The church’s gradual and at times nearly complete break with the pattern of her Lord and of the first Christians on the question of war is yet another public witness to the unconscious practical atheism of many whose mantra is “in God we trust.”
Either we believe finally that love is stronger than death, and the way of the cross stronger than the way of the sword, or we do not.
Our Lord trusted this way unto death.
My meditation from last week—prior to the escalation with Iran—asks whether at some point before the end of history the whole church will return to Jesus and the first Christians and put our money where our Creed is.
Either we trust this radical stuff about the cross and resurrection as revealing the way to become human as God is human in the flesh of Jesus Christ—as the cruciform path by which God saves the world God loves—or we believe in the will to power, in horses and chariots, like the majority of Homo sapiens in history.
Does the end of history involve a global church that recovers from amnesia and remembers to trust the way of the cross in all its weakness, to trust that co-suffering love is stronger than any means of power this world offers?
Does a church arise that trusts God will defend and rescue and vindicate and resurrect them after their passion, and so they, as the only body Christ now has in the world, lay down their collective life in this world as the body of Christ in imitation of our Lord?
It is after all the *kind* of life one human lives among us as the only living God dies for the life of the world that ought to instruct how *we* live and how *we* die—a life manifested in the dispositions, thoughts, words, and actions of Jesus Christ.
The first Christians were fully immersed in his way of dying to become human. They chose the way of the cross.
It is a great mystery of human existence that the first Christians did this for more than three hundred years—without insurgencies, without a Spartacus, without a Mark Anthony—unlike any other movement within humanity before or after, and this magnificent sign and wonder is certainly a great witness to the authenticity of the gospel.
The way of self-preservation (as families or communities or cities or nations) has not always been the way of Christians, and as citizens of a world power we may not know how to make this path our own.
Millions have perished while trusting in the resurrection and in their crucified God. To suggest that they should have taken a more realistic or utilitarian stance, that they should have taken up arms, is a kind of blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. These were looking to a transfigured world. These had a different country in their hearts.
They trusted that God was on the side of humanity, on the side of his creation, no longer a God with or for one geography or one people or one culture but a God with and for everyone, everywhere.
Is there a final moment in history when instead of fighting the Antichrist, instead of taking up arms against the penultimate Hitler or the final ISIS or whatever form death’s last great tyranny takes, the church visibly rejects the means and powers of this world, the privilege of self-defense, our idolatry of weapons, and decides instead to beat all our swords and spears into farming tools, chooses to trust the humility and weakness of God in Jesus Christ to vindicate us—not our armaments, our anger, our right to stand up for ourselves—in order to make manifest an already-accomplished defeat of darkness on Golgotha?
What if the end comes only after an unprecedented and great slaughter of Christians, after a worldwide crucifixion of the body of Christ, in which after great sacrifice in imitation of her Lord she dies and rises from the ashes of her demise by the Spirit, and God is finally all in all because the cruciform pattern of love that governs the universe and holds all things together and gives all living things breath has been confirmed in a peculiar crucified and resurrected people with Christ as her head?
In the end Jesus tells us we will win not by defending our life, nor by trying to hold on to our privilege, but by giving up our life so that the world might live.
Thank you Kenneth Tanner for sharing this. I am currently reading “The Day the Revolution Began by N. T. Wright & what you wrote & this book dovetails beautifully. I am especially blessed as today is the 50th anniversary of my starting on the path to wholeness found in Jesus Christ.
Posted by: John Kemp | January 10, 2020 at 10:37 AM