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
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