“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.)