour as ourselves,” it means, “You shall love your neighbour as being your own self .” Your neighbour is your true self. You have no self in yourself. And Jesus pushed the bounds of who is the neighbour to the limit to include the enemy. Further, the teaching from Matt. 25 (31ff) is that Christ is invariably to be found “in the least of these” - in any and every neighbour without exception, in any and all enemies without exception. Love in the New Testament is the ceaseless attempt to make the enemy a friend, to try without limit to draw a circle of inclusion around the other.

Therefore a “Christian soldier,” a “Christian executioner,” or any kind of “Christian-cum-destroyer-of-neighbour/enemy” is a contradiction in terms, or, baldly stated: a heresy.

So much of the Christian evangelistic enterprise is precisely that: a false call and choice or decision (“heresy” in the original Greek connotation) to “come to Jesus” independent of the call to “come to ourselves” (what the prodigal son did) precisely in the neighbour, the enemy. As two similar poles of a magnet repel each other, so does the call and decision to come to Jesus contradict any independence from the call to love the neighbour, love the enemy. For there are two great commands, not one: to love God and neighbour/enemy. When the evangelistic call stops at loving Jesus, it is a heresy, as surely as judgment without similar offer of grace and forgiveness is a Christian travesty. It is biblically impossible to come to Jesus without coming to the other, supremely the enemy. Failure to believe and destroying the enemy are equally denials of the faith.

René Girard: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

On March 5 to 9 2001, CBC IDEAS broadcaster, David Cayley, did five hours of radio programming on the thought and influence of French literary critic, anthropologist, and social scientist, René Girard. Girard is considered by a growing number of scholars worldwide to be the major theorist on violence and its origins in the 20th century. Charles Bellinger also opines this most recently in his brilliant study: The Genealogy of Violence, just published by Oxford University Press.

A reviewer in Comparative Literature writes: “René Girard’s work suggests the projects of those nineteenth-century intellectual giants – Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud – who still cast such long shadows today.”

Philosopher Paul Dumouchel of the University of Québec writes: "Beginning from literary criticism and ending with a general theory of culture, an explanation of the role of religion in primitive societies and a radical reinterpretation of Christianity, René Girard has completely modified the landscape in the social sciences. Ethnology, history of religion, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology and literary criticism are explicitly mobilized in this enterprise. Theology, economics and political sciences, history and sociology - in short, all the social sciences, and those that used to be called the moral sciences - are influenced by it (quoted in Bailie, p.6)." On the recent CBC IDEAS series, he added that Girard’s anthropology provides the way for an entire recasting of human epistemology – how we know what we know.

International conferences have been convened to discuss Girard’s contributions to human knowledge. Since 1990, there has been an annual gathering in Europe or North America of international scholars (mainly) across a broad spectrum of disciplines, and some activists around Girard’s discoveries. It is called: Colloquium on Violence and Religion. I have been privileged to present workshops at two of those gatherings.

Girard delineates three great intellectual discoveries that have informed his development throughout a long and distinguished academic career. They are: mimetic desire, the scapegoat mechanism, and the absolute uniqueness, anthropologically, of the Bible. Leaving aside the first two, Girard writes of his third and most formative discovery thus:

I certainly do not believe that the Bible gives us a political recipe for escaping violence and turning the world into a utopia. Rather, the Bible discloses certain truths about violence, which the readers are free to use as they see fit. So it is possible that the Bible can make many people more violent...

In the Hebrew Bible, there is clearly a dynamic that moves in the direction of the rehabilitation of the victims, but it is not a cut-and-dried thing. Rather, it is a process under way, a text in travail... a struggle that advances and retreats. I see the Gospels as the climactic achievement of that trend, and therefore as the essential text in the cultural upheaval of the modern world (Hamerton-Kelly, ed., p. 141)."

In his just published book, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, he adds:

The Passion accounts [the stories of Jesus’ crucifixion] reveal a phenomenon that unbeknownst to us generates all human cultures and still warps our human vision in favor of all sorts of exclusions and scapegoating. If this analysis is true, the explanatory power of Jesus’ death is much greater than we realize, and Paul’s exalted idea of the Cross as the source of all knowledge is anthropologically sound.

The opposition between the scapegoat concealed in mythology and unconcealed in Judaism and Christianity illuminates not only archaic religions, not only many neglected features of the Gospels, but above all the relationship between the two, the unique truth of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Since all this knowledge comes from the Gospels, the present book can define itself as a defense of [the] Judaic and Christian tradition, as an apology of Christianity rooted in what amounts to a Gospel-inspired breakthrough in the field of social science, not of theology (2001, p. 3).

To explicate why this is so in Girard’s thinking would be easily the theme of another Café discussion. I am willing to come back next month and elaborate on this, if you are interested.

Conclusion: Is Violence Master of Us All?

In the third chapter of Embodying Forgiveness (Jones, 1995), “Forgiveness Eclipsed” Jones asks whether violence is the master of us all. He tells the true story of a Catholic priest, Maximilian Kolbe, who on July 30, 1941, in Auschwitz concentration Camp, stepped forward to offer himself for punishment of starvation by death in place of one of ten who were so sentenced. As the days ground on, and all the men slowly starved, the priest consistently responded to fellow captives and captors alike with love and forgiveness. His actions increasingly inspired his fellow captives and unnerved the captors. His refusal to submit to, and thus reproduce, violence, became recognized as a growing threat to the Nazis. On the 16th day, the Nazis killed the priest, since he was so subversive to the good order of the Camp. In the fictionalized novel about this true story, entitled Orbit of Darkness, one character says: “Those who give up their lives, at least in principle, become more dangerous to the Germans than planes or tanks. They become the ultimate weapon ([p. 249], Jones, 1995, pp. 91ff, italics added).” Interestingly, Kolbe has since been canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church.

This is precisely the Apostle Paul’s thesis in 2 Cor 10:4-5, as quoted earlier:
The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

The weapons Christians wield are subversive to the core of every cultural institution known to human history, caught in endless spirals of scapegoating violence. On the one hand there is the wisdom of the world that is foolishness in God’s sight. On the other, there is the wisdom of the Gospel that is arguably the most potent subversive force in human history.

As Walter Wink has taught us, the Nazis were defeated indeed, but Nazism called forth a response of violence so identical to the spirit of Nazism that we have reaped the whirlwind of violence in the West ever since. We became what we hated in the Nazis. The indiscriminate slaughter of hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians through incendiary bombing raids on civilian targets in hundreds of German and Japanese cities, topped off by the dropping of two atomic bombs spelling instant death for multiplied thousands of non-combatants, is overwhelming witness to that horrible reality.

Christians believe they are called to be now, what the world is meant to become then. They are called to lives “lived on eschatological edge (Johnson, 1986, p. 265).” Living the end now. And what is that end? It is the glorious vision of the Peaceable Kingdom for which all humanity yearns. Listen to the biblical depiction in Isaiah 11:6-9:

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. Amen!

References
Alison, James (1996). Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination, New York: Crossroad.

Anderson, Paul N. (1994). “Jesus and Peace,” The Church’s Peace Witness, Ed. Marlin E. Miller & Barbara Nelson Gingerich, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Aquinas, St. Thomas (1988) On Law, Morality, and Politics, William P. Baumgarth and Richard J. Regan, eds., Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

Bailie, Gil (1995). Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, New York: Crossroad.

Barbé, Dominique. 1989. A Theology of Conflict: and other writings on Nonviolence, New York: Orbis Press.

Bellinger, Charles K. (2001). The Geneaology of Violence: Reflections on Creation, Freedom, and Evil, New York: Oxford University Press.

Boersma, Hans (1999). The Feet of God: In Stomping Boots or Dancing Shoes?: The Trinity as Answer to Violence, Geneva Society Lamblight Lecture Series, Trinity Western University, September, 1999; since published in Canadian Evangelical Review 18 (1999), pp. 2-18.

Dixon, Dixon (1992). The Other Side of the Good News: Confronting the Contemporary Challenges to Jesus’ Teachings on Hell, Wheaton: BridgePoint.

Dowley, Tim, ed. (1995) Introduction to the History of Christianity, Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Frank, Douglas W. (1986). Less Than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the Twentieth Century, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Gabor, Thomas (1994). ‘Everybody Does It!’: Crime By the Public, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Girard, René, (2001). I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, translated with a Foreword by James G. Williams, New York: Orbis Books.

Gorringe, Timothy (1996). God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, violence and the rhetoric of salvation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hamerton-Kelly, Robert G., ed. (1987). Violent Origins, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hays, Richard B. (1996). The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics, New York: HarperSanFrancisco.

Johnson, Luke Timothy (1986). The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation, Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Jones, L. Gregory (1995). Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Litwack, Leon F. (1996) “Civil War, American,” Microsoft Encarta96 Encyclopedia, Seattle: Microsoft Corporation.

Marshall, Chris (1999). “Judgment and Justice: Some Brief Observations,” presented at a postgraduate seminar at the Bible College of New Zealand; included in revised form in Christ and Crime (forthcoming), Eerdmans.
Morris, Debbie (1998). Forgiving the Dead Man Walking, Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
Morris, Leon (1974). The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, J.D. Douglas, General Editor, “Atonement,” Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House.

O’Malley, John W. (1996) “Inquisition,” Microsoft Encarta96 Encyclopedia, Seattle: Microsoft Corporation.
Porter, J. M., ed. (1974). Luther: Selected Political Writings, Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Redekop, Vern (1993). Scapegoats, the Bible, and Criminal Justice: Interacting with René Girard, Akron: Mennonite Central Committee.

Ricoeur, Paul (1969). The Symbolism of Evil. Trans. Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon.
Travis, Stephen H. (1986). Christ and the Judgment of God: Divine Retribution in the New Testament. Southhampton, Hants: Marshall Pickering.
Williams, Hunston, ed. (1957). Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers, Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
Wink, Walter (1987). Violence and Nonviolence in South Africa: Jesus’ Third Way. Philadelphia/Santa Cruz: New Society.
Wink, Walter (1992). Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

The Sickness of America, the Sickness of Humanity by Wayne Northey

This was sent to me over the Internet:

All-Time Best Quote

In a recent interview, General Norman Schwarzkopf was asked if he thought there was room for forgiveness toward the people who have harbored and abetted the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks on America.

His answer was classic Schwarzkopf.

The General said, “I believe that forgiving them is God’s function. OUR job is to arrange the meeting.”

The good General apparently never read the Lord’s Prayer: “This, then, is how you should pray: “‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’    For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”[1] (Matt 6:9-15)

My second-year French professor in 1968 digressed delightfully in his classes. His favourite theme that fall was not Proust, Pascal, or Prudhomme. It was the prospective fascist state under Richard Nixon, should he be elected. He was, and the rest, as they say, is history, repeated history at that…

Time magazine privileges history’s unfolding as function of great players, not great events. Two instances were 1990’s front-page photos, one captioned, “The Face of a Hero,” the other, “The Face of Evil.” General Norman Schwarzkopf was the former, Timothy McVeigh the latter.

My French prof taught that perspective is everything. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 innocents, and was executed. Yet he is martyr and hero amongst white supremacists and similar ilk crackpots. General Schwarzkopf, celebrated American hero, was contrarily hated in Iraq in the first Gulf War, responsible in fact for the death of as many as 100,000 combatants and civilians, most infamously on “the highway to hell,” when thousands of retreating Iraqi troops, mostly teenagers, were relentlessly slaughtered “like a turkey shoot.”

When it comes to violence resort, one person’s hero is ineluctably another’s killer. The most startling and least acknowledged ethical insight of humanity is, end and means are one. Resort to violence, reap violence; in violent response to resort to violence, reap more violence. There is no nonviolent outcome in use of violence.

The above is borne out in the research of arguably the greatest contemporary theorist on violence: René Girard. From Charles Bellinger’s discussion in The Genealogy of Violence, Girard’s theory begins with the experience in all cultures known to history of existential lack or ontological sickness, which lack leads to endless societal cycles of imitation or mimesis of others, which invariably elicits violence. Society consequently seizes upon a victim and kills him/her to meet its own psychological needs. Humanity historically prevented itself from descending into a chaos of self-destruction by choosing a scapegoat whose death would create a new sense of social unanimity and cohesion. This may be routine sacrifice of victims in ancient Incan and Mayan “civilizations” to secure blessings from the gods; mob lynching of Blacks to protect “righteous” white folk; immolation of Jews in Nazi Holocaust to excuse collective German guilt; prosecution of a minority of “criminals” through imprisonment and the death penalty to let the “law-abiding” off the hook; Allied saturation bombing of two million civilians in Germany and Japan to “make the world safe for democracy.” There is fundamental moral and psychological falsity to, endless recycling of, all scapegoating violence.

Girard applies a hermeneutic of suspicion to foundational social phenomena, claims Bellinger. The ubiquitous scapegoat mechanism is one side of the great either/or of human existence: either our civilization (and any other) will continue sacrificing victims

to meet the psychological needs arising out of universal “ontological sickness,” or humans will learn to follow the way of love of neighbour and enemy at its most broadly political and social application. “Civilized” society invariably acts throughout history the exact opposite to the way of nonviolence, which summation is “love your neighbour/enemy as yourself” – as being yourself. We are, according to African ubuntu tradition, human only through others.

For Girard, the spiritual immaturity of modern Western civilization creates an inability to recognize and love its “victims” (which all civilizations known to history invariably generate) as neighbours. At the heart of violence is mimetic desire that results from a failure of individuality. The person who has become an individual (truly human) is a person responsive to the charge: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Such receptiveness opens up the way to a new kind of society, quite simply a community of love and respect for all people, including for those who perpetrate and harbour those who perpetrate, terrorism, without exception.

There are increasingly open comparisons between President Bush in his “War Against Terror” and various fascist leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini. But the cancer goes far deeper. “The Face of Fascism” in fact is “Everyone” who ultimately endorses sacrifice of “others” for self-preservation (though it invariably be whitewashed as “democracy” and “freedom” in the West).

Here are the chilling words of CIA operative “Anonymous” concerning potential civilian casualties in an interview about his 2004 book, Imperial Hubris: “That's the way war is. I've never really understood the idea that any American government, any American elected official is responsible for protecting civilians who are not Americans.”

What he’s also never remotely understood is Gospel. The tragedy is, most American church leadership, certainly most Evangelical church leadership, from Billy Graham to whomever, would/do say the same. That is the nub of America’s idolatry; of America’s sickness unto death. Billy Graham is right now (end of June, 2005) leading his (likely) last Crusade in New York much to nation-wide acclaim, since his has ever been the Gospel of “American Empire Über Alles.” Next year, a full-size bronze statue of Billy Graham preaching in front of a cross will be unveiled at the 2006 Southern Baptist annual meeting in Greensboro, N.C. Not surprisingly, George Bush, the most executing state Governor ever, and fast approaching the most killing President, attributes his “conversion” to Mr. Graham. All that is needed to complete such pure American civil religion idolatry is for Graham’s statue to be installed on Capitol Hill and captioned, “Anti-Christ.”

Historian Bishop Stephen Neill once tellingly designated America as the mission field where “religion is up, morality down.” Meanwhile, ironically, Evangelicals throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, like the Pharisees trumpet from the housetops their sick version of a deadly self-serving individualistic morality. Neill’s is possibly the most succinct description ever of the pure spirit of pharisaism.

Evangelical church historian Douglas Frank in Less Than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the Twentieth Century (Eerdmans, 1986) wrote: “We are the Pharisees of our time, if anyone is (p. 229).” In the Epilogue of a sweeping historical and sociological analysis of Evangelicalism in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, he added: “Whether in auspicious or declining times, as we have seen, we display a tenacious commitment to self-deceit. It is true that we are those who like to think that we heed Jeremiah’s words, ‘Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord.’ Our history, however, gives evidence rather of Jeremiah’s wisdom in adding these words: ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?’ (Jer. 17:7,9). In our very protests of trust in the Lord, we find occasion for our deepest self-deceits (p. 278).”

This deceit/conceit leads to scapegoating violence at its most religious and pragmatic. It is Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s “final solution” to fighting the Muslims: “What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them, just like we did in the Balkans.” This is Hitler with the Jews and six millions liquidated; six millions more non-desirables wiped out. This is also the all-time most decorated American war hero General Curtis LeMay, more celebrated even than Schwarzkopf, who boastedthat “wescorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 [1945] than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” (He was, for the record, wrong: only 100,000 civilians died that night, while 120,000 were slaughtered instantaneously by the two bombs.) He also admitted that had America lost that war, he and many other American leaders would have been executed as war criminals. Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara acknowledged the same in Errol Morris’ 2004 documentary, The Fog of War.

The “clash of civilizations” (Samuel Huntington) is in truth the “clash of barbarisms” (Gilbert Achcar), as René Girard’s life work so compellingly presents. Jared Diamond in The Third Chimpanzee, wrote – and substantiated his conclusion with long lists of evidence – that the only consistent signature of our species is genocide. This is certainly the case with all Empires, Pax Americana included. Psychologist John Brand, who directed me to that insight, says humans are “reptilian” or “raptorial” at our very core. Jeremiah as already seen said the same: “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? (Jer 17:9)” Jeremiah wrote in the context of war against Babylon. Babylon is modern Iraq…

The “face of fascism” turns out to be my face and your face, unless we turn our faces individually and collectively towards the neighbour and enemy in relentlessly creative new embrace. The Gospel (not its current American Empire version, 100 million American Evangelicals and other religious notwithstanding) addresses this: “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it (Mark 8:35). There is evangelism without the Gospel, and it is ubiquitous; and, says Jeremiah, it is also iniquitous. Dominant American evangelism, following Luther, calls the individual to find a gracious God without reference to neighbour or enemy. Theologian Walter Wink has taught us: The Gospel calls us without exception to find God in neighbour and enemy, or not find God at all!

The “how” perhaps begins with the “why.” My second-year French prof always claimed it is the only way of becoming human.

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[1] And what is “sin”? Listen to New Testament scholar Luke Johnson:

Paul’s statement in Rom. 14:23 has provided us with our basic framework in this discussion: “whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” Paul delineates the two responses available to humans who have been presented with the gift of God. If sin is the refusal of otherness and a consequent closure of the self, faith is the acceptance of the gift from the Other with an accompanying openness of the self. Faith is defined by openness to the One who is totally Other but who gifts us in the specific and concrete others we encounter every day. Faith does not close any single aspect of the world, but defines the self in relationship to the One who transcends all the world and by transcending is related equally to all that exists. Faith’s freedom resides in the simple fact that by being related to the One who is open to all things, we thereby are enabled to be open to all things. (Faith’s Freedom: A Classic Spirituality for Contemporary Christians, Luke Timothy Johnson, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990, p. 176).

As to God’s gift: Karl Barth (in “Christianity or Religion,” Fragments Grave and Gay, Karl Barth, London: Collins, 1971) said humanity’s search for God is “religion,” to all of which Christianity is opposed, beginning “when religion ends.” God’s “arising to go to man” is Christianity’s “essence.” It is also God’s gift.

Killing in war and capital punishment are ultimate state-ordered sin.

Dangers and Ironies of the "Enemy-is-a-Cancer" Argument: Two Friends Chatting Across the Border by Brad Jersak and Shannon McGuire

BRAD:

Summary of the Enemy-is-a-Cancer Argument: While we normally regard a military enemy as people to be respected both during and in the aftermath of warfare (as per the Geneva Convention), there are those, such as extremist Islamic terrorists like Al Qaeda or totalitarian leaders like Korea’s Kim Jong Il, who have so eradicated their own humanity that the sole purpose of their lives is given to destruction and killing. In the reality of an us-or-them scenario with such madmen, we must view them as no longer human, but rather, as a deadly, malignant cancer to be annihilated.

Little Palestine by Greg Rollins

By Greg Rollins. Greg is a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams, an organization that asks, "What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?"

The flashbacks disoriented me. Sometimes, for brief moments I could not remember where I was.

Amidst a mob of Palestinian children, our Palestinian guides showed us through the refugee camp. They showed us four room apartments that house up to five families. They showed us warehouses that people sought shelter in after they had been kicked out of their houses. They showed us bullet holes from the police and soldiers who randomly shoot at the apartments. We saw alleys and walkways blockaded with fallen palms and water tanks filled with sand to keep the police or soldiers from driving through the camp in the middle of the night and blasting their horns or playing loud music.

None of this was new to me. I see things like this all the time in Palestine. Then I remember, I’m not in Palestine, I’m in Iraq.

In the refugee camp my team mate Will and I listened to Palestinians who told us about life for them in Iraq. One man, born in 1946 just outside of Haifa, Palestine, told us how the journey to Iraq started. During the war of ’48 the Iraqi army was fighting the Israelis in the Galilee/Haifa area. The Iraqis evacuated many Palestinian families from their homes due to the fighting. At the request of the Iraqi Queen Alia, they were invited back to Iraq. The Palestinians went. When the fighting in Palestine ended, the Israelis did not allow them to return.

Our hosts told us that life for Palestinians in Iraq is hard. Many of the some 30,000 here would rather live under the Israelis. Because the Palestinians were invited to Iraq and not forced here, they have not been given refugee status by the UN. But they are not Iraqi citizens either. They are almost nothing. They cannot own homes or land; they cannot own businesses, or even cars. Although Saddam boasted that he treated the Palestinians in Iraq better than he treated the Iraqis, our hosts told us that it was not true. Saddam only talked about treating the Palestinians luxuriously but he never gave them anything.

Today, under a different government, life is no better. While Palestinians suffer like Iraqis, without water, electricity or work, they continue to suffer from discrimination. In some respects they are lucky, they have yet to be the target of insurgents, but the Iraqi Police and National Guard search homes in the camps three or four times a week. They insult the residents and arrest people for no reason. Because they are not citizens, all Palestinians must go to the residency office once a month to receive permission to remain in the country. One man told us that if your stamp expires and you are stopped by the police or National Guard, you’ll go to jail. Another told us he shows police his ID from a human rights organization he works for because it doesn’t say that he is Palestinian.

After Will and I left the camp we felt confused by what the Palestinians told us. I knew that Palestinians are discriminated against throughout the Middle East, but their plight here adds one more dimension of oppression and chaos to an already oppressive and chaotic situation. It enforced in my mind that this is not a black and white situation, it is gray. The situation grows grayer here every day. 

Life in the Green Zone by Greg Rollins

By Greg Rollins. Greg is a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams, an organization that asks, "What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?"

I recently talked to a foreigner I know who lives in the Green Zone, Saddam’s old palace grounds in the centre of Baghdad. The Green Zone is about four kilometres long and two kilometres wide. It holds the biggest U.S. embassy in the world, the British embassy, along with several others, the Iraqi parliament and dozens of foreign organizations and contractors. The man I spoke to works for a telecommunications company. He said the Green Zone is like a prison. He wants to leave it and live else where in Baghdad but his company won’t let him.

One condition that makes his life there so difficult is the myriad levels of security. Almost every major contractor or organization in the Green Zone has its own security unit. Each one is an entity unto itself. He refers to these security guards as cowboys, strutting around with their guns strapped to their thighs. Many security companies have their own checkpoints in front of their buildings. He said every time he leaves his apartment he must pass through two of these checkpoints on his street alone. It can take him as long as fifteen minutes to pass through them. I asked him if the guards ever recognized him and let him pass without checking him. He said they do recognize him but always search him.

To pass through some of these security zones the guy showed me several of his ID badges. Each one allows him to enter a different place. The badges reminded me of stories about Beirut in the 1970s when journalists needed different forms to move through the checkpoints of the numerous militias. The guy told me that each badge had different restrictions. Some stated he needed an escort to go places, some read he needed prior permission to enter areas. I asked him if it was true that there was a McDonald’s in the Green Zone. He said there was but you needed a special badge to go there. My teammate Tom asked if the badge had a picture of Ronald McDonald on it.

The man I spoke with was also irritated by the fact that the Iraqis who work for him are not allowed to go anywhere in the Green Zone with out him escorting them. Every morning he has to pick them up at one of the entrances and every night he has to drop them off there.

The guy did not like the behaviour of the U.S. soldiers in the Green Zone either. He said they yell at cars to move out of their way, pointing their guns at anyone and everything. If they drove that way inside the Green Zone, he was afraid to hear how they drove outside the Green Zone in Iraqi traffic.
     From my own experiences in the Green Zone and from what other people I know who live there have said, life in such a tight environment is not satisfying. It might be a “safe” place but it isn’t real. It doesn’t reflect what is happening in Iraq. Most foreigners who live in the Green Zone never set foot outside its borders. They spend months here but they have no idea what Iraq is really like. It makes me wonder if people inside the Green Zone, particularly U.S. military and government officials, really know what is going on in Iraq at all.

Reflection on the London Bombing by Wayne Northey

The colourful condemnation by Western leaders of acts of terror is obviously fully deserved. As far as it goes…

            On July 7, 2005 Prime Minister Tony Blair called the London bombings “barbaric attacks.” On September 1, 1939, President Roosevelt wrote to the major powers that aerial bombing of civilians had “profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity” and called it “inhuman barbarism.” He later referred to the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbour as a “date, which will live in infamy.” President Bush designated the September 11, 2001 attackers “evildoers.”

            James Berardinelli in a review of Errol Morris’ documentary The Fog of War wrote: “[Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara] served in World War II under the unrelenting command of General Curtis LeMay, the commander of the 20th Air Force. In 1945, LeMay was in charge of a massive firebombing offensive in Japan that resulted in the deaths of nearly 1 million Japanese citizens, including 100,000 in Tokyo during a single night. LeMay's B-29 bombers raked 67 Japanese cities, sometimes killing more than 50% of the population. McNamara points out that, had the United States lost the war, he and LeMay would have been tried as war criminals.” General Curtis LeMay, au contraire the most decorated military officer of the (democratic!) United States of America, boasted of the Tokyo raid: “[W]escorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 [1945] than went up in vapour at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” (For the record, he was mistaken.)

            The Chief of Staff for Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, William Leahy, memoired of the atomic bombs that killed at least 120,000 civilians instantly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan… My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

            Prime Minister Churchill nonetheless described the thousands of carpet and fire bombing campaigns against over 100 German and Japanese cities, including the two atomic detonations, as “moral bombing”…

            Columnist Bob Herbert (New York Times, November 1, 2004) draws on reliable sources to inform us there were by last year already 100,000 civilian deaths due to the American invasion of Iraq. President Bush recently said however, “It is worth it,” echoing former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s judgment, some of whose family lived through the Nazi Holocaust, that one million civilian deaths from sanctions against Iraq were “worth it.”

            Historian Tami Biddle wrote that when aerial warfare was still only imagined in the 19th century, it meant “English-speaking peoples raining incendiary bombs over the enemy to impose the customs of civilization.” Rudyard Kipling applauded the ruthless conquering of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War: “Take up the White Man's burden--/The savage wars of peace --.”
            Shakespeare expressed in Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” He might have been describing a gaggle of 20th- and 21st-century Western leaders, most recently Prime Minister Blair and President Bush. In that same play, Shakespeare wrote: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” In place of Denmark might have been written: “Western civilization.”

            Pete Seeger sang, “When will they ever learn?” Catholic anthropologist Gil Bailie suggested of war, including by “the good guys,” the West: “If we humans become too morally troubled by the brutality to revel in the glories of the civilization made possible by it, we will simply have to reinvent culture. This is what Nietzsche saw through a glass darkly. This is what Paul sensed when he declared the old order to be a dying one (I Cor. 7:31). This is the central anthropological issue of our age.”

            Michael Scheuer, the “Anonymous” CIA author of Imperial Hubris, in an interview said:“That's the way war is. I've never really understood the idea that any American government, any American elected official is responsible for protecting civilians who are not Americans.”

            In the West, no less than anywhere else in the world, the “clash of civilizations” (Samuel Huntington) seems still in truth to be the “clash of barbarisms” (Gilbert Achcar). The ancient Babylonian creation myth established the ubiquitous maxim: Might is right. Jared Diamond in The Third Chimpanzee, wrote – and substantiated his conclusion with long lists of evidence – that the only consistent signature of our species is genocide.

            Mahatma Gandhi once was asked, “What do you think of Western civilization?.”He responded, “I think it would be a good idea.”

The "Other" Iraq by Greg Rollins

By Greg Rollins. Greg is a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams, an organization that asks, "What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?"

The Other Iraq was the one that had weapons of mass destruction. It was the one that had nuclear laboratories on the backs of huge semi trucks that could move around so the UN couldn’t find them. It was the Iraq that purchased uranium from some African country. The Iraq that was connected to Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida and was some how connected to the attacks on September 11. It was the Iraq that never had a problem with depleted uranium. It was the Iraq that was a menace to freedom and freedom loving nations throughout the world.

Today, the Other Iraq is flourishing. It is the one that is now free from oppression and fear. The city of Fallujah, in the Other Iraq, is safe from insurgents. It is the Iraq where the militants that somehow gained access across the borders are in their last throes. Any time now the U.S. will defeat them. It is the Iraq that has elected a stable government and that is creating a viable constitution where other Iraqi citizens will be able to live in safety and freedom.

The Other Iraq is the Iraq where the U.S. will be able to start reducing its troop level by the end of the year. It is the Iraq that has an abundance of water, electricity and jobs and the medical situation has never been better. Reconstruction in the Other Iraq thrives. All the money that goes to rebuilding the country finds its way into the local economy. It is the Iraq that continuously welcomes the U.S. occupation. It is the same country that has a well trained, honest and just security forces that respect human rights. The same country where its politicians are trustworthy.

In the Other Iraq they still don’t have a problem with depleted uranium. In the Other Iraq only a handful of U.S. troops have committed human rights violations against other Iraqi civilians and prisoners. In the U.S. prisons in the Other Iraq, 90% of the prisoners are guilty and only 10% are innocent but will be freed soon with full apologies. In the Other Iraq the concerns of the voiceless are always listened to.

The Other Iraq is the Iraq that you have heard about in the speeches made by George W. Bush and referred to by vice-president Dick Cheney. It is the country in the Middle East that is the furthest on the path to democracy.

The Other Iraq is nothing like the real Iraq. The real Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and was not connected to Osama Bin Ladan. It is not flourishing. The voiceless are never listened to. There is little water or electricity and unemployment is said to be as high as 40%. The real Iraq is the Iraq that George W. Bush does not talk about. Real Iraqis understand this. When they hear Bush talk about the Other Iraq, they want to know where the Other Iraq is.