Andy’s Letter
The following is an
excerpt from Chapter 78. Please also
read “Violence and Nonviolence – (Parts I and II)”, and “Excerpts Re. Hell –
Parts I and II”.
October 29, 1972
Dear Berlin Team:
Throughout
my life there has been a strong evangelistic impulse. But there is I contend a wider understanding
of mission that has been overlooked by GO and my upraising. In the Sheep and Goats passage in Matthew 25,
what did Jesus mean by the mission mandate “to the least of these”, if
juxtaposed with the much more frequently quoted passage about the “Great Commission”
in Matthew 28, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the
name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost…”? Yet even in the Matthew 28 passage, surely
the “Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you”
references back to Matthew 5 – 7, “whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and
doeth them”, the central early church catechism that calls for a consistent and
persistent justice done to the neighbour.
Then
there is the Great Commission in John 20, that said Jesus was sending out his
disciples as the Father had sent him out: to (according to Luke 4) “preach the
gospel to the poor; ... to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the
captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are
bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.” That all sounds very socially oriented,
though doubtless with a spiritual dimension too. As does of course Mary’s Song in Luke 1, that
includes: “He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those
who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones, “and Presidents from
their Snow White House”, but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but
has sent the rich away empty.”
So
doesn’t the litmus test for authentic Christianity go something like this: to
love God means to love the neighbour means to love the enemy? To whatever extent we fail to find God in the
enemy, to that extent we fail to find God anywhere else on the continuum. God-talk without enemy-love is plain
hypocrisy – “sounding brass and tinkling cymbal”.
How
that squares with a wider Christianity that this century alone has endorsed participation
in warfare occasioning over 100 million killings is God’s business to
judge. It is though ours to repent
of. This is not to mention at least a
millennium of Christendom teaching that has blessed the State in the wholesale
slaughter of religious and social heretics within, State enemies without.
Just
because the church has been massively unfaithful to the neighbour/enemy love
mission mandate throughout most of its centuries is no reason to go on with
business as usual. Surely! Someone must cry out, “But the Emperor/Church
has no clothes!” For there is another
Gospel mandate besides winning converts to believe in Jesus. And it is no less valid and compelling as the
call to invite people to personal faith in Christ.
I
appeal to you, G.E., to all of you on our Berlin mission, to test out the truth
of these claims against the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels, Paul’s and other
writers’ instructions in the rest of the New Testament, and what had transpired
on the contrary throughout church history.
Now
consider the longstanding “Christian” doctrine of hell as “eternal conscious
punishment” for the unbeliever. I know
this has been a prime motivator for evangelism in general, and for the first GO team in particular. But is it biblical after all? I now think not.
First,
is not the doctrine of hell ominously close to the church’s longstanding
embrace of destroying the enemy, despite Jesus’ explicit teaching to the
contrary? Is God not contradicting his
own teaching by relegating his enemies to eternal conscious torment?
Second,
whom did Jesus threaten with hell? As I
have read and re-read the Gospels, I come up with one consistent answer, no
exceptions: the self-righteous religious believer is only ever warned about
hell.
Third,
isn’t Jesus’ understanding of hell in fact the downward spiral of an
inward-turned self destined for self-destruction? Isn’t hell by definition the incapacity of a
self to see beyond itself to God or neighbour? Isn’t hell ultimately man’s choice not God’s sentence, especially to a
torture chamber? Isn’t C.S. Lewis right
in observing that in the end, there are only two kinds of humanity: those who
say to God, “Thy will be done”, and those to whom God says with profound sadness,
“Thy will be done”?
I
appeal to your sense of biblical commitment to see the truth in what I am
saying. I challenge you not to just go
along with Evangelical tradition, however hoary in its contrary reading of
Scripture.
I know I came over here with a whole bunch of
answers to questions I found people were not even asking. Then, just through a variety of life
experiences, discussions, and the sheer weight of living, I found that my answers didn’t remotely relate to my real questions! And the
questions I was asking were not giving way to ready answers the way I was
raised.
I find it now impossible to remain one-sided
about mission. As you know, we have been
doing evangelism. But while doing it, we
began encountering all kinds of basic human needs. And we started meeting them as best we
could. Until you, G.E., reminded us we
were there to do evangelism, not social work! So we’ve been limited to telling people about Jesus, but
not showing them by our actions what
Jesus means. That’s evangelism without
the Gospel. The irony is immense. Evangelical practice ubiquitous.
I also met several people who quite challenged me about what “mission” means. I began to change. I still believe in telling people about Jesus. Don’t get me wrong. But I’m much more interested in the showing than I used to be. Or at least it has grown on me this idea that there are two fundamental Christian callings, related both to the Two Great Commandments according to Jesus. One is to draw people into a love of God that is liberating, not binding. The other is to encourage Christians to love the neighbour and the enemy like they love God. They’re inextricably interconnected.
This is certainly the case with C.S. Lewis and Billy Graham, the two most representative Evangelicals of the twentieth century. Likewise, the vast majority of
Christians of every stripe in Germany supported the Nazis both passively by doing nothing to resist them, and
actively by supporting the huge war effort wherein between thirty-five to sixty
millions, half of them civilians, died worldwide by war’s end. At the same time, in the pre-War and War
years, multiplied thousands were also guillotined and sent to places like Dachau.
Then there was the Holocaust which saw at least
six million Jews slaughtered, not to mention an estimated equal number of
undesirables liquidated through no crime except being a despised minority. And somehow that was all justified because
the “State” is ordained by God?! If the
State in Nazi Germany wasn't in fact the Beast of the Book of Revelation, I don't know what was. I wonder the same about contemporary America and its Pax Americana worldwide, especially right now in Veitnam.
Lest we think Western Christendom is otherwise
exempt, what the Allies alone did during the last War is utterly bone-chilling:
routine bombing for years of residential areas in over forty cities throughout
Germany with unnumbered civilian casualties; Dresden, overflowing with
refugees, almost entirely leveled; incendiary bombings of more than sixty
Japanese cities, again with almost 100% civilian deaths. In one night of terror alone, that would make
Robespierre of the French Revolution’s “Reign of Terror” look like a pious
Sunday School teacher, or the Catholic killers of thousands of Huegenots on St
Bartholemew’s Day in 17th century France feel utterly outdone, or
even Hitler feel jealous at the massive killing efficiency, the Allies, mainly
American bombers, slaughtered one hundred thousand innocents in Tokyo, burning
the whole mass of them, men, women, children, babies – didn’t matter – to
death! Then they dropped two atomic
bombs a few months later. And one
hundred and twenty thousand more men, women, and children were instantly
incinerated. Not to mention the
thousands more who died slow agonizing deaths subsequently; the multiplied
thousands maimed for life; the horrendous ecological destruction...
What amazes me, now that I really let my mind dwell on it, is how utterly devoid of guilt the West, including the Christian West, is about all this incalculable obscenity. Did any of us ever catch a hint in school or church that this kind of mass murder was wrong? Did you even know what the Allies did in Germany? Do you think most Western Caucasian Christians know about more than the atomic bombs in Japan?
Which are always justified. The State, no less the Western democratic
state supported fully by virtually all Evangelical Christians, in every
instance is a monstrous idol spewing doublespeak, declaring wrong right,
fundamentally inverting the Gospel call to love of enemies. It has to be the ultimate fallen power, given
its massive destructive impact upon lives for whom Christ died; its pouring out
of death this century alone into the hundreds of millions.
So the Christian West has been for centuries
front row in helping produce the major mass murderers of the twentieth century:
Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, McKenzie
King, Nixon, etc., etc., etc. Where will
it end, this succession of mass killers whom we good citizens, most Christians,
wildly cheer on? Just don’t dare even to
whisper this contrary perception around. One would be an irreligious traitor, deserving of the same fate! Jim Billings on the Spain team intimated such desert in a letter I recently received, after my sharing with him a little of my growing consternation...
I guess it comes down to this: when the West
has participated equally in upwards of one hundred million victims slaughtered
so far in international conflict this century, our ethical sensors, even if
attuned, must simply shut down from moral overload. We are forced to resist, or
justify the mass murders. Evangelicals en masse have always chosen the latter. We either choose to opt out of the kind of
society that would sanction and actually do this kind of unconscionable grand
scale murdering, or we justify it by our very refusal to even think about it –
except on Remembrance Day each year when we glorify it. And then of course there are the endless
death hucksters in books and movies who actually soothe everyone’s
sensibilities so that we may step with clean consciences over the ubiquitous
corpses littering the entire Western scapegoating cultural landscape in order
that we may get on with living. “In
State violence we trust” has always been most Christians’ ultimate creed – at
least since the Middle Ages. A creed
more final than allegiance to the true and living God.
Being in the West is like growing up in a Mafia family of murderers who oppose killing of their own kind, until they are reminded that others might feel similar opposition to their rampant carnages. As I understand it, just try living in Ireland or the Middle East.
Both
sides to the conflicts excoriate violence – then commit it cold-bloodedly in
the name of retaliatory vengeance. And
the rest of the West condemns it, constantly calling the killers to peace. But guess what!... There are multiplied millions of skeletons
rattling in our own closets, belying such unbelievable hypocrisy.
And yet, incredibly, no one gets it! No one will blink in this centuries-long game
of deadly chicken and say: I guess, across the board, the real
enemy is state violence itself, not just “enemies” committing it!
Such are some of my thoughts since working over
here in Christian mission.
So where does that leave me? Not a little disillusioned with Christianity,
mission, evangelism, and Western values, so informed by Christendom for two
millennia. The massive unfaithfulness to
Jesus’ delineation of Two Great Commands, not least of which as subcategory is,
“Love Your Enemies”, and the cold-blooded inability of most of the Christian
and secular West to “get it”, not least of whom are Evangelicals, leaves me not
a little jaded.
But right now, I don’t quite know where to go
with that. I can’t just opt out of the
world – like the Apostle Paul would say. I want to shout at the top of my
lungs, “But the Emperor has no clothes!” Yet the theological and philosophical dupes and sycophants have been
strutting otherwise for nearly two thousand weary years of Church History. In the secular West no less, for all its apparent
opposition to Christendom. How can one
(or a few) lonely voice(s) drown out that long history of murderous cacophony?
I kept my mouth shut as long as I could.
It finally showed. I had quite a sharp disagreement with you,
Gary, recently. If you only knew how
deeply I’m offended by your cheap-grace rapacious, murderous
Evangelicalism. It terrifies me. Up until not too long ago, I bought into all
that too.
In sum, if I had one appeal to make to
Evangelicals, to Christians of all stripes, it would be: be
evangelical! Really do take seriously, for once in two millennia,
Jesus and the Bible.
Thanks for hearing me out.
Andy
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