Christ and Violence by Ronald J Sider

I just finished a short but powerful book by Ronald Sider, Christ and Violence.
Here are some of the better quotes from this book.

Pg. 24
[Jesus] informed Pilate that His kingdom was not of this world in one specific regard – namely that His followers did not use violence (John 18:36).  Obviously He did not mean that the messianic kingdom He had inaugurated had nothing to do with the earth.  That would have contradicted His central announcement of the eschatological Jubilee which He expected His followers to begin living.  But He did mean that He would not establish His kingdom by the sword.
To a people so oppressed by foreign conquerors that repeatedly over the previous two centuries they had resorted to violent rebellion, Jesus gave the unprecedented command: “Love your enemies.” 

Pg. 25
Jesus’ way is entirely different.  For the members of Jesus’ beginning messianic kingdom, neighbor love must extend beyond the limited circle of the people of Israel, beyond the limited circle of the new people of God!  All people everywhere are neighbors to Jesus’ followers and therefore are to be actively loved.  And that even extends to enemies – even violent oppressive foreign conquerors!
It is exegetically impossible to follow [Martin] Luther’s two kingdom analysis and restrict the application of these verses on love of enemies to some personal sphere and deny their application to violence in the public sphere.
As Eduard Schweitzer says in his commentary on Matthew, “There is not the slightest hint of any realm where the disciple is not bound by the words of Jesus.”

Pg. 27
The radical, costly character of Jesus’ call for love toward enemies certainly tempts us to decisively weaken Jesus’ message by labeling it an impossible ideal, relegating it to the millennium, or limiting its application of personal relationships.  But that is to misread both the text and the concrete historical context in which Jesus lived and spoke.  In his original setting, Jesus advocated love toward enemies as His specific political response to centuries of violence and to the contemporary Zealot’s call for violent revolution.  And He spoke as one who claimed to be the Messiah of Israel.  His messianic kingdom was already breaking into the present, and therefore His disciples should and could live out the values of the New Age.
To be sure, He did not say that one should practice loving nonviolence because it would always instantly transform enemies into bosom friends.  The cross stands as a harsh reminder that love for enemies does not always work – at least in the short run. 

Pg. 30
It was the resurrection which convinced the discouraged disciples that in spite of the cross, Jesus’ claims and His announcement of the messianic kingdom were still valid.

Pg. 34
Because Jesus commanded His followers to love their enemies and then died as the incarnate Son to demonstrate that God reconciles His enemies by suffering love, any rejection of the nonviolent way in human relations involves a heretical doctrine of the atonement.  If God in Christ reconciled His enemies by suffering servanthood, then those who want to follow Christ faithfully, dare not treat their enemies in any other way.
It is a tragedy of our time that many of those who appropriate the biblical understanding of Christ’s vicarious cross fail to see its direct implications for the problem of war and violence.  And it is equally tragic that some of those who most emphasize pacifism and nonviolence fail to ground it in Christ’s vicarious atonement…
Certainly the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ for the sins of the world was a unique element of His cross that could never be repeated. But that fact never prevented the New Testament authors from discerning in the cross a decisive ethical clue for the Christian’s approach to opponents and enemies, indeed even friends, spouses, and fellow members of Christ’s body.

Pg. 38
In every strand of New Testament literature and with reference to every kind of situation (whether family, church, state, or employment), the way of the cross applies.  Jesus’ cross, where He practiced what He had preached about love for one’s enemies, becomes the Christian norm for every area of life.  Only if one holds biblical authority to irrelevant that one can ignore explicit, regularly repeated scriptural teaching; only if one so disregards Christ’s atonement that one rejects God’s way of dealing with enemies; only then can one forsake the cross for the sword.
To be sure, church history is a sad story of Christians doing precisely that.  After the first three centuries when almost all Christians refused to participate in warfare, Christians repeatedly invented ways to justify violence.
And each of us if we think honestly about the costly implications of suffering servanthood, will understand within ourselves how temptingly plausible it is to consider Jesus’ nonviolent way in an impossible ideal, a utopian vision practiced only in the millennium, or some idealistic teaching intended only for personal relationships. But if one recalls Jesus’ historical context, one simply cannot assert that this is what Jesus Himself meant.  Claiming to be their Messiah, He came to an oppressed people ready to use violence to drive out their oppressors.  But He advocated love for enemies as God’s method for ushering in the coming Kingdom.  And He submitted to Roman crucifixion to reconcile His enemies.

Pg. 44
I think activist nonviolence rather than nonresistance is the more faithful application of the New Testament teaching.

Pg. 45
Lethal violence is different.  When one kills another person, one treats him as a thing, not a person.  Hence Jesus’ teaching excludes lethal violence as an acceptable option for Christians.

Pg. 47
Indeed, one should love one’s enemies, even at great personal cost.  The good of the other person, not one’s own needs or rights, are decisive.

Pg. 48
Thus Jesus’ saying is compatible with the use of economic, legal, or political power to oppose evil as long as love for the oppressor as well as the oppressed is both the means and the end.

Pg. 55
This eschatological hope for the restoration of the whole of creation including the principalities and powers underlines the fact that the Christian dare not choose between a creation ethic and a kingdom ethic.

Pg. 57
To announce Christ’s lordship to the principalities and powers is to tell governments that they are not sovereign…
Again, it is clear that merely to witness in a biblical way to the principalities and powers is to engage in dangerous, subversive political activity.
But is that all we are to do? Is it correct to say that we should witness to the state and other principalities and powers but not take the offensive against them?  I think not.  I doubt that the absence of offensive weapons in Ephesians 6:10-20 means that we are merely to defend ourselves against the powers.  Everyone agrees that we are to witness boldly to the powers.  But surely that is an offensive act, not a defensive one.  One can take the offensive with words just as much as with actions.  Ephesians 6 calls us to arm ourselves with the truth, with the gospel, and with the Word of God.  The kind of words we are summoned to speak to the powers surely involves taking the offensive unless one wrongly supposes that bold proclamation is merely a defensive approach.

Pg. 59
In reference to Romans 13
Neither Jesus nor the early church ever supposed that to be subject to government meant to obey its every command.  Jesus and the apostles knew that whenever government commanded what was contrary to God’s command, it must be disobeyed.  “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29) was their working principle.  But even in their refusal to obey, even in their civil disobedience, they continued to be subject to government.  They did not rebel.  They did not take up the sword to overthrow government.  On the other hand, when government commanded things contrary to God’s will they regularly refused to obey, and then accepted the penalty for their disobedience.

Pg. 60
We should resist the evils promoted or perpetuated by governments.  We dare not rebel against government and cast off its authority.  We can and should try to make our government – no matter how good or bad it is – more just.  We dare not – however unjust it may be – try to destroy it.  We can engage in political lobbying, voter power, economic boycott, political demonstration, civil disobedience, tax refusal, even total noncooperation and still be subject to our government.  As long as the methods are those of loving nonviolence, as long as we refuse to consider the oppressor an enemy, as long as we submissively reject rebellion and instead respectfully accept the penalties that are imposed, we remain subject to government.  Scripture commands us always to be subject to government.  It does not command us to obey without condition.  And wholehearted subjection to government is fully compatible with the most vigorous nonviolent resistance to governmental injustice because the goal is not rebellion but improvement of the government to which was are subject precisely as we resist.

Pg. 63
Precisely as we plunge deeper into the centers of power of secular society, we will need even more urgently to strengthen the church as a counterculture of Christians whose visible commitment to the radical values of Jesus’ new kingdom is so uncompromising that the church’s very existence represents a fundamental challenge to surrounding society.  Unless we are based in that kind of kingdom counterculture, our movement into society will be useless because we will merely become one more empty echo of an unjust status quo. But that need not happen if we maintain the sharp biblical distinction between the church and the world and if our primary identity and allegiance remains with Jesus’ new community of believers.

Pg. 67
Probably few people reading this book will have killed another person.  Many would choose going to jail rather than going to war.  But joining the army is not the only way to participate in murder.  Established economic structures can destroy people by the millions.  Slavery did that.  Child labor did that.  Both were as legal as they were lethal.  Legal structures can be violent.  Therefore we must face a very painful question: Do we participate in economic structures that help destroy millions of people each year?

Pg. 68
Not even the Dominicans who work on the sugar plantations have profited.  The sugar plantation workers earned less in real wages in 1978 than they did in 1968 – in part because the Dominican government installed by U.S. marines have destroyed the cane cutters’ labor union.  The U.S. has invested more money per capita for police training in the Dominican Republic than in any other Latin American country.  And those police have made widespread use of torture to suppress any opposition to the dictatorship which ruled for over a decade.  Fortunately that government was replaced in 1978, thanks in part to President Carter’s vigorous support of the results of an election which the armed forces wanted to annul.  But that former government has made it possible for Gulf and Western to use a vast part of the country’s best land to grow sugar for you and me at a handsome profit to the company.
Now who is responsible for the thousands of Dominican children who die each year of malnutrition?  Just the top leaders at Gulf and Western?  Just the Dominican Republic’s elite who profit by cooperatin with Gulf and Western?  Or are you and I also implicated?
Jacques Ellul has pointed out that unjust economic systems can be as violent as rampaging armies:  “I maintain that all kinds of violence are the same... the violence of the soldier who kills, the revolutionary who assassinates; it is true also of economic violence – the violence of the privileged proprietor against his workers, of the ‘haves’ against the ‘have-nots;’ the violence done in international and economic relations between our societies and those of the third world; the violence done through powerful coporations which exploit the resources of a country that is unable to defend itself.”  One can only agree with James Douglass:
“In the contemporary world of affluence and poverty, where man’s major crime is murder by privilege, revolution against the established order is the criterion of a living faith.  ‘Truly I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me’ (Matt. 25:45).  The murder of Christ continues.  Great societies build on dying men.”

Unfortunately it is not true that our society’s wealth is simply the result of God’s blessing and hard work.  To a significant extent, our affluence depends on unjust economic structures that make us rich and Latin Americans hungry.  Fully one half of all the cultivable land in Central America is used to grow export crops (sugar, coffee, bananas, flowers, and the like) to sell to the U.S., Canada, and other rich nations.  That land ought to be used to grow food for the masses in Central America where 60 percent of the children die of malnutrition before they are five years old.  But it is used to grow sugar and coffee and bananas for North Americans because we can pay for it and the starving children’s parents cannot.

Pg. 70
There is an important difference between consciously willed, individual acts (like lying to a friend or committing an act of adultery) and participation in evil social structures.  Slavery is an example of the later.  So is the Victorian factory system where ten-year-old children worked twelve to sixteen hours a day.  Although both slavery and child labor were legal, they destroyed people by the millions.  They represent institutionalized violence or structural evil.  Tragically, most Christians seem to be more concerned with individual sinful acts than with participation in violent social structures.
But the Bible condemns both.  Speaking through His prophet Amos in Amos Chapter 2, the Lord declared,
⁶ This is what the Lord says:
“For three sins of Israel,
    even for four, I will not relent.
They sell the innocent for silver,
    and the needy for a pair of sandals.
⁷ They trample on the heads of the poor
    as on the dust of the ground
    and deny justice to the oppressed.
Father and son use the same girl
    and so profane my holy name.
Biblical scholars have shown that some kind of legal fiction underlies the phrase “selling the needy for a pair of sandals.”  This mistreatment of the poor was legal!  In one breath God condemns both adultery and legalized oppression of the poor.  Sexual sins and economic injustice are equally displeasing to God.
Some young activists have supposed that as long as they were fighting for the rights of minorities and opposing militarism, they were morally righteous regardless of how often they shacked up for the night with a guy or a girl in the movement.  Some of their elders, on the other hand have supposed that because they did not lie, steal, and fornicate, they were morally upright even though they lived in segregated communities and owned stock in companies that exploit the poor of the earth. God however, has shown that robbing one’s workers of a fair wage is just as sinful as robbing a bank. 
God clearly revealed that laws themselves are sometimes an abomination to him.
Psalm 94
²⁰ Can a corrupt throne be allied with you—
    a throne that brings on misery by its decrees?
²¹ The wicked band together against the righteous
    and condemn the innocent to death.
²² But the Lord has become my fortress,
    and my God the rock in whom I take refuge.
²³ He will repay them for their sins
    and destroy them for their wickedness;
    the Lord our God will destroy them.

pg. 72
God proclaims the same word through the prophet Isaiah:
Isaiah 10:1-4
Woe to those who make unjust laws,
    to those who issue oppressive decrees,
² to deprive the poor of their rights
    and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
making widows their prey
    and robbing the fatherless.
³ What will you do on the day of reckoning,
    when disaster comes from afar?
To whom will you run for help?
    Where will you leave your riches?
⁴ Nothing will remain but to cringe among the captives
    or fall among the slain.
Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away,
    his hand is still upraised.

There is one other aspect to institutionalized violence or structural evil which makes it especially pernicious.  It is so subtle that one can be ensnared almost without realizing it.
God inspired His prophet Amos to utter some of the harshest words in Scripture against the cultured, kind, upper-class women of his day:
Amos 4:1-2
Hear this word, you cows of Bashan on Mount Samaria,
    you women who oppress the poor and crush the needy
    and say to your husbands, “Bring us some drinks!”
² The Sovereign Lord has sworn by his holiness:
    “The time will surely come
when you will be taken away with hooks,
    the last of you with fishhooks.
The women involved probably had no contact with the impoverished peasants. They may never have realized clearly that their gorgeous clothes and spirited parties were possible only  because of the seat and tears of toiling peasants.  In fact, they may even have been kind to individual peasants they met.  (Perhaps they gave them “Christmas baskets” – once  year).  But God called these privileged women cows because they profited from structural evil.  Hence they were personally and individually guilty before God.
We must conclude, I think, that if we are members of a privileged class that profits from structural violence and if we do nothing to try to change things, then we stand guilty before God.  Structural evil is just as sinful as personal evil.  And it hurts more people and is more subtle.

Pg. 76
We are all implicated in structural evil.  The patterns of international trade are unjust.  An affluent minority devours most of the earth’s nonrenewable natural resources.  And the food consumption patterns in the world are grossly lopsided.  Every North American benefits from these structural injustices.  Unless you have retreated to some isolated valley and grow or make everything you use, you participate in unjust structures which contribute directly to the hunger of a billion unhappy neighbors.
But that is not God’s last word to us. If there were no hope of forgiveness, admission of our complicity in guilt of this magnitude would be an act of despair.  But there is hope – if we repent. 

Pg. 77
We need change at three levels: 1) our personal lifestyles, 2) the church, and 3) secular society.  In each case, the goal is peacemaking… First we need to pursue simpler personal lifestyles.  As the Catholic saint, Elizabeth Seton, has said, “The rich must live more simply that the poor may simply life.”

Pg. 79
It is a farce to ask Washington to legislate what the church refuses to live.
The church should consist of communities of loving defiance.  Instead it consists largely of comfortable clubs of conformity.  A far-reaching reformation of the church is a prerequisite if the church today is to commit itself to Jesus’ mission of liberating the oppressed.
The God of the Bible is calling Christians today to live in fundamental nonconformity to contemporary society.  Affluent North American society is obsessed with materialism, sex, economic success and military might.  Things are more important than persons.  Job security and an annual salary increase matter more than starving children and oppressed peasants.  Paul’s warning to the Romans is especially pertinent today: “Don’t let the world squeeze you into its own mold” (Romans 12:2; Phillips).  Biblical revelation summons us to defy many of the basic values of our materialistic adulterous society.

Pg. 89
It is in that kind of [small group] setting – and perhaps only in that kind of setting – that the church today will be able to forge a faithful lifestyle for Christians in an Age of Hunger.  In small house-church settings, brothers and sisters can challenge each other’s affluent lifestyles.  They can discuss family finances and evaluate each others’ annual budgets.  Larger purchases (like houses, cars, and long vacations) can be evaluated honestly in terms of the needs of both the individuals involved and God’s poor around the world.  Tips for simple living can be shared.  Voting patterns that liberate the poor, jobs that are ecologically responsible, charitable donations that build self-reliance among the oppressed and direct actions campaigns that successfully challenge unjust multinational corporations – these and many other issues can be discuppes openly and honestly by persons who have pledged themselves to be brothers and sisters in Christ to each other.
My second proposal on the church begins with the assumption that it is a tragic farce for the church to ask Washington to legislate what it cannot persuade Christians to live.

Pg. 83
The United States has trained large numbers of police who have tortured thousands of people working for social justice in countries like Chile and Brazil.  Multinational corporations in the United States work very closely with the repressive governments.  Events in Brazil and Chile demonstrate that the United States will support dictatorships that use torture and do little for the poorest one half as long as those regimes are friendly to U.S. investments.

Pg. 85
Our most fundamental Christian confession is that Jesus is Lord.  But He won’t be Lord of our family life and allow radio and TV commercials to be Lord of our family budget and multinational corporations to be Lord of our business practices.  If Jesus is our Lord, then He must be Lord of our business practices, our economic lifestyle, Lord of our entire life.
The Historical Peace Churches are a biblical people who have opposed theological liberalism.  But still I’m afraid that we are in danger of falling into theological liberalism today.  We usually think of theological liberalism in connection with issues like the bodily resurrection and the deity of Jesus Christ.  And that is correct.  Theological liberals have fallen into terrible heresy in recent times by rejecting those basic doctrines of historic Christianity.  But notice why that happened.  Modern people became so iof impressed with modern science that they thought they could no longer believe in the miraculous.  So they discarded the supernatural aspects of Christianity and abandoned the resurrection and the divinity of Christ.  They allowed the values of surrounding society rather than biblical truth to shape their thinking and acting.  That is the essence of theological liberalism.  In our time, we are in desperate danger of repeating exactly the same mistake in the whole area of justice and the poor.  We are allowing surrounding society rather than Scripture to shape our values and life.  Have not our economic lifestyles and our attitudes toward the poor been shaped more by our affluent materialistic society than by Scripture – even though the Bible says as much about this set of issues as it does about the atonement or Christology?
If we want to escape theological liberalism, if our confession that Jesus is Lord is genuine, then we must cast aside the secular economic values of our materialistic society.  Now I know many of the people in our churches don’t want to do that.  They don’t want to hear the Bible’s radical call to costly discipleship.  But that simply raises in a more painful way for every church leader the basic question: Is Jesus really our Lord?
Many pastors, Sunday school superintendents, and other church leaders agree that we should be concerned with the poor and work for peace via justice.  They are willing to talk carefully about these things as long as the message is not too upsetting to the congregation, as long as it does not offend potential new members and hinder church growth.  But they don’t make it clear, as Jesus did, that we really have to choose between Jesus and Mammon.  They are afraid to teach and preach the clear biblical word that economic systems perpetrate instutionalized violence and murder because that would offend business people.  One wonders whether it is Jesus or church growth, whether it is Jesus or vocational security, whether it is Jesus or social acceptance who finally is our Lord.

Pg. 87
Is Jesus or surrounding society our Lord?  If we intend to follow the risen One, then I think we will discover that He calls us to be peacemakers through economic change – through more simple personal economic lifestyles, through more simple church lifestyles, and through action designed to change economic systems that produce violence by statute.

Pg. 99
I dream of a time when it will be the norm rather than the exception for our people to authenticate our word about peace with lives of costly, nonviolent identification with the oppressed.  For tens of thousands that will mean leaving comfortable rural or suburban surroundings to join the poor of the earth in their struggle for justice – by making our homes in the black or Spanish speaking inner cities, in the Appalachian Highlands, in unjust third word settings.  When tens of thousands of our people have done their homework so they are competent to discuss pending legislation with Senators, when tens of thousands of our people are going to jail, when we are being tortured and getting martyred in a nonviolent struggle for justice in the inner cities and the third world, then we will have the right to talk about nonviolence.
Of course, not all of us should move.  For others, identifying with the oppressed will mean talking and working against unjust structures here and abroad so persistently and single-mindedly that our scholarly societies, our professional colleagues, our business associates and political friends will discover that we worship the God of the poor not success, that we will accept social disgrace, professional failure, unemployment, even imprisonment for civil disobedience rather than forsake our identification with the oppressed.

My Prayers for 2012

Now that I've pretty much recovered from a season of loss and stress, I've now entered into a season of praying, waiting and preparation. In fact, my good friend Joe Kumor even told me in a message the other day that he was excited to see the next adventure God had for me.

I recently read a book by Mark Batterson, The Circle Maker, that talked about praying circles around important people and our future. In response to that book, the three circles I've made for this year are: My family/ adoption, justice/peace and teaching/ preaching. While I was already thinking and praying about those things, this book helped me focus my efforts. Here is a bit of info on where I am now with each circle and where I hope to be by the end of 2012.

Family / Adoption I've made more an effort lately to be praying for my wife and my son. I'm also praying about where to begin our next adoption process. Dawson basically fell into our lap, so I'm guessing the next child will take some effort on our part. I have a list of some agencies we can look into, I just need to actually do it. I'm also encouraged by the fact that my employer, Farmers, has a $4,000 adoption credit.

Preaching / Teaching teaching and preaching the scriptures is a gift that God has given to me. Not being in a regular pastoral role, however means I'm not in a regular rhythm of using those gifts, but I'm working into a new rhythm. I will be preaching at IC Gardner every six weeks or so and will be starting a discipleship group for new Christians.
But how will this move ahead in the future? I've been thinking for a couple of years that I'd love to start a ministry that educates people on Jesus' nonviolent teachings and example. I've been thinking lately that it would be great to teach some college level ethics classes. So it might be time for me to pursue some sort of doctoral degree. Yesterday morning, a life-long mentor of mine, Randy Beckum, gave me some great ideas for a doctoral program.

Peace / Justice Clearly, I have a passion to help make this nation slightly less war-hungry (at least among Christians) and slightly more just. Randy Beckum also told me that my alma matter, MidAmerica Nazarene University is starting a Center for Social Justice. I'd love to work for something like that. The educational ministry mentioned above would be a part of living out this passion as would some teaching opportunities at another initiative of MNU.
In the present, however, I'm continuing to read war history and nonviolent Christian teachings and sharing those on my blog. I'm also volunteering, and trying to recruit more volunteers, for the Urban Scholastic Center in Kansas City, KS. I'll write more on that later.

So those are my "prayer circles" for 2012. If you'd like to occasionally join me in those prayers, I'd greatly appreciate it.

The Old Testament Roots of Nonviolence Part II

Here are some more quotes from Philip Friesen's book.

[At the arrest of Jesus] The commander of heaven’s armies had forbid his disciples the use of the sword at the very moment when it was needed to protect him from capture. Victory would be achieved by dying rather than by killing.

In the Kingdom of Christ, the rules of engagement for spiritual warfare demand that we confront the enemy and be willing to die – to accept violence, but not to commit violence. When we seek to use civil authorities to enforce morality and justice for which the world is not ready, we deny the power of the gospel to bring needed change, and the strongholds of the human mind remain under enemy control.
In the New Testament, social change came first inside the church. In modern times, this is how apartheid was defeated in South Africa without civil war, to the amazement of the world around. It is true that apartheid was strong inside the institutional church, but strong voices of opposition within the church were also raised, and the impetus for social change come initially from the seeds of the gospel inside the church, nonetheless. In South Africa there were martyrs, but the martyrs won. That should not surprise us who claim to follow Jesus! It is the New Testament pattern.
Over the past 2,000 years we have seen that the systems of monarchy, patriarchy, and slavery have proved incapable of justice and unworthy of trust. If the Gospel is what has brought this about, which is the burden of this book, then it should be expected that one day the Gospel will also succeed in destabilizing the institutions of warfare, proving them nonviable, and unworthy of the faith we have placed in them.
The Jesus who made no compromise with evil is the Jesus we offer to the nations, and to offer a lesser Jesus is to sell Jesus short.

If we trust the institutional violence of a national defense system, a system that first Moses and then Jesus rejected, then we deny the incarnation its power on earth, making Jesus Lord of heaven but not of earth, and reveal whom we actually trust.

Christendom had reproduced a version of the Old Testament religion whereby the ritual sacrifice was repeated again and again in the mass, and the king enforced God’s laws, punishing idolaters with the sword. The reformation abolished the sacrifice of the mass, but failed to address the underlying violence of the system.

[Anabaptist Reformers] sought to make the cross of Christ their way of life on earth rather than merely an icon of future life in heaven.

Whenever the world divides into armed camps the church on both sides of conflict must come together, not split apart. If followers of Jesus allow themselves to be divided over the things that divide the world, then the unity of the one God will not be seen. To hide behind the deception of ‘just war’ obscures the reality of who we are in Christ.
Following Jesus inevitably leads to conflict with the rulers of this world, and may lead to charges of treason. No war was ever more just than the Jewish war against Rome; but instead of going to war, Jesus found a way to bring Jew and Roman together for those who practiced forgiveness. Even though conflict is painful, such is our calling in Christ, and Paul is the greatest apostolic example. He accepted the abuse and rejection of his own people in order to bring the good news to the Greeks and the Romans, the Jew’s enemies, both culturally and militarily. For Paul, his precious Jewish culture and religious values were given up as rubbish in order to gain Christ (Philippians 3:8). Nothing could have been more unpatriotic.

I suggest that an appropriate metaphor for the true church of our Lord would be that of a ping-pong game being played in the middle of a football field while the football game is going on. Again and again the ping-pong table is demolished and the players carried off the field with serious injuries, but again and again the ping-pong table reappears and the ping-pong game continues, to the consternation of the football teams and crowd. The followers of Jesus are playing a different game with different rules on the world’s field. Heaven’s citizens act as though the game has already changed and play by new rules. Their persistence and endurance will triumph. Jesus said, ‘The one who endures to the end will be saved’ (Matthew 24:13 and Mark 13:13).

The reason for being a pacifist is that the practice of warfare defiles the soul. It violates the new nature Christ has given us.

If my readers will agree that both slavery and war fall short of the righteousness God requires (i.e. they are sinful), then we should also agree that military systems and preparations for warfare are equally as abhorrent as slavery. We noted earlier that once Charles Finney had recognized slavery to be sin, he opposed it. Once we recognize warfare to be sin, we must oppose it also.
When should one be a pacifist and refuse military service? The answer is that we must oppose military service as soon as we recognize it to fall short of God’s glory. One must be a pacifist when the conviction of the Holy Spirit within the soul allows no other option; and as the Spirit of God continues to convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:8), we should expect that a growing mass of believers in the world will be called to bear witness against this evil system in which the nations have placed their trust, and because of that witness, accept the possibility of martyrdom. This way the deception of the snake will be exposed and his power destroyed.
Revelation 20:3 describes the future. ‘And [they] cast him [the dragon, the old serpent] into the bottomless pit and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled.’ To believe in the necessity of armaments and war preparations is to believe the dragon’s deception. In war Revelation 20:7, as soon as the dragon is released from confinement, he gathers the nations once again for war. Here the writer of Revelation draws a strong connection between warfare and Satan’s deception of the nations. This is in stark contrast to the triumph of the Lamb who conducts warfare by the sword of his mouth and the word of his servants’ testimony.

The Just War Theory of Christians theologians offers nothing substantive that Islam (and also Judaism) does not offer. If the birth announcement in Luke is true – that Jesus’ arrival signaled peace on earth – then this issue belongs to the gospel, it is imperative upon the followers of Jesus to demonstrate the truth of it visibly in a way that Islam and Judaism do not. After all, Muhammad showed commendable graciousness to his defeated enemies in Mecca; and his ethics of warfare compare favorably with the ethics of Augustine or any other Christian theologian. The reality is that when our Christian faith is not centrally informed by the power of the cross in praxis, we deny Jesus just as surely as do the non-Christian religions.
All accommodating structures exist in the world as a demonstration of unbelief, and all rely upon violence. When we understand the historic process by which God has been weaning his people from faith in the violence of the accommodating structures of patriarchy, monarchy, and slavery, then we should be able also to see by faith where God is leading us in terms of our relationship to all institutions of violence, including the military. We must demonstrate within the social order the truth of Jesus as Messiah who brings peace on earth. This peace, incarnate in the fabric of fellowship of our faith around the world, bridging the boundaries of ethnic, racial, and nationalistic violence, is what will convince the world of who Jesus is. This is why we need to take pacifism seriously today.

Whenever Christians make either family, national identity, or even a religious institution their primary point of orientation, they deny their Lord and confuse the world about who they are. When this is understood, military service for the sake of preserving national boundaries and maintaining national identity becomes difficult to defend. Peace must be a missiological concern.

The battles between Christians and Muslims have really been battles over the control of earthly resources. When Christians put on the military uniform to fight for the power of an earthly government, the gospel message is sadly obfuscated in the eyes of the world. When the church becomes a cheerleader for some military effort, it denies its Lord. When Jesus called his disciples to put up the sword and follow him unarmed to death, he established Moses’ vision for a nation of priests rather than warriors. This is the legacy we must be prepared to follow to make our message believable.

I suggest that when Christians no longer kill each other on the basis of national identity, that then the invisible Kingdom of our Lord will become visible to those outside, because they will see another government in control of our loyalties.

War Crimes and the American Conscience Part III

During downtimes for my training with Farmers, I was able to read an interesting book from 1970 entitled “War Crimes and the American Conscience.” The book was an analysis of US war crimes committed in Vietnam in the light of the principles of the Nuremburg conference; the recorded notes of the 1970 Congressional Conference on War and National Responsibility. Below are some excerpts.

“Yet [most Americans] should recognize that vigorous objections to policies which the individual regards as unwise is the very stuff of which democracy is made. The true patriot follows the whole of Carl Schurz’s admonition, ‘My country right o wrong; if right to be kept right, if wrong to be put right.’ – Senator George C. McGoveren Pg. 167

“There is a strong emotional argument for supporting our soldiers on the line with everything they need. But they are best supported by actions designed to bring them home and to limit the power of the Executive to demand their sacrifice in an ignoble venture. I have stopped voting for Vietnam war appropriations, and I shall not do so again. – Senator George C. McGoveren Pg. 168

“But a new idea for the United States – a central one for empire – developed after WWII: The matter of winning any particular war, or of losing it, became secondary to the quest for constant military engagement and the display of American power. War became a continuous way of life. War is no longer attached to interests, purposes, or objectives. It became an end in itself, prepared and conducted at the pleasure of national security institutions.
“Since WWII, indeed, the primary activity of national security institutions has been to police the world. Law is subservient to the club, to napalm, to the bribe, to the rolling thunder of the B-52. The United States has executed scores of agreements, assigned hundreds of thousands of troops around the world, placed tactical and strategic nuclear weapons hither and yon, bought and sold governments. National security activity has become a criminal enterprise without political accountability or human motive.
– Senator George C. McGoveren Pg. 172

“As the administration pursues its doctrine of ‘low profile’ involvement around the world, using the CIA or foreign troops rather than American soldiers for intervention, the need for close and continuing public scrutiny becomes more urgent. There is a need, for example, for development of a new standard of bureaucratic responsibility. Would it change the decisional process and the causal view of war if Government officials were personally responsible in a LEGAL sense for their policy actions?
If such questions are to be answered in a positive manner, the Congress and the people must redefine legitimacy, put another way, rather than the internal and national security institutions spying on the people, it is now time for the process to be reversed. – Marcus Raskin Pg. 170

“This is to say that the imminent danger to a democratic society is not the specter of overt military control of national policy, but the more subtle one of a military isolated from the general citizenry, allowing for greater international irresponsibility by its civilian leaders. It is only when the consequences of such irresponsibility are uniformly felt throughout the body politic that we can begin to hope constraints will develop on the use of violence to implement national policy. – Charles C. Markos, JR.
Pg. 181

War Crimes and the American Conscience Part II

During downtimes for my training with Farmers, I was able to read an interesting book from 1970 entitled “War Crimes and the American Conscience.” The book was an analysis of US war crimes committed in Vietnam in the light of the principles of the Nuremburg conference; the recorded notes of the 1970 Congressional Conference on War and National Responsibility. Below are some excerpts.

“The American tradition is to locate the source of evil deeds in evil men. We have yet to learn that the greatest evils occur when social systems give average men the task of routinizing evil. - Edward M. Opton Jr. Pg. 113

“As the satirist Art Hoppe put it, ‘The best way [to kill civilians], it’s generally agreed, is to kill them with bombs, rockets, artillery shells, and napalm. Those who kill women and children in these ways are called heroes...’ How is it, the foot soldier must wonder, that ‘to kill women and children at less than 500 paces is an atrocity; at more than 500 paces, it’s an act of heroism.’ – Edward M. Opton Jr. Pg. 115

“We should pay tribute to that small but courageous number of the American armed forces who have refused over the years to follow orders when it came to the indiscriminate killing of civilians… These are heroes whom we ought to remember and honor – not only for their own sake, but because they provide us with an example of what individual conscience can do against the immortality of an act of Government.” Pg 148, Hans Morgenthau

“The free and responsible man will support and refine man-made laws wherever possible, but he will not permit his conscience to be limited by statute or its application. If he is a religious man, he will appeal to transcendent authority and join St. Peter in saying, ‘We must obey God rather than man.’ He will ‘seek first’ God’s kingdom, insisting that every other loyalty is a lesser loyalty. Or, lacking the authority of revelation, he may join Thoreau in refusing to pay taxes, in denouncing legalized racism and an unjust war, appealing to the ‘general right and obligation of men to disobey commands of a government’ which they consider morally wrong.
Flag-waving chauvinism must be recognized for exactly what it is. If Auschwitz was inhumane, so was Hiroshima. – James Armstrong Pg. 152

“The ultimate crime is war itself, and trying to assign degrees of criminality to certain of its forms is like trying to disguise the stench of rotting carcass by pouring perfume on it. – Jerome Frank Pg. 162

“Public officials should, therefore, be made to answer such legitimate questions as whether we have a real interest in the outcome of a conflict and, more importantly, whether we have a RIGHT to interfere. A refusal to answer on the basis of such considerations as ‘You’d support me if you knew what I know,’ is an abuse of power that a democratic society can never tolerate. – Senator George C. McGoveren
Pg. 166

War Crimes and the American Conscience Part I

During downtimes for my training with Farmers, I was able to read an interesting book from 1970 entitled “War Crimes and the American Conscience.” The book was an analysis of US war crimes committed in Vietnam in the light of the principles of the Nuremburg conference; the recorded notes of the 1970 Congressional Conference on War and National Responsibility. Below are some excerpts.

“If we work up to the level of our technology in terms of the wars we are prepared to fight, the sky is the limit; There will be absolutely no control over what the United States can do, because it is the most powerful nation in the world and has the most advanced military technology. We will use other tactics, we will fight ‘clean’ Vietnams, where our hands don’t get dirty, where we fly in the stratosphere, not seeing what we are hitting and killing. - Hans Morgenthau Pg 27

“It is also a reality, I think, that no American President will look upon himself as a possible perpetrator of war crimes. It could not occur to him, it could not occur to the American people – except to the young – that war crimes are something that can be charged to Americans. – Daniel Ellisberg Pg 31

“The blind destruction of whole villages with artillery or from the air, on the grounds that one had drawn fire from somewhere in these villages, would seem on this basis [Nuremberg Conference Definitions of War Crimes] to be a war crime. - George Wald Pg 75

“As a nation, we have abdicated our responsibility to differentiate between means and ends in the execution of our foreign policy. We turned this responsibility over to an Executive who is not bound in the conduct of foreign policy by much more than his own perception of the world and the consciences of those who surround and advise him. – William R. Corson Pg. 91

“Can any country such as the United States, with its predominant military and economic power, with a position so commanding in the world, carry out warfare against a weaker state, without in fact pressing its advantage to the limit of its own assessment of its own security? When the United States has exercises restraint, it has done so only in response to perceived threats from a stronger or equally strong power.
The basic issues is the permissibility of basing a foreign policy on our unilateral determination to use violence whenever and whenever we see fit, to achieve ends as we determine them. This basic notion of how we use our military power really has to be attacked before we can work out ground rules for managing the violence on the battlefields. – Richard Barnet Pg 98

“Turning now to the rest of the American population and its response to My Lai, we can identify at least three psychological mechanisms called forth to avoid facing such unpleasant truths. The first is denial, ‘The massacres didn’t really happen or have been exaggerated.’ The second is rationalization, ‘War is hell.’ And the third, in a way more politically dangerous, is the mobilization of self-righteous anger; ‘Stop picking on our boys. The Vietnamese had it coming to them. You [the bearer of the news] ought to be sent to Vietnam to fight.’ - Robert Jay Lifton Pg. 106

“When we go into a village, we classify all the people into different categories. But these categories do not depend on something we perceive about them; they depend on what we do to them. If we kill them, they are Vietcong. If we capture them and tie them up, they are Vietcong suspects. If we grab them and move them to a camp, they are hostile civilians. Having don this to many people who are in fact innocent, the definitions we have imposed become real. The men who have been tied up or tortured actually become our enemies and shoot real bullets at us, but still we are facing the shadow of our own actions. – Robert Jay Lifton Pg. 111

War and Peace

In the spring of 2006, as Erin and I were preparing for a trip to Europe, I thought it would be fitting to start reading a great novel from European history, "War and Peace". Tonight, Dec. 23, 2011, I have FINALLY finished the book.

Overall, I felt it was a pretty mediocre read, not even close to as gripping as Hugo’s “Les Miserables” nor as powerful as Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov. It was better however, than Dostoevsky's “Crime and Punishment.”

I did enjoy the character development of Pierre as well as Tolstoy’s musings about why Napoleon was the product of dumb luck or fortunate circumstances rather than genius or great leadership. Tolstoy liked to point out that the people who first declared Napoleon a glorious hero for France and Europe later declared him an insane criminal who was a danger to civilization, therefore exiling him. Not surprisingly, this opinion of Napoleon differed from the opinion Hugo expressed in “Les Miserables.” The last 50 pages or so was a whole bunch of historical philosophy of which I had trouble understanding. I did find a few quotes toward the end of the book that are worth sharing.

“In the first place the historian describes the conduct of separate persons who, in his opinion, lead humanity (one regards as such only monarchs, military generals and ministers of state’ another includes besides, monarchs, orators, scientific men, reformers, philosophers and poets). Secondly, the goal towards which humanity is being lead is known to the historian. To one this goal is the greatness of Rome, or the Spanish, or the French state, for another, it is freedom, equality, a certain sort of civilization in a little corner of the world called Europe.
In 1789 there was a ferment in Paris: it grew and spread, and found expression in the movement of peoples from west to east. Several times that movement is made to the east, and comes into collion with a counter movement from east westwards. In the year 1812 it reaches its furthest limit, Moscow, and then, with a remarkable symmetry, the counter movement follows from east to west; drawing with it, like the first movement, the peoples of Central Europe. The counter-movement reaches the starting-point of the first movement – Paris – and subsides.
During this period of twenty years an immense number of fields are not tilled; houses are burned; trade changes its direction; millions of men grow poor and grow rich, and change the habitations; and millions of Christians, professing the law of love, murder one another.
What does this all mean? What did all this proceed from? What induced these people to burn houses and to murder their fellow creatures? What were the causes of these events? What force compelled men to act in this fashion? These are the involuntary and most legitimate questions that, in all good faith, humanity puts to itself when it stumbles on memorials and traditions of that past age of restlessness.
To answer these questions the common-sense of humanity turns to the science of history, the object of which is the self-knowledge of nationals and of humanity.” – Pg. 1112

“For causes, known or unknown to us, the French begin to chop and hack at each other. And to match the event, it is accompanied by its justification in the expressed wills of certain men, who declare it essential for the good of France, for the cause of freedom, for equality. Men cease slaughtering one another, and that event is accompanied by the justification of the necessity of centralization of power, of resistance to Europe, and so on. Men march from west to east, killing their fellow-creatures, and this event is accompanied by phrases about the glory of France, the baseness of England, and so on. History teaches us that those justifications for the event are devoid of all common-sense, that they are inconsistent with one another, as, for instance, the murder of a man as a result of the declaration of his rights, and the murder of millions in Russia for the abasement of England. But those justifications have an incontestable value in their own day.
They remove moral responsibility from those men who produce the events. At the time they do the work of brooms, that go in front to clear the rails for the train: they clear the path of men’s moral responsibility. Apart from those justifications, no solution could be found for the most obvious question that occurs to one at once on examining any historical event; that is, How did millions of men come to combine to commit crimes, murders, wars and so on?” – Pg. 1130


Just FYI, “War and Peace” is split up into 15 different parts each containing around 50 – 70 chapters that are from one to four pages long. This allows the book to be read in tiny little snippets over a long period of time. Long as in almost 6 years. So if you’d like to broaden your cultural and historical horizons, I’d recommend you change your bathroom reading from the newspaper to some Tolstoy. If only for about six years.

"The Root of War is Fear" by Thomas Merton

The following is a powerful excerpt of Thomas Merton's 1962 essay, "The Root of War is Fear."  I first read this article in The Power of Nonviolence but found this abbreviated version here.

The present war crisis is something we have made entirely for and by ourselves. There is in reality not the slightest logical reason for war, and yet the whole world is plunging headlong into frightful destruction, and doing so with the purpose of avoiding war and preserving peace! This is a true war-madness, an illness of the mind and the spirit that is spreading With a furious and subtle contagion all over the world. Of an the countries that are sick, America is perhaps the most grievously afflicted. This is a nation that claims to be fighting for religious truth along with freedom and other values of the spirit. Truly we have entered the "post-Christian era" with a vengeance.


What is the place of the Christian in all this? Is he simply to fold his hands and resign himself to the worst, accepting it as the inescapable will of God and preparing himself to enter heaven with a sigh of relief? Should he open up the Apocalypse and run out into the street to give everyone his idea of what is happening? Or worse still, join in the madness of the war makers, calculating how by a "first strike," the glorious Christian West can eliminate atheistic Communism for an time and usher in the millennium?

What are we to do? The duty of the Christian in this crisis is to strive with all his power and intelligence, with his faith, hope in Christ and love for God and man, to do the one task that God has imposed upon us in the world today. That task is to work for the total abolition of war. There can be no question that unless war is abolished the world will remain constantly in a state of madness and desperation in which, because of the immense destructive power of modern weapons, the danger of catastrophe will be imminent and probably at every moment everywhere. We may never succeed in this campaign but whether we succeed or not the duty is evident. It is the great Christian task of our time. Everything else is secondary, for the survival of the human race itself depends on it. We must at least face this responsibility and do something about it. And the first job of an is to understand the psychological forces at work in ourselves and in society.


At the root of all war is fear, not so much the fear men have of one another as the fear they have of everything. It is not merely that they do not trust one another. They do not even trust themselves.... They cannot trust anything because they have ceased to believe in God.

It is not only our hatred of others that is dangerous but also and above an our hatred of ourselves: particularly that hatred of ourselves which is too deep and too powerful to be consciously faced. For it is this that makes us see our own evil in others and unable to see it in ourselves....

As if this were not enough, we make the situation much worse by artificially intensifying our sense of evil, and by increasing our propensity to feel guilt even for things that are not in themselves wrong. In all these ways, we build up such an obsession with evil, both in ourselves and in others, that we waste all our mental energy trying to account for this evil, to punish it, to exorcise it, or to get rid of it in any way we can.

We drive ourselves mad with our preoccupation and in the end there is no outlet left but violence. We have to destroy something or someone. By that time, we have created for ourselves a suitable enemy, a scapegoat in whom we have invested all the evil in the world. He is the cause of every wrong. He is the fomenter of an conflict. If he can only be destroyed, conflict will cease, evil will be done with, there will be no more war....

In our refusal to accept the partially good intentions of others and work with them (of course prudently and with resignation to the inevitable imperfection of the result) we are unconsciously proclaiming our own malice, our own intolerance, our own lack of realism, our own ethical and political quackery.

Perhaps in the end the first real step toward peace would be a realistic acceptance of the fact that our political deals are perhaps to a great extent illusions and fictions to which we cling, out of motives that are not always perfectly honest: that because of this we prevent ourselves from seeing any good or any practicability in the political ideas of our enemies--which may of course be in many ways even more illusory and dishonest than our own. We will never get anywhere unless we can accept the fact that politics is an inextricable tangle of good and evil motives in which, perhaps, the evil predominate but where one must continue to hope doggedly in what little good can still be found....

I believe the basis for valid political action can only be the recognition that the true solution to our problems is not accessible to any one isolated party or nation but that all must arrive at it by working together....

We must try to accept ourselves whether individually or collectively, not only as perfectly good or perfectly bad, but in our mysterious, unaccountable mixture of good and evil. We have to stand by the modicum of good that is in us without exaggerating it. We have to defend our real rights, because unless we respect our own rights we will certainly not respect the rights of others. But at the same time we have to recognize that we have willfully or otherwise trespassed on the rights of others. We must be able to admit this not only as the result of self-examination, but when it is pointed out unexpectedly, and perhaps not too gently, by somebody else.
These principles that govern personal moral conduct, that make harmony possible in small social units like the family, also apply in the wider areas of the state and in the whole community of nations. It is however quite absurd, in our present situation or in any other, to expect these principles to be universally accepted as the result of moral exhortations. There is very little hope that the world will be run according to them all of a sudden, as a result of some hypothetical change of heart on the part of politicians. It is useless and even laughable to base political thought on the faint hope of a purely contingent and subjective moral illumination in the hearts of the world's leaders. But outside of political thought and action, in the religious sphere, it is not only permissible to hope for such a mysterious consummation, but it is necessary to pray for it. We can and must believe not so much that the mysterious light of God can "convert" the ones who are mostly responsible for the world's peace, but at least that they may, in spite of their obstinacy and their prejudices, be guarded against fatal error....
For only love--which means humility--can exorcise the fear that is at the root of all war .

What is the use of postmarking our mail with the exhortation to 'pray for peace' and then spending billions of dollars on atomic submarines, thermonuclear weapons, and ballistic missles? This, I would think, would certainly be what the New Testament calls 'mocking God' - and mocking Him far more effectively than what the atheists do.  The culminating horror of the joke is that we are piling up these weapons to protect ourselves against atheists, who, quite frankly, believe there is no God and are convinced that one has to rely on bombs and missles since nothing else offers any real security.  Is it then, because we have so much trust in the power of God that we are intent upon utterly destroying these people before thay can destroy us?  Even at the risk of destroying ourselves at the same time?
If men really wanted peace they would sincerely ask God for it and He would give it to them. But why should He give the world a peace it does not really desire? The peace the world pretends to desire is really no peace at all.
To some men peace merely means the liberty to exploit other people without fear of retaliation or interference. To others peace means the freedom to rob brothers without interruption. To still others it means the leisure to devour the goods of the earth without being compelled to interrupt their pleasures to feed those whom their greed is starving. And to practically everybody, peace simply means the absence of any physical violence that might cast a shadow over lives devoted to the satisfaction of their animal appetites for comfort and pleasure.
Many men like these have asked God for what they thought was "peace" and wondered why their prayer was not answered. They could not understand that it actually was answered. God left them with what they desired, for their idea of peace was only another form of war....
So instead of loving what you think is peace, love other men and love God above all. And instead of hating the people you think are warmongers, hate the appetites and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed--but hate these things in yourself not in another.



From Passion for Peace, edited by William H. Shannon, 1995. Permission to reprint is granted by Crossroad Publishing Company.

War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.

The late Howard Zinn was a WWII vet who made his post-war career as an historian, author and political activist. Zinn stated that he never intended to write books that went against the mainstream thought of American history, but he wasn’t able to keep to himself the uglier, but often- ignored realities of US history that he uncovered during his masters work. While many people call him “unpatriotic,” Zinn claims that his critiques of American society were done with the intent of bettering the nation he loved. While I don’t agree with all of the political conclusions to which he arrived, I do appreciate his bold naming of our nation’s addiction to war.

Zinn’s most popular book, and therefore most hated by those who want to ignore the ugly side of US history, is A People’s History of the United States. Honestly, that book put me in a negative funk, a foul pessimism from which I wasn’t able to recover until reading Rob Bell’s book, Jesus Wants to Save Christians. Bell took a similarly honest approach to US imperialism, while offering a Christ-centered hope that Zinn wasn’t able to offer.

But Zinn’s perspective does offer some hope in his challenge for the US to spend less money on national defense and more money on social programs. While I don’t agree Zinn’s belief that socialism would cure all ills, he does make some good points. And his position as a veteran, historian and voice for our nation’s powerless does put him in a unique position to call our nation to higher standard in relationship to military oppression and fiscal priorities.
With that said, check out Zinn’s quote from the intro to a book I just started, The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace from 2002.
“The images on television were heartbreaking. People on fire leaping to their deaths from a hundred stories up. People in panic and fear racing from the scene in clouds of dust and smoke. We thought that there must be thousands of human beings buried alive but soon dead under a mountain of debris. We imagined the terror among the passengers of the hijacked planes as they contemplated the crash, the fire, and the end.

Those scenes horrified and sickened me.

Then our political leaders came on television, and I was horrified and sickened again. They spoke of retaliation, of vengeance, of punishment.

‘We are at war,’ they said. And I thought, they have learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from the history of the twentieth century, from a hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war, a hundred years of terrorism and counter-terrorism, of violence met with violence in an unending cycle of stupidity.

We can all feel a terrible anger at whoever, in their insane idea that this would help their cause, killed thousands of innocent people. But what do we do with that anger? Do we react with panic, strike out violently and blindly just to show how tough we are? ‘We shall make no distinction,’ the President proclaimed, ‘between terrorists and countries that harbor terrorist.’ We bombed Afghanistan, and inevitably killed innocent people, because it is in the nature of bombing to be indiscriminate, to make ‘no distinction.’ Did we commit terrorist acts in order to ‘send a message’ to terrorists?

We have resonded that way before. It is the old way of thinking, the old way of acting, and it has never worked. Reagan bombed Libya, Bush made war on Iraq, and Clinton bombed Afghanistan and also a pharmaceutical plan in the Sudan, to ‘send a message’ to terrorists. And then comes this horror in New York and Washington. Isn’t it clear by now that sending a message to terrorists through violence doesn’t work, it only leads to more terrorism?

Haven’t we learned anything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Car bombs planted by Palestinians bring tanks and air attacks by the Israeli government. That has been going on for years. It doesn’t work, and innocent people die on both sides.

Yes, it is an old way of thinking, and we need new ways. We need to think about the resentment felt all over the world by people who have been the victims of American military action. In Vietnam, where we carried out terrorizing bombing attacks, using napalm and cluster bombs, on peasant villages. In Latin America, where we supported dictators and death squads in Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and other countries. In Iraq, where a million people have died as a result of our economic sanctions. And perhaps most important for understanding the current situation, in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, where three million Palestinians live under a cruel military occupation, while the United States government supplies Israel with high-tech weapons.

We need to imagine that the awful scenes of death and suffering in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania we witnessed on our television screens have been going on in other parts of the world for generations, and only now can we begin to know what people have gone through, often as a result of our policies. We need to understand how some of those people will go beyond quiet anger to acts of terrorism.

We need new ways of thinking. A $300 billion military budget has not given us security. American military bases all over the world, our warships on every ocean, have not given us security. Land mines and a ‘missile defense shield’ will not give us security. We need to rethink our position in the world. We need to stop sending weapons to countries that oppress other people or their own people. We need to be resolute in our decision that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.

Our security can only come by using our national wealth, not for guns, plans, bombs, but for the health and welfare of our people – for free medical care for everyone, education and housing, guaranteed decent wages, and a clean environment for all. We cannot be secure by limiting our liberties, as some of our political leaders are demanding, but only be expanding them.

We should take our example not from military and political leaders shouting ‘retaliate’ and ‘war’ but from the doctors and nurses and medical students and fireman and policemen who have been saving lives in the midst of mayhem, whose first thoughts are not vengeance but compassion, not violence but healing.”

Great thoughts, but not original with Zinn. It reminds me a lot of a great quote from President Eisenhower, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ... Is there no other way the world may live?"

Thankfully, God became flesh in the person of Jesus to model, teach, die and resurrect to show us a better way.

My thoughts on Osama's killing and our nation's response

Actually, I think the thoughts of Walter Wink are best suited to this event and to our nation's reaction.

And check out David Brush's post. 

The quote below if from Engaging the Powers. 

"Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world. It has been accorded the status of a religion, demanding from its devotees an absolute obedience to death. Its followers are not aware, however, that the devotion they pay to violence is a form of religious piety. Violence is so successful as a myth precisely because it does not seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It is what works. It is inevitable, the last, and often, the first resort in conflicts. It is embraced with equal alacrity by people on the left and on the right, by religious liberals as well as religious conservatives. The threat of violence, it is believed, is alone able to deter aggressors. It secured us forty-five years of a balance of terror. We learned to trust the Bomb to grant us peace.
The roots of this devotion to violence are deep, and we will be well rewarded if we trace them to their source. When we do, we will discover that the religion of Babylon – one of the world’s oldest, continuously surviving religions – is thriving as never before in every sector of contemporary American life, even in our synagogues and churches. It, and not Christianity, is the real religion of America. I will suggest that this myth of redemptive violence undergirds American popular culture, civil religion, nationalism, and foreign policy, and that it lies coiled like an ancient serpent at the root of the system of domination that has characterized human existence since well before Babylon ruled supreme. In order for us to get our bearings, however, we have to go back to the mythic source."

To continue reading this chapter, click here and start reading on page 12.  But I'm not sure how many pages you'll get to read, though.  Believe me, this book is worth the purchase, one of the best books I've ever read.  I had a "red pill/ blue pill" type of mind change when reading this book.  And it's what eventually lead my down the "rabbit hole" taking me into teaching in the inner-city.

Shane Claiborne's Letter to the IRS

Check this out. 
And to read the entire blog post, click here. 

Dear Internal Revenue Service,

I am filing my 1040 here. As you will see, I made $9600 this past year, and found that according to the 1040 form, I owe $324.44 of that to federal taxes. While I am glad to contribute money to the common good and towards things that promote life and dignity, especially for the poor and most vulnerable people among us, I am deeply concerned that 30 percent of the federal budget goes towards military spending, with 117 billion going to support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Further, when we include the 18% that goes towards past military costs, such as the 380 billion in debt payments, 80% of which are military related debts, that number goes up to a total military budget of 1,372 billion dollars — nearly half of the federal budget). My Christian faith and my human conscience require me to respectfully reserve the right not to kill, and to refrain from contributing money towards weapons and the military.

For this reason, I am enclosing a check for $227.11, which is, according to the form, 70% of what I owe. The remaining $97.33 represents 30% of my tax payment, the amount that would go towards military spending. I will donate this remaining 30% to a recognized US nonprofit organization working to bring peace and reconciliation. My faith also compels me to submit to the governing authorities, which is why I am writing you respectfully and transparently here. I am glad to discuss this further if you have any questions. I can be reached by phone at 215 423-3598 or by mail at 1838 E. Allegheny Avenue Philadelphia, PA 19134.

May we continue to build the world we dream of.

–Shane Claiborne

Cynicism

In my previous post, I referenced the weekly email sent out by my District Superintendent.  I want to share something else from that email.  It's about cynicism and forgiveness.  It's hard not to by cynical when you're in a pastoral position.  While we take it too far sometimes, I enjoy hanging out with another pastor friend in Gardner and just letting the cynicism flow as we make each other laugh at our stories. 
But it's also good to know that I'm not the only pastor who struggles to forgive and to stave off cynicism.  Enjoy this challenge from a colleague who is very talented as a leader but secure enough to admit his shortcomings. 

Good morning, Pastor

This morning I prayed that God would help me to forgive you. Relax, I don't mean “you” specifically, I mean “you” generally as my brothers and sisters in Christ. Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes the cumulative effect of disappointment over how God’s people act leaves me …. well, disappointed. Truthfully, over time that disappointment can become anger. I ended up there by Sunday night after several instances of receiving reports of people talking, acting, gossiping, and assuming in ways that leave me with a significant expectation violation to deal with. My expectation is that holiness people will act like it! When that doesn't seem to happen, my temptation is to become angry (including anger with myself). If that anger is not dealt with appropriately it can turn to cynicism, and that is a major red-flag that the problem is no longer with “those people” – the problem is with me. Some time ago God confronted this temptation in me and gave me a way out (1 Cor. 10:13). I was at College Church listening to a sermon from Dr. Graves. It was a sermon on forgiveness. I went to church that day smarting from some tough exchanges with people that week, probably feeling a bit sorry for myself, and no doubt being tempted to fall into a cynical attitude about the church. As my brother David preached on forgiveness I didn't really see the connection at first (I'm sometimes slow on these things) but then the Spirit opened my heart and I heard the clear message: cynicism and unforgiveness live right next to each other! I realized that the most powerful way to ensure that cynicism cannot get a foothold in my life is to drink deeply of God’s grace that enables us to pray, Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
I did not want to write this today because it exposes one of my many flaws. I just wonder if perhaps pastors as a group face this temptation because we are on the front lines of the work of the Spirit in the lives of people who are broken by disappointment, fear, and hurt? May I offer to you this Jesus-taught strategy for those times when you are tempted to anger and cynicism toward the very people you are called to love? Forgive them. As God has forgiven you, forgive them. And the peace of God that is beyond understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Enemy Love Conquers the World

From Frederich Buechner in The Magnificent Defeat

"The love for equals is a human thing - of friend for friend, brother for brother.  It is to love what is loving and lovely.  The world smiles.  The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing - the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely.  This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.  The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing - to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man.  The world is always bewildered by its saints.  And then there is the love for the enemy - love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain.  The tortured's love for the torturer.  This is God's love.  It conquers the world."

He-Man and the Sermon on the Mount

Sunday morning, I had the privilege of introducing my son to my favorite childhood hero, He-Man.  The introduction came via Hulu and when scrolling the episodes, I recognized what was my favorite episode as a child, "Dawn of Dragoon."  As a kid, it was my favorite episode because He-Man risked his life to save the bad guy. 

While trying to throw He-Man down the "bottomless pit of Tatoon", Dragoon is actually pulled over the edge and into the abyss.  Fortuitously for him, however, he's caught on a ledge.  In response to his calls for help, He-Man slides down to the ledge and then pulls Dragoon back up to safety.  Of all the He-Man episodes I watched as a child, that's the one scene that I remember.  It made quite an impression on me. 

Watching that episode 27 years later, however, the dialogue after that event (and believe me, He-Man has some lame dialogue) hit home with me in a new way. 

Dragoon:  “I don’t understand. You risked your life to save me? I wouldn’t have done that for you."
He-Man:  "That’s how we’re different. I believe in saving lives."
Dragoon:  "Even your enemies?"
He-Man:  "I may be your enemy, but you’re not mine."
Dragoon:  "Maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe saving lives is better."



All the reading I do from authors who take seriously Matthew 5:38-48 believe that one of the (many) reasons Jesus doesn't want his creation to kill is because it simply perpetuates evil.  One can see in history that when a group of revolutionaries use violence to overthrow a regime, the new regime set up by the revolutionaries often becomes as, or even more, violent than the previous regime.  While a forced lack of conflict (peace through superior firepower) can exist for awhile, it's not a real peace.  Violence simply begets more violence.  To take someone's life sends them into eternity, rather than giving them the chance to chance through a self-sacrificial love - the love Jesus showed for his enemies on Calvary. 

But loving one's enemies opens up the possibility of them being transformed.  While it's certainly likely the act of love may cost the Christian their physical life, it introduces their enemy to the love of Jesus.  And the love of Jesus is what our enemies need to encounter.  The sword leads to more bloodshed.  The cross leads to transformation.

What's also so interesting about this He-Man episode is that it counters the prevalence of the Myth of Redemptive Violence found in most kids' cartoons that feature good-guys and bad-guys, as pointed out by Walter Wink in The Powers that Be.

Matthew 5:38-48
38 "You have heard the law that says the punishment must match the injury: 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.'*39 But I say, do not resist an evil person! If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the other cheek also.40 If you are sued in court and your shirt is taken from you, give your coat, too.41 If a soldier demands that you carry his gear for a mile,* carry it two miles.42 Give to those who ask, and don't turn away from those who want to borrow.
43 "You have heard the law that says, 'Love your neighbor'* and hate your enemy.44 But I say, love your enemies!* Pray for those who persecute you!45 In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike.46 If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much.47 If you are kind only to your friends,* how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that.48 But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.

MLK and Peace

"One day as Napoleon came toward the end of his career and looked back across the years—the great Napoleon that at a very early age had all but conquered the world. He was not stopped until he became, till he moved out to the battle of Leipzig and then to Waterloo. But that same Napoleon one day stood back and looked across the years, and said: "Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have built great empires. But upon what did they depend? They depended upon force. But long ago Jesus started an empire that depended on love, and even to this day millions will die for him."
You can read the entire sermon on my wife's blog.

From a sermon in which MLK explains why he opposes the Vietnam War.
"My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."
You can read the entire sermon here.

Modern Day Holocaust

"When they came for the communists, I was silent, because I was not a communist; When they came for the socialists, I was silent, because I was not a socialist; When they came for the trade unionists, I did not protest, because I was not a trade unionist; When they came for the Jews, I did not protest, because I was not a Jew; When they came for me, there was no one left to protest on my behalf."
- Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)


I'm back in the office after being on vacation from Monday the 2nd to Monday the 9th. The first day of our vacation in Washington, DC, we visited the US Holocaust Museum. I've read enough and watched enough movies about the Holocaust that I wasn't shocked by anything I saw, although it was very moving to see actual bunks from a camp and to stand in a railcar that had been used to transport "prisoners."

But the thought that kept haunting me was "what would I have done if I'd been living in Nazi Germany? Would I have had the courage to stand up to the sins being committed in the name of 'German interest?'" It scared me to realize how many Germans truly believed that whatever was best for Germany was really the right thing to do. Other than a few members of the confesssing church, lead by Deitrich Bonheoffer, no christians or churches stood up to the Nazi government, everyone just looked the other way. They took the attitude "it's not hurting me or my family." The Nazis controlled Germany and the occupied countries by punishing entire families or even entire villages for subversive actions. Only a brave few dared oppose the Nazis.
Would I have had the courage to stand up to the Nazis, though it would've cost my life and the life of my family?A pastor in southern France did exactly that, his family and church hid a group of Jews in their church and eventually helped them escape occupied France. This guy had a wife and 4 kids and some of his family members were arrested.

This question kept bothering me, especially since it doesn't matter anymore. But there are two things I took away from those 4 hours in the musuem.

1) Our partiotism and love of country must never take precedence over our commitment to honoring Christ. If we believe (as did many Germans) that our country's interests or the lives of US citizens take precedence over the lives of those in other countries, we've fallen into serious sin. If we ever excuse the sins of our nation (as did many Germans) because of some belief that our country is Christian and thus we have a right to kill others to inflict our will in the world, then we're living in sin. Singing the Star Spangled Banner must never take away the ability to speak to with a prophetic voice!

2) A modern day Holocaust is happening right now. After wondering what I'd do had I lived then, I remembered that massive genocide is happening right now in Africa. And as soon as I made this connection, I saw that the museum had an exhibit on the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. It doesn't matter what I would've done in the 1940's, but it does matter how I respond to the genocide in Darfur. For more info, check out http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/alert/darfur/contents/01-overview/. Or just google "Darfur" to find out more.