“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants.” —Thomas Jefferson (who venerated ‘nature and nature’s god’)
The Tree of Life does not require the blood of the martyrs and is not refreshed by their blood nor by the blood of tyrants.
The martyrs don’t die to accomplish anything—their deaths are not ‘useful’—nor because God needs their sacrifice—God desires the death of no one, desires not our sacrifices—nor because God is glorified in their deaths; no, the martyrs die because violence is the currency of the powers of this world. Violence is what the powers trust.
Instead, God converts the lives of the martyrs to his kind of life, which is never-ending love, and which never seeks vengeance, or to prove itself, or to take anything or anyone by force (on this side of death or in the life that is beyond the power of death).
“The desire of God for humans is the same desire God has for himself” (Chris Green) so that when God commands us not to kill this is an expression of his own way of being, a way of being he desires for us.
That the death of a martyr works some kind of good for God or the world, or worse, as one Christian theologian and pastor teaches, because God wills all that occurs in the world God is the sender of the person who blows up the church building, is the logic of terrorism not of the Christian faith.
We do not worship “nature or nature’s god,” as the pagans did, for nature is truly fallen. We venerate the God whose uncreated light shines in the face of Jesus Christ.
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