Introduction
A Canadian evangelical theological student,
suspicious of Karl Barth’s neoorthodoxy, once asked him: “What do you think of
reason?” Barth sharply retorted: “I use it!”
Eleventh century theologian St. Anselm of
Canterbury coined the phrase, “Credo ut intelligam” – I believe in order to
understand. That approach underlies all knowledge, all epistemologies. All
knowledge in fact begins in a realm of irrationality in this sense: we assume
several givens about life before reason kicks in.
In biblical faith, part of the conscious
assumptions, the presuppositions, the prior faith commitments, is to Scripture
as sure Guide. “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path (Ps
119:105).,” Scripture self-attests, and Christians affirm. But after that prior
faith commitment, it is full throttle on use of reason.
While there are problems to be sure about
that faith avowal, once made, we’re only halfway home. We still have to figure
out what the text actually says. It
was W. C. Fields who read the Bible, he explained facetiously, “looking for the
loopholes.” Few of us are quite so candid. All of us are complicit at times in
such an approach.
I know this is first thing on a Monday
morning, and for those living on campus, short minutes ago you may have still
been in bed. Nevertheless I want to call on your sound use of reason today to
present to you two conundrums.
I grew up in a biblical tradition that
claimed to take Jesus and the biblical text seriously. It was therefore a huge
shock to me when I first attended Regent College in the fall of 1974, and took
in Clark Pinnock’s inter-term three-week course entitled, “The Politics of
Jesus.” He had lifted that title straight from a book published two years
earlier by Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. I was of the mind until that
point that, in the words of Regent College’s then vice-principal, Dr. William
Martin, “there are no politics in the Bible.” He said that to me with reference
to Pinnock’s semester course he taught the next fall by that same title. Dr.
Martin like me was from that faith tradition that church historian Ernest
Sandeen dubbed “quintessential fundamentalist,” that until 30 years ago at least
was almost purely a-political, centrally pietist and otherworldly in its understanding of God and mission, though
practice on the mission field back then often transcended the disconnect to
neighbour and created order.
Though I had “accepted Christ as Saviour”
at the tender age of four, as I always told in giving my testimony, though I
was baptized at 12 and studied the Bible religiously from that day onwards,
making copious notes for years and winning the approbation of all the elders in
my church and all our missionaries, I was still in for the shock of my life
until then when I first sat down for that three-week course of Dr. Pinnock,
January, 1975. On principle I refused to read Yoder’s text, though it was the
only one assigned, and we had to hand in a report on it. I passed the course
somehow, but felt rather furious at the “strange Gospel” Pinnock was peddling
and many embraced that wet January three decades ago.
But Pinnock, and, I eventually conceded,
Yoder, hooked me, and took me through two conversions. Stanley Hauerwas,
“America’s finest theologian” according to Time
magazine a few years ago, who likewise was converted by Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus, believes that
book is bar none the most important
theological watershed of the twentieth century. Theologian James William
McClendon Jr. wrote an outstanding three-volume Systematic Theology because he too was transformed by reading Yoder
about “the politics of Jesus.” Yet Dr. Martin, whom I served as research
assistant in my second year at Regent College, said there were no politics in
the Bible, he who had read his Bible in the original even, most of his life,
and ought to have known!
In the thirty years since I arrived an
eager young theologue at Regent College, most pietistic traditions have
undergone what I call my first post-Christian “conversion” experience: they
became not only convinced that the Bible is about politics, in the United
States their current representatives comprise the greatest block of supporters
for President Bush and the Republican party. Evangelicals, largely of pietistic
origin, have indeed discovered the centrality of politics in the Bible.
But I underwent a second conversion at
Regent College that most of my fellow Evangelicals did not, thanks to my
professor, Clark Pinnock, and also to John Howard Yoder’s book. So did Stanley
Hauerwas and James William McClendon Jr., again thanks to Yoder’s book. That
was to discover that the biblical way of
doing politics was the utterly counterintuitive way of the nonviolent cross.
About 20 years after the publication of The Politics of Jesus, in private
conversation at a conference, Yoder told me that he had not once ever been
challenged by any biblical scholar about his reading of Jesus and the New Testament in that book on the issue of
nonviolence. Rather, he had been dismissed because of the sheer impracticality of living out that reading.
So I come to my theme this morning: I find
in response to Scripture, and in response to the experience of war, two
fundamental conundrums about violence.
I gave a title to my talk: “Two Conundrums and the Kingdom of God.”
Conundrum
1: Violence and Scripture
Help me reason
this out, in the spirit of Karl Barth.
Richard Hays, an
American New Testament theologian, has written the premier contemporary study
on New Testament ethics. The massive tome is entitled The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation. After spending the first few hundred pages meticulously presenting how
to read the New Testament to excavate its ethics, he supplies several case
studies to demonstrate the theory. One is the issue of violence. In a chapter
entitled “Violence in Defense of Justice,” Hays leaves no exegetical task
unturned in sifting through the entire New Testament for its witness concerning
violence. He begins with Matthew’s Gospel, in particular the Sermon on the
Mount. He writes:
The point is that the community of Jesus’
disciples is summoned to the task of showing forth the character of God inthe world. That character is nowhere
more decisively manifest than in the practice of loving enemies (5:44—45), a
practice incompatible with killing them.32 Those who are peacemakers
are to be called “sons of God” (5:9) because, like God, they love their enemies
(5:45, cf. 5:48).33 Thus, the church’s embodiment of nonviolence
is—according to the Sermon on the Mount—its indispensable witness to the
gospel (p. 329).
Then, under
the title “Synthesis: Violence in Canonical Context,” he gives an overview of
the entire sweep of the New Testament:
Our exegetical illustration of Matthew 5:38—48
has led to the conclusion that the passage teaches a norm of nonviolent love of
enemies. Within the context of Matthew’s Gospel, the directive to “turn the
other cheek” functions as more than a bare rule; instead, as a “focal instance”
of discipleship, it functions metonymically [it stands for all responses to an
enemy], illuminating the life of a covenant community that is called to live in
radical faithfulness to the vision of the kingdom of God disclosed in Jesus’
teaching and example. Taken alone, this text would certainly preclude any
justification for Jesus’ disciples to resort to violence. The question that we
must now consider is how Matthew’s vision of the peaceful community fits into the
larger witness of the canonical New Testament. Do the other texts in the canon
reinforce the Sermon on the Mount’s teaching on nonviolence, or do they provide
other options that might allow or require Christians to take up the sword?
When the question is
posed this way, the immediate result—as [Karl] Barth observed34— is
to underscore how impressively univocal is the testimony of the New Testament
writers onthis point (p. 329)…
Hays then takes us on
a tour of all the relevant passages buttressing this reading, concluding:
“Thus, from Matthew to Revelation we find a consistent witness against violence
and a calling to the community to follow the example of Jesus in accepting sufferingrather than inflicting it
(p. 332).”
Then Hays asks the one
question most frequently posed in response to his summary of the New Testament:
What about the Old Testament witness? He responds:
Taken on its own terms, the Old Testament
obviously validates the legitimacy of armed violence by the people of God under
some circumstances. This is the point at which one of the methodological
guidelines proposed in Part III must come into play: the New Testament’s
witness is finally normative. If irreconcilable tensions exist between the
moral vision of the New Testament and that of particular Old Testament texts,
the New Testament vision trumps the Old Testament (p.336)…
He adds:
The vocation of nonviolence is not exclusively
an option for exceptionally saintly individuals, nor is it a matter of
individual conscience; it is fundamental to the church’s identity and raison d’être [reason for existence]. Mainline Protestantism has usually
treated this matter as though it were a question of individual moral preference,
supporting the “right” of individual conscientious objection but also generally
sanctioning Christian participation in war. In light of the New Testament’s
call to the community as a whole to embody the teaching of Jesus, however, this
position is untenable and theologically incoherent. The church is called to
live as a city set on a hill, a city that lives in light of another wisdom, as
a sign of God’s coming kingdom… [I]f we ask the larger question about the
vocation of the community, the New Testament witness comes clearly into focus:
the community is called to the work of reconciliation and—as a part of that
vocation—suffering even in the face of great injustice. When the identity of
the community is understood in these terms, the place of the soldier within the
church can only be seen as anomalous (p. 337).
A little later, he
speaks to the issue of realpolitik:
or how practical is this, Mr. Yoder?:
To put this in theological shorthand, the New
Testament’s ethical teaching must always be situated within the context of
eschatological hope. If we fail to read the New Testament texts on violence
through the lens of new creation, we
will fall into one of two opposing errors: either we will fall into a foolish
utopianism that expects an evil world to receive our nice gestures with
friendly smiles, or we will despair of the possibility of living under the
“unrealistic” standards exemplified by Jesus. But if we do read the texts
through the lens of new creation, we
will see that the church is called to stand as God’s sign of promise in a dark
world. Once we see that, our way, however difficult, will be clear (pp. 338
& 339).
Hays notes further:
The paradigm
mode is the preeminent mode of the New Testament canon’s pervasive witness
against violence. The Gospel passion narratives are at the center of that
witness, along with Paul’s kerygma that tells the story of how God has
reconciled enemies through the death of his Son. The story of Jesus’ exemplary
renunciation of violence is in turn reflected in stories such as the death of
Stephen and in the exhortation of Peter that believers should follow “in his
steps.” Nowhere does the New Testament provide any positive model of Jesus or
his followers employing violence in defense of justice. (In this respect the
New Testament is quite remarkable within the world’s literature.) (pp. 339
& 340)
And again, in direct
response to realpolitik:
The truth about reality is disclosed in the
cross: God’s power is disclosed in weakness. Thus, all who are granted to see
the truth through Jesus Christ will perceive the world through the lenses of
the Beatitudes and the strange narrative of the Apocalypse, in which the King
of kings and Lord of lords is the slaughtered Lamb. The power of violence is
the illusory power of the Beast, which is unmasked by the faithful testimony of
the saints (p. 340)…
Nonviolence, Hays argues, is ultimate realpolitik.
Finally, under the title, “OTHER AUTHORITIES,”
Hays writes:
This is the place where New Testament ethics
confronts a profound methodological challenge on the question of violence, because
the tension is so severe between the unambiguous witness of the New Testament
canon and the apparently countervailing forces of tradition, reason, and experience
(p. 341).
In consideration of each of these three
“countervailing forces,” the writer carefully nudges us back towards the New
Testament text as normative.
Hays’ final words in the chapter, under the
title, “Living the Text: The Church As Community of Peace,” are:
One reason that the world finds the New
Testament’s message of peacemaking and love of enemies incredible is that the
church is so massively faithless. On the question of violence, the church is
deeply compromised and committed to nationalism, violence, and idolatry. (By
comparison, our problems with sexual sin are trivial.) ….
Only
when the church renounces the way of violence will people see what the Gospel
means, because then they will see the way of Jesus reenacted in the church.
Whenever God’s people give up the predictable ways of violence and
self-defense, they are forced to formulate imaginative new responses in
particular historical settings… If we live in obedience to Jesus’ command to
renounce violence, the church will become the sphere where the future of God’s
righteousness intersects—and challenges—the present tense of human existence.
The meaning of the New Testament’s teaching on violence will become evident
only in communities of Jesus’ followers who embody the costly way of peace
(pp. 343 & 344).
I quoted Hays at such
length, since I wanted to put the case home that there is no biblical warrant for supporting Christian resort to violence at the
personal level, or in support of the state’s doing our dirty work for us
through war against our international enemies, or capital punishment against
our domestic enemies. There is, on the contrary, one New Testament response
to our enemies that Jesus gives: “Love your enemies.” In Luke’s Gospel, the
passage goes on, picked up by Saint Paul in Romans 13, “Love your enemies, do
good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who
mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also.
If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give to
everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand
it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you (Luke 6:27 – 31).” Where
are W.C. Fields’ loopholes in that? Where are the exception clauses anywhere
else in the New Testament? And to put the point home, Jesus caps it off with a
reprise: “But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without
expecting to get anything back. 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).” Negative and
positive reciprocity are both rejected by Jesus. You have read René Girard, and
know his whole inquiry turns on that reality.
The Templeton
Prize in Religion winner for 2004 was theoretical cosmologist George F. R. Ellis
who co-authored with theologian Nancey Murphy the book, On The Moral Nature of the Universe, in which they argue that a
“particular moral vision – a ‘kenotic’ ethic – is supported ‘from below’ by the
social sciences and ‘from above’ by theology. Contemporary cosmology, they
argue, points ultimately to an ethic that centers on self-sacrifice and
nonviolence (back cover).” This is consonant, argues Stanley Hauerwas in The
2001 Gifford Lectures, borrowing an expression from John Howard Yoder, “with
the grain of the universe” (Hauerwas, 2001) – how God set up things and
intended them to work. It is presented in theologian James Alison’s book, Raising Abel (1996) as “recovery of the
eschatological imagination,” whose work as well interprets theologically that
of René Girard, possibly the foremost living theorist on the origins of human
violence. It is given ‘systematically’ in James Williams McClendon Jr.’s
trilogy on Systematic Theology as the
true starting point of all theology, all God-talk. What a different world, what
a different history in the last two millennia, if that had only been dominantly
true.
So the conundrum is:
why? Why has majority Christian practice overwhelmingly been pro-violence? Dr.
Ellis, whom I just mentioned, at a Trinity Western University lecture two years
ago, in response to that very question posed by me, said: “Because it is just
too hard otherwise.”
A character in my novel, Chrysalis Crucible, says:
My conclusion from simple observation is: Evangelicals
routinely practise an under-your-breath ideologized “footnote theology” that
reads repeatedly, “Except our enemies,” when quoting John 3:16 and all other
similar New Testament ethical teachings. How could Billy Graham tell the North Vietnamese that God loves
them, when he fully blesses his own country in doing the exact opposite; when Billy Graham is still praying with
the President for victory in the War – which means massive carnage and
widespread wanton destruction? When he apparently wills the utter inversion of everything Gospel in treatment of
neighbour, enemy and creation?
In my novel, set in West Berlin during the
Vietnam War in the early seventies, evangelist Andy Norton has time to kill
outside the American army base, while waiting for his colleague to complete a
visit inside with an officer. By this time, Andy has been challenged repeatedly
about his pro-violence stance with which he had grown up as an Evangelical
Christian. In a long soliloquy, his mind finally goes wild. I will read
portions of it:
He had some serious thinking to do. Somehow the
sight of this Compound, representing American power flung to the far corners of
the world, was an inspiration. But not to sing The Star-Spangled Banner.
Andy’s mind first turned to G.E.’s forceful
missive about only “preaching the Gospel.” He thought immediately of the
Matthew 25 passage.
He felt again overwhelmed with the salvation
message of the passage. It all turned upon good works performed in this
lifetime. And yet he had been raised all his life to believe “not by works, lest any man should boast,”
Paul’s teaching, which was all after-death oriented. So did Paul simply
contradict Jesus? Did a choice have to be made of that sort? Or was James, in
echoing Jesus with “ Show me your faith
without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.,” simply out to
lunch, author indeed of a “right strawy epistle,” unaware that salvation was
freely offered without good works?
Were James and Jesus in their teachings somehow
heretics? Even though Jesus the icon saved us through His blood? But not
through His words lived out? Then Andy remembered the startling discovery in
Matthew’s Gospel that the “wise man” was not the one who believed, and the
“foolish man” not the unbeliever destined for hell fire. Rather, the wise man
was “everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice.” And what was the immediate context for
Jesus’ “words” to discern what practice? The Sermon on the Mount, which is
chock-a-block full of the call to treat the neighbour with justice, mercy and
compassion. That was the purview of the wise man. That was the concrete
actualization of salvation that is “today.”
How had Andy missed, how had the entire
Evangelical tradition misread, such evident biblical teaching? Could it be that
Evangelicals, for all their protestations of biblical faithfulness, were
instead after all most like the legalistic Pharisees, “of their father, the
devil,” murderers and liars from the beginning? Andy hated it when his mind
took such turns. This could get a guy crucified he self-scolded with a chill.
Andy turned to the immense human capacity to
inflict human suffering upon one’s fellow, as he walked alongside the American
Base. The American Army is the most capacitated in the entire world to do
precisely that! Images of Agent Orange defoliating multiplied hundreds of
thousands of hectares of pristine jungle, and doubtless deforming thousands of
unborns for a whole new generation; gas ovens; massive bombings; scientific
excising of “cancer” from the body politic; cluster bombs scattered by the
millions, and jungle slaughter of soldiers, villagers, and anyone else caught
in the crossfire; napalm sending an eight-year-old girl naked down the road,
the searing pain all over her face, captured for the world by a happenstance
photographer. He wondered at the enormous human capacity and lust for
perpetrating overwhelming misery against others.
The thought struck, had he first heard it from
Hans?, that this had to be the ultimate inversion of evangelism, when bombs and
bullets, Agent Orange, and God only knows what else in word and deed, not “the
good seed,” were scattered indiscriminately upon the earth. Pain, death and
devastation followed. Massively.
Then the terrifying reminder that Evangelicals en masse blessed all that! The ultimate
world evangelist gave routine assent, as surely as Saul and those stoning
Stephen persecuted the early Christians. Billy always prayed with the President
during times of national crisis. And with Graham, the vast majority of Western
Evangelicals nodded their approval, like the Nazis at Dachau and elsewhere in
the white coats at the end of those one-way train trips. What utter perversion
of the Good News. What Gospel travesty. What complete inversion of evangelism. By
the world’s greatest evangelist, and amongst the world’s most virulent religion
propagators: Evangelicals.
…
His horror turned to terror that his entire life
he had worshipped God and had been formed in all his core beliefs in company
with such sycophants of mass murder and mayhem. As if he had been born into a
Mafia family, where killing and slaughter were simply routine, justified as
what was needed to “get the job done,” to enable “normal” life to go on. “Just
War” theory as Christians had always enunciated it, Andy suddenly understood,
was equally the prerogative of the Mob and every vile tyrant known to humanity.
No doubt Christians were more sophisticated than what a Mafia family godfather
or dictator might articulate, but in the end, it all boiled down to exactly the
same thing: terror and slaughter. People destroyed, the earth raped and
pillaged, all for a “just” cause. How could he have been so duped, and not have
seen the true face of Christendom, of Evangelicalism, viciously “red in tooth
and claw”?
…
His mind moved inexorably to Evangelical, in
general Christian, justification of every war fought in the entire history of
the church. All had been blessed by the church on both sides of the conflict. Andy
knew that over one hundred millions had been slaughtered in the twentieth
century so far alone, mostly with the blessing of the church from every side. He
knew from Hans the terrible recitation of mass butchery by Western Allies. These
hundreds of thousands of immolated innocents just happened to be living in the
wrong place at the wrong time, like the infants under two that Herod had
destroyed to wipe out the Christ-Child.
Just like that!,
Andy saw it with a start. Then: And
they’re still aimed at murdering the Christ-Child! What was that Christian
World War II slogan?: “Praise God and pass the bombs!.” Sick, and designedly destructive of the Christ-Child in every last one
of “the least of these”! Herod’s decree marching orders ever since for
virtually all Christendom, world without end; world brought to a horrible end
possibly in nuclear nightmare!; all enemies for sure consigned to a
God-forsaken end, Amen and Amen, intoned by every military chaplain in the
history of Christendom.
Why was such an obvious biblical association so
out of step with virtually everyone else living in the West? Incredible! Astounding!
The power of monstrous myth-making to perpetrate the Ultimate Lie: “Might is
right. Violence is holy.” Isn’t that exactly what he was looking at? One
clarion symbol of that very mythmaking? A two-millennia religious phenomenon,
Christendom, including right up to its most vehement contemporary defenders,
Evangelicals, utterly at odds with the most straightforward, most pervasive,
most undeniably central Gospel ethical truth: Love your neighbour; love your
enemies. The Core of the Gospel: unbridled reconciliation; the Core
of Christendom: endless violence. Each in diametrically opposed stark
juxtaposition.
…
When Gandhi once was asked what he thought of
Western civilization, he paused, then replied: “I think it would be a great
idea!” Freedom of the Western press for those who own one. Freedom from
violence for those who own the biggest guns. Drop that first atomic bomb. Now
the Russians will know who has the Biggest Gun! Stupid white men facing each
other down on Main Street at High Noon. Little kids all; puerile; totally
stunted growth; utter fools every last one, from President John down to Kinky
Sex Dee and Christine and Marilyn… A great idea indeed, “civilization,” however
foreign in the West.
Gandhi might have similarly responded to, ‘What
do you think of Western Christianity?’ with, ‘I think it would be a great
idea…” Then he might have added, “They could even start by following Jesus!”
What a novel thought. And for different reasons, but in the end with identical
outcome, both believer and non-believer respond: “So what?” Billy Graham, the
pagan, the lowly G.I. Private in Vietnam, latest evangelistic convert stroking
his New Testament like a good luck charm, while proceeding to engage in routine
acts utterly anti-Christ: blowing,
not welcoming, the enemy to Kingdom Come! That, in the end, is the true measure
of Evangelical evangelism. “Kingdom Come” all right, when all is said and done,
at the point of the gun, the discharge of the bomb, the launch of the missile. Praise
God and drop those bombs, toss those grenades, spew death from the automatic
weaponry, fire those missiles. That’s God’s true Kingdom Come on earth for
Western Christianity: all enemies be damned, God be praised forevermore.
…
He could not stop his mind’s stream of
consciousness. He noticed absently geese overhead. Presumably. He imagined
American war planes about to once again drop deadly destruction upon all beneath,
the good creation.
…
And who would be thanked for saying, “But the
Emperor has no clothes!”? Certainly not the little boy crying out the sudden
revelation in Andersen’s The Emperor’s
New Clothes. “Crucify him!,” Andy suddenly heard the Evangelical hordes
crescendo in response, as robustly, as resolutely, as incomprehensibly, as the
mob in front of Pilate two thousand years before – or the soldiers doing
Herod’s bidding to the two-and-under toddlers in Bethlehem so long ago. Why did
Andy’s mind think this way? What was the matter with him? What had seized his
troubled mind to arrive at conclusions that would get him crucified, and blacklisted by every Evangelical leader in the
world? Who did he think he was?!
…
Had he somehow misunderstood? Did Evangelicals
after all really take Jesus seriously? He thought immediately of all the
“born-again” military personnel right in front of him. A real revival, the team
had been told. He remembered what Hans Beutler had said, recalled his
discussions with Dan, and reviewed his own awareness of church history. No. He
was not wrong. The vast majority of Christians throughout history, and of his
contemporary Evangelicals, best represented by Billy Graham at the White House
in his constant blessing of U.S. military interventions, had always
underwritten mass slaughter of America’s, the West’s, the “good guys’” enemies,
worldwide. Whenever it served American, or Western interests.
There was always justification for Western
Holocaust. The “other justification” like Paul’s “other gospel” that was pure
symmetrical inversion of biblical “justification by faith.” It was
Evangelicals’ primary gospel; foremost kind of “justification.” The Gospel of
Jesus Christ, of the Bible, was unknown or secondary.
There was no difference between Evangelical
doctrine and Mafia belief in the end. Regrettably or not, in cold blood, or
with a glimmer of conscience, people must
die, the good earth be wasted! Whatever to get the job done. It was the
logic of High Priest Caiaphas who said of Jesus that it was better that one man
should die than that the whole nation perish. Evangelicals, all of Christendom,
had simply repeated that scapegoating anti-Gospel dogma throughout their long,
sick and desperately evil history, who can know it?; Andy’s mind echoed
Jeremiah. The dynamics that had killed the Prince of Peace were identical to
those theologized, endorsed, and perpetuated by most of Christendom most
of history, by most everyone. Andy quoted to himself: the heart is deceitful above all things, and
desperately wicked, who can know it? Evangelicals obviously did not. Did
he?
…
So what about all the Germans, Japanese, Koreans
and Vietnamese – enemies all within the past thirty-five years – murdered on a
grand scale by the “Good Guys,” and blessed by all Christendom , except “enemy”
Christendom, which of course identically called down God’s blessing on the
slaughter of the “Good, really Bad, Guys.” Had God not made them in his image
too? Had Christ not also died for them? Was there not Good News they were
equally entitled to hear? Embrace? Live out? Does “love” mean in the end what
the papal legate said centuries before, and Evangelicals explicitly follow in
the present day, “Kill them all, God will sort out who are his own!”?
…
What kind of utter perversion, inversion, of
biblical “love” had Christendom embraced, to permit the wholesale slaughter
throughout the centuries of domestic and foreign “enemies,” who were
“neighbours,” who were “God,” at least God’s image bearers, in whom, “the least
of these,” Jesus was to be found? Why had seemingly so few in the history of
the church from within screamed out: The Emperor has no clothes!?
Some of Andy’s earlier discussions were doing
reruns.
…
Was not Martin Luther tragically misguided in only trying to find justification before
a holy God, yet never likewise before God’s image-bearers, not least God’s
chosen, the Jews? Luther who had instructed the German Nobility, “Smite, slay
and kill” the peasant hordes, and had committed to writing some of the most
vituperative anti-Semitic hate literature known to humanity. Which the Lutheran
church officially rejected only after the
Nazis, steeped in Martin Luther’s German Christianity, had slaughtered six
million Jewish innocents.
Was not, come to think of it biblically, contrary
to mainstream Protestant and Evangelical understandings, the only way to find a holy God through loving embrace of neighbour and
enemy? Was not Jesus the Way, and that Way according to Jesus is living out
the two Greatest Commandments, of which the second is the “royal law” and only
way of actually performing the first – loving God – Whom one has not seen? How
had Evangelicals, so adamant about following Jesus, sucked him utterly dry of
all true content when it came to Jesus’ own central teachings and example about
love of neighbour and enemy?
Andy’s mind had built up such momentum that
nothing seemed able to stop the ineluctable questions he was posing to himself.
He felt immobilized, like a terrified mouse before the proverbial snake. Yet
somehow the serpent, unlike in the Primordial Garden, rightly was about to swallow its prey. Wasn’t the church, in light
of its long and terrifying history of violence, one of the most evil
scourges on humanity the world had known? Possibly the most evil? He remembered a line from a German poem, Die Gerechtigkeit der Erde, O Herr, hat Dich
getötet – the righteousness of the earth, O Lord, has killed you. Only he would change O Herr to O Kirche. The church had self-imploded in light of all human
standards of righteousness, which were far more vaunted than the church’s. Or
were they? Had the secular world simply imbibed the church’s biblical teaching,
despite Christendom’s contrary example, and now was holding the church to
account when it had so quickly and so long since turned faithless to its own
founding texts?
Andy didn’t know where to turn. Who had written
on this stuff? Why didn’t he know of it? When in church history, if at all, did
at least a few lonely voices cry out about the Emperor’s, Christendom’s,
Evangelicalism’s stark and shameful, vile and unconscionably evil nakedness;
unrepentant and endlessly repeated whoredoms? Were there at least seven
thousand in the long history of the church who had not bowed the knee? Would he
have to leave the church to find God? Would he have to turn to the secular
thinkers and philosophers to discover true biblical religion? Was the church,
in the end, the Mob; worse?
…
He wished he could somehow tear out that part of
his brain that was causing so much offence, like Jesus had said one should do
with an eye or a hand. But wasn’t the church in fact the primary offender? He recalled a saying he had read by Simone
Weil: The church is that great totalitarian
beast with an irreducible kernel of truth. And Weil refused to join it
throughout her lifetime. No wonder, Andy now reconsidered. And hadn’t she also
said the most fundamental act of forgiveness humans needed to undertake is
towards God? Wasn’t she right? Might it indeed have been better had Jesus never
been born even, had the word “God” never first been uttered long ago amongst
Semitic nomads? Given how the church and its precursors had desecrated so
violently its content?
Andy felt wretched. It seemed like he was being
thrust inside an Alfred Hitch*censored*
horror movie, when all perspectives and norms were rendered kaleidoscopic. Where
was he to turn when everything normal had convulsed into a thousand
distortions? He had come over to Germany to propagate faith, and instead had
found his faith buffeted and sent topsy-turvy, not by contrary intellectual
argument from others, he had braced for that, but from his own experience and
rethinking within the faith.
He was his own fifth columnist, his own desperate
traitor, self-betrayed! How distressing. He had unwittingly been lying in wait
to ambush his easy-believism cheap-grace Evangelical faith, so proud and *censored*y
about having “the truth,” that he didn’t know that he was himself the hunted,
not the hunter.
The tables had been turned. The shoe was on the
other foot. He needed to be
evangelized. He was that Emperor
without any clothes. This was his
moment of truth. Would he repent and turn, from what?, Evangelical faith?, or
would he, like the Emperor, thrust his head a little higher, and strut
stark-staring naked onwards to the beat of Christendom’s droning blood-drenched
drums? He knew the sycophants who in that case would cheer him on. He knew the
irony of a British gun boat “rescuing” the children in Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Out of the frying
pan, into the fire. Was he, in his evangelistic zeal, only guilty of traversing
the ocean to make his converts twice the
sons of hell for his efforts? Was this the indictment of most Evangelical
missionary and evangelistic efforts worldwide, of every Billy Graham
evangelistic crusade he had so unthinkingly prayed for? How dare he think such
thoughts? Wasn’t this ultimate heresy? Who
did he think he was?
“O wretched man that I am!,” he suddenly cried
out audibly. No one heard.
Around the corner at which intersection he had
arrived, there was a horrific thundering as Army vehicle upon army vehicle
rolled down Clayallee to enter the Compound. There must have been twenty
or more; tanks, armoured cars, and a fleet of others he could not identify. They
must have been on some kind of training exercise. He was wrong, therefore. All
the Christians were not at the Base. Some at least were training once again to
kill. He felt sick. He felt like launching a rocket to wipe them all out. He
felt wretched.
Jack came out after the last of the procession
had turned in to the Compound.
Andy crossed over to the other side. Jack said he
looked like he’s seen a ghost. Andy said he had, millions of them. But
nowhere the Holy Ghost.
Jack did not even try to understand.
“Let’s head back. I’ll tell you about the visit
on the way.”
Andy looked again at the Compound for the Holy
Ghost, maybe Jesus. No such luck.
Jesus once said: “For the people of this
world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the
people of the
light (Luke 16:8).” Sometimes they see better, too. Mahatma Gandhi
refused to
accept Christ according to missionary understandings. Yet he was
greatly
attracted to Christ’s teachings, and sought to follow them. He once
observed: “The only people on earth who do not see Christ and His
teachings as nonviolent are Christians.”
Conundrum number one, to repeat: How can
Christians committed to the Prince of Peace and the authority of Scripture
destroy their enemies, and support the State to do the same?
Conundrum
II: Human Experience and Violence
In Canada we’ve just come through another
Remembrance Day celebration. When last year Westerners, we good guys, were
celebrating the 60th anniversary of D-Day, the Calgary Herald published this Op. Ed. piece by me, entitled We
Are Mansfield Park:
Western culture is
committed to a mass mythology of the righteousness of war. The latest 60th
Anniversary D-Day commemorations are recent evidence.
Anthropologist René
Girard defines “mythology” as that which camouflages violence to benefit its
perpetrators.
I have lived through
55 Remembrance Day and D-Day commemorations. I have only heard officially about
the sacrifice and bravery of our soldiers in both World Wars. No government
ceremony however has recounted Allied savagery and brutality, nor commemorated
the millions of Allied civilian victims. This is disingenuous mythology.
My dad fought on the
Italian front in World War II. It was known that at its most savage, Allied
soldiers did not take prisoners… A few years ago, my teen-age eldest burst into
tears when this awareness sank in. His grandfather never talked about
the War until his dying day. But silence like mythology only covers, does not
exonerate, culpability.
Edgar L. Jones wrote
in The Atlantic Monthly February 1946, “One War is Enough” (http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/bookauth/battle/jones.htm):
“What kind of war do
civilians suppose we fought, anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out
hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished
off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the
Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for
sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers. We topped off our
saturation bombing and burning of enemy civilians by dropping atomic bombs on
two nearly defenseless cities, thereby setting an all time record for
instantaneous mass slaughter.” And again: “…we mutilated the bodies of enemy dead, cutting off
their ears and kicking out their gold teeth for souvenirs, and buried them with
their testicles in their mouths, but such flagrant violations of all moral
codes reach into still-unexplored realms of battle psychology.”
Retired American Lt. Col. David Grossman has since done some of this
study in a new area of research he has dubbed “killology.” He writes that
modern soldiers are trained in brutalization: “This brutalization is designed to break down your existing mores and
norms and to accept a new set of values that embrace destruction, violence, and
death as a way of life. In the end, you are desensitized to violence and accept
it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal new world.” (See his
website: www.killology.com.)
In
October, 2003, The Toledo Blade ran a
Pulitzer-Prize winning four-part series, “Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths,” on
atrocities committed by an elite army unit, Tiger
Force, in Vietnam, designated “a rogue unit.” During its reign of terror in
the Central Highlands of Vietnam in 1967, hundreds of civilians were
mercilessly tortured and murdered. The government investigation into these
atrocities was intended to remain buried forever. There were no criminal
charges laid. (See: http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20031022/SRTIGERFORCE/110190169)
In
a December 28, 2003 article, The New York
Times quoted David Hackworth, creator of the Tiger Force unit: “Vietnam was
an atrocity from the get-go. It was that kind of war, a frontless war of great
frustration. There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the
numbers of bodies you counted.” The article adds: “But they [those from Tiger
Force interviewed] wanted to make another point: that Tiger Force had not been
a ‘rogue’ unit. Its members had done only what they were told, and their
superiors knew what they were doing.” This “defence” was regularly heard at the
Nuremberg Trials.
Former
Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry was also quoted giving evidence
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. He reported that
American soldiers in Vietnam had “raped, cut off heads, taped wires from
portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs,
blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion
reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks
and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the
normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done
by the applied bombing power of this country.” The full article may be found
at: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/national/28TIGE.html?ex=1073639319&ei=1&en=94ecfbb2e66368dd. A similar reality is being revealed in the
War on Terror.
In
Tokyo, March 9 and 10, 1945 about 100,000 civilians died from
incendiary
bombing, as in Dresden a month earlier. General Curtis LeMay, highly
decorated
commander of the Japanese war theatre, boasted that “wescorched and
boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that
night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
combined.” “I suppose if I had lost the war,” LeMay later commented,
“I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately we were on the
winning
side.”
There were about
800,000 civilian casualties in bombings of 66 other Japanese cities,
culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an instantaneous death toll in fact
of over 200,000 civilians. There were also about one million civilian
casualties in Germany from Allied carpet bombing of 42 cities.
In the movie
adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield
Park, the central character, Fanny Price at age 10 goes to live at her
relatives’ fairy-tale estate, Mansfield Park. Her new life is idyllic and
genteel in every way. But eventually into her adulthood the awful truth
emerges, adumbrated throughout the movie: the “civilized” opulence is
underwritten by the putrid horror of New World slavery that her uncle, Sir
Thomas, oversees business interests in, and (implied) also participates in rape
with impunity of chattel black women, and worse.
Our cherished avowal
of democracy and freedom, our protestations of inviolable international human
rights, stand knee-deep in the blood of millions of civilian victims the world
over. This unmitigated horror is the (officially) unacknowledged legacy of
World War II, of all war.
We are Mansfield Park.
In response to the detailed weaponry of the
current American military, I wrote a poem entitled: It’s All Fun and War
Games at the Air Show! It starts out:
They’ve found body
parts at a Coquitlam pig farm in BC
Disgusting, revolting, rightly wrenching.
How can a person be so
perverse? Humanity reversed.
But not us! Oh, no!
Of course!
But not us! Of
course! Oh, no!
It’s all fun and
games at the Air Show!
Just sex trade workers
after all, titillation and obfuscation for many years.
But even sex trade
workers get their (posthumous) day in court so it seems….
But not the victims
of our bombs. Whose body parts to far-flung corners are strewn.
Take Scatmines for
starters, let’s call them “Gators”:
One bomb spreads 564
mines out over a 200 by 650 metre area.
Shrapnel-loaded, they
“produce a kill”
When the landmine is
triggered by a trip wire.
Only a few millions
around worldwide (failure to self-destruct)
A nasty little trip-up
blessed by John Doe (taxpayer no?)
The US would not ban
them – they might be needed in a fight…
Imagination from hell…
a nice democratic university lab somewhere.
But not us! Oh, no!
Of course?
But not us! Of
course! Oh, no!
It’s all fun and
games at the Air Show!
Or the BLU-82 – a friendly 15,000 pound giant. (The kids would love
its flash!)
Second biggest conventional money can
buy! The Vietnamese loved it (NOT!).
One explosion kinda unmakes their (“them”
not “us”) day
Though the kids below would never
know… They call it “Daisy Cutter”
I call it “Widow, Widower, Fatherless,
Motherless, Sibling-less Childless Maker”
Doesn’t matter really what it’s named
– leaves all around not just maimed…
Since it vapourizes up to 264,000
square metres. Everything/one.
(Makes the Oklahoma City Bomber, that
Devil Incarnate!, look like an amateur,
His detonation almost an innocuous
love-in. Executed justly for his misdemeanour!)
Not to worry though:
only a few dozens ever used, and certainly NIMBY!
Instant helicopter
landing pad! Likely a promotion for the inventors…
Why unlike Edison like
its victims do we never know their names?
Are they ashamed to
hold heads up high beside such diabolical engines of death –
I wonder why?”
Then
the MOAB, biggest conventional money can buy. (Soon for sale – don’t be shy!)
Though
you can’t buy used… “Daisy-Cutter” replaced by cruise…
“The
idea behind an ‘air burst’ weapon, as opposed to a weapon that explodes on
impact with the ground, is to increase its destructive range. A bomb that
penetrates the ground and then bursts tends to send all of its energy either
down into the ground or straight up into the air. An air burst weapon sends a
great deal of its energy out to the side.” Read “maximized death and
destruction everywhere.”
Where do
they hatch these mini-fiends? Hitler clones. Timothy McVeigh genes.
In
America’s democracy, it’s hard to believe I know. “All men are created equal”
Notwithstanding.
Unless you live “over there” where our bombs are landing.
Then
you are not human but guinea pig: democracy imploded, up the jig!
The
MOAB – features 40% greater bang for the buck
(Not a
thing below its life does not suck)
Than the measly
BLU-82. New and just barely tested (you can see great videos!)
(The US military calls
it “Mother Of All Bombs” to parody Hussein.)
Everything incinerated
below – only dead little children the videos don’t show.
Chemically ignited,
though chemical weapon of course not (NOT?!)
Only they have
WMD’s and US?: “Praise God and pass the bombs!”
So of course WMD-less,
but not god-less no!
They have Billy Graham
and myriad lesser lights to ever bless their show.
Terror just the same;
US ultimate “rogue state” not. (NOT?!)
Such weapons from hell
blow to same. For Americans though, just part of the game.
It’s all so surgically
legal – like those Nazis in their white coats.
Six millions dead just
the same – Holocaust deniers be damned!
But all victims of US
and NATO bombs are well-deserved deaths –
Please, stop your
wimpish *censored*ing and complaining!
Besides, how dare they
live over there with bombs and missiles raining?
Don’t they know it’s
much safer here – in the eye of the storm no fear?
How can we help if
those little kids, their mothers the elderly, innocent others …
Incinerate beneath our
fire? Wrong place, wrong time – don’t they know?
“It’s a tough job,
killing the innocents, but somebody’s gotta do it!”
Those brave young
pilots at the Air Show! God bless ‘em! Our henchmen!
God bless America! For
democracy you know!
Herod’s thugs in war
planes stand tall, but “holocaust deniers” – not at all!
No we’re the “good”
guys. Never in the way.
We’re not the
victims of our bombs. (Or are we?)
There are none,
really, just “military targets and collateral damage”
But not us! Of
course! Oh, no!
Not holocaust
deniers no!
It’s all fun and
games at the Air Show!
And so on. The poem is a few pages long. You
get the idea!
Chris Hedges is the award-winning author of
War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,
first published in 2002. Reading it brought out the Hi-Liter for use on many
pages. He wrote in the Introduction that
“The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage
it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a
reason for living (p. 5).” In turn, Hedges claims. “War finds its meaning in
death (p. 144).” This death is usually that of the innocent victim war must now
be waged to avenge/protect. A little later in the Introduction we read: “Once
we sign on for war’s crusade, once we see ourselves on the side of angels, once
we embrace a theological or ideological belief system that defines itself as
the embodiment of goodness and light, it is only a matter of how we will carry
out murder (p. 9).” Ever since World War I, when warfare became so much more
technologized, in particular aerial warfare became the new staple in the
warrior’s arsenal, civilians have been its primary victims, Hedges informs us. He
says: “The technological and depersonalized levels of organized killing begun
in World War I have defined warfare ever since (p. 85).” In the past century,
some 62 million innocents died simply because they were there where the bombs
detonated, the missiles exploded, the bullets whizzed. The wrong place at the
wrong time. Comparatively, only some
45 million military personnel were killed in last century’s conflicts. Much
safer to be a soldier! But just pause with me for a moment: 62 million civilian
victims in a century of warfare. Canada’s current population is about
32,000,000. Vancouver’s population is about 2,000,000.
This means that twice in the last century, war has eradicated every living soul
in Canada, except the second time, it spared Vancouver. And these are just the
civilians. Add the military personnel and Canada’s population is wiped out a
third time, and a fourth time, with half the population and Vancouver and the
Fraser Valley the fourth time left to bury the dead.
So Hedges writes again: “In the world of
war, perversion may become moral; guilt may be honor, and the gunning down of
unarmed people, including children, may be defined as heroic. In this world the
‘liquidation’ of the enemy, with the enemy defined as simply the other, is part
of the redemption of the nation (p. 139).”
Once in crossing the American
border, I hesitated in answer to a question, and was immediately ordered out of
the car, and told to open up my trunk. I had done nothing wrong but hesitate. In
Iraq, American military, at checkpoints routinely “light up” vehicles, if even
a hint of something wrong is there. And suddenly whole families are shot to
death, on a whim. New York Times
journalist Bob Herbert wrote a year ago: “Unofficial estimates of the number of
Iraqis killed in the war have ranged from 10,000 to 30,000. But a survey
conducted by scientists from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and
Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad compared the death rates of Iraqis before
and after the American invasion. They estimated that 100,000 more Iraqis have
died in the 18 months since the invasion than would have been expected based on
Iraqi death rates before the war.” Herbert adds: “Most of the widespread
violent deaths, the scientists reported, were attributed to coalition forces.
‘Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces,’ the report said,
‘were women and children.’”
Hedges goes on to explain that
“Wars that lose their mythic stature for the public, such as Korea or Vietnam,
are doomed to failure, for war is exposed for what it is – organized murder (italics added, p. 21).” The primary disseminators
of this mythology are the state and the press. So Hedges tells us that war is
the ultimate national drug as well, and “The myth of war sells and legitimizes
the drug of war (p. 25).”
With reference to Jesus’ call to
“Love your enemies,” Hedges writes: “A soldier who is able to see the humanity
of the enemy makes a troubled and ineffective killer (p. 73).” This is why as
mentioned killologist David Grossman writes that modern
soldiers are trained in brutalization. So Hedges says of America: “We
equip and train the most efficient killers on the planet (p. 85).” This of
course should mean, Mennonite John Stoner suggests ironically, that when
furloughed or discharged veterans kill at home, they should only be charged
with poaching – killing out of season. For, after all, the government taught
them in the first place to kill mercilessly. That in fact was the greatest
good. So how can the government ever hold them responsible whenever they kill –
except for the lesser misdemeanour of killing out of season?
Hedges says further: “The moral certitude
of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous
messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come
increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam… There
is a danger of a growing fusion between those in the state who wage war – both
for and against modern states – and those who believe they understand and can
act as agents of God (p. 147).”
In his final chapter, Hedges discusses
“eros” and “thanatos” – love and death. He writes: “War is necrophilia [sexual
attraction to the dead]. And this necrophilia is central to soldiering, just as
it is central to the makeup of suicide bombers and terrorists. The necrophilia
is hidden under platitudes about duty or comradeship. It waits, especially in
moments when we seem to have little to live for and no hope, or in moments when
the intoxication of war is at its pitch, to be unleashed. When we spend long
enough in war it comes to us as a kind of release, a fatal and seductive
embrace that can consummate the long flirtation with our own destruction. The
ancient Greeks had a word for such a drive. They called it ekpyrosis – to be consumed by a ball of fire. They used the word to
describe heroes (p. 166).”
In an observation that could have come
straight from René Girard, though Hedges seems not to know of him, we read:
“The lust for violence, the freedom to eradicate the world around them, even
human lives, is seductive. And the line that divides us, who would like to see
ourselves as civilized and compassionate, from such communal barbarity is
razor-thin. In wartime it often seems to matter little where one came from or
how well-schooled and moral one was before the war began. The frenzy of the
crowd is overpowering (p. 172).” And of course a central teaching of Søren
Kierkegaard was: “The crowd is untruth.”
So Hedges observes: “The myth of war and
the drug of war wait to be tasted. The mythical heroes of the past loom over
us. Those who can tell us the truth are silenced or prefer to forget. The state
needs the myth, as much as it needs its soldiers and its machines of war, to
survive (p. 173).”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: “It was only when
I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first
stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating
good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between
political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all
human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even
within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained;
and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.” I
once heard a Catholic priest say, “Every saint has a past; every sinner has a
future..” An American cartoon character, Pogo, whose home was a Florida swamp,
used to say, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The African understanding of
ubuntu and the application to humans
of the doctrine of the Trinity both tell us: a person is a person through other persons. The flip side or
corollary is: a person loses personhood
when he or she destroys or degrades another person.
So, almost at the end of the book,
Hedges observes: “As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in
patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment, we will never understand
those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally
those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it at all. We will
never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have
for violence. And we will court our own extermination. By accepting the facile
cliché that the battle under way against terrorism is a battle against evil, by
easily branding those who fight us the barbarians, we, like them, refuse to
acknowledge our own culpability. We ignore real injustices that have led many
of those arrayed against us to their rage and despair (p. 180).”
By the end of the
book, there is not a shred of legitimation, whether moral, spiritual,
pragmatic, historical, theological, psychological, sociological, or just plain logical, that is left to justify war. Every
prop is kicked from under such would-be defenders’ feet.
But now I present
conundrum two. For Hedges, who holds a Masters of Divinity degree from Harvard,
writes in the Introduction: “And yet, despite all this, I am not a pacifist… Even
as I detest the pestilence that is war and fear its deadly addiction, even as I
see it lead states and groups towards self-immolation, even as I concede that
it is war that has left millions of dead and maimed across the planet, I, like
most reporters in Sarajevo and Kosovo, desperately hoped for armed
intervention. The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of
responsibility… Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human
condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must
be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral (p.
16).” He writes later: “Reinhold Niebuhr warned us that moral choice is not
between the moral and the immoral, but between the immoral and the less immoral
(p. 144).”
And there you have it.
War, in the end, is a necessary force to give us, if not meaning, justice. And we’re right back to Richard
Hays’ discussion of “violence in defense of justice.”
Conundrum number two:
how can people knowing remotely the absolute horror and bankruptcy of war even
for a moment continue to embrace it? How can this be? Who has the wisdom of
Solomon to distinguish which side of a conflict is “less immoral,” when
self-interest, nepotism, historical myopia, and numerous psychological and
sociological factors impinge on all judgment as blinders? Theologian Lee
Griffith wrote in a penetrating book, The
War on Terrorism and the Terror of God: “What would
this mean if it were true that we love God only as much as the person we love
least? Would it not mean that, when we have finally won the victory in our war
on terrorism, when we have finally managed to exterminate all the thugs and
Hitlers and terrorists, we will have expressed nothing so much as our total
confidence in the death of God? (p. 263)” This is the heart of Griffith’s
sustained thesis that “the biblical concept of ‘the terror of God’ stands as a renunciation
of all violence – and of death itself (inside front jacket cover).”
Conclusion
So there you have it: two conundrums. How
can a Christian read the Bible, then knowingly choose against Jesus, and
blithely send others and go off to war still a believer? And how can a 15-year
war correspondent veteran, also a Christian, write a brilliant and devastating
book about the effects of war, and still send others and go off to war?
Please help me out.
Thank you.
Bibliography
Alison, James (1996). Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination, New
York: Crossroad Publishing Company.
Griffith, Lee (2002). The War on Terrorism and the Terror of God, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Hays, Richard B. (1996). The Moral Vision of the new Testament: A
Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics, San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco.
Hedges, Chris (2003). War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, New York: Anchor Books.
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