(ABP) — If American troops kill Osama bin Laden, it should be “in the name of justice,” not “in the name of the Lord” as televangelist Jerry Falwell suggests, according to one Southern Baptist ethicist.
Falwell, perhaps the best-known Southern Baptist pastor, said on CNN Oct. 24 that President Bush should “blow them [terrorists] away in the name of the Lord.”
Capturing and, if necessary, killing terrorists “is a morally legitimate exercise of military force,” said David Gushee, also a Southern Baptist and professor of moral philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tenn. “However, it must be recognized that in the terms of Christian moral thought, even justified wars are not to be treated as if they are being fought 'in the name of the Lord.'
“If we do capture Osama bin Laden, for example, or even if we kill him, it will not be 'in the name of the Lord,'” Gushee said. “It will be in the name of justice, and in the defense of the United States. There is a difference, and one that is easily overlooked when passions run high in times of war.”
Falwell's comment came on “CNN Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer” in a debate with Baptist minister Jesse Jackson, who called the Iraq war “a misadventure” that isolated the United States politically and cost the country lives, money and “our character.”
Falwell, pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchnurg, Va., responded: “I'd rather be killing them over there than fighting them over here, Jesse. And I think you would…”
“Let's stop the killing and choose peace,” Jackson responded. “Let's choose negotiation over confrontation.”
“Well, I'm for that too,” Falwell added. “But you've got to kill the terrorists before the killing stops. And I'm for the president to chase them all over the world. If it takes 10 years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord.”
“That does not sound biblical to me,” Jackson responded. “And that sounds ridiculous.”
Falwell and other conservative Christians have drawn criticism for linking the war on terrorism with a crusade against Islamic fundamentalism. Falwell earlier called Muhammad, Islam's founder, a terrorist, then later apologized.
“Jerry Falwell apparently believes the United States is waging holy war in Iraq,” Stan Hastey of Washington, D.C., executive director of the Alliance of Baptists, said Nov. 1. “… Such comments are fodder for the terrorists, bulletin board material for Osama bin Laden in recruiting his own holy warriors. What spews out of Jerry Falwell's mouth is increasingly toxic. He would do well to re-read Jesus' beatitudes and reorder both his rhetoric and priorities accordingly.”
Gushee agreed Christians should speak carefully about the war. “We must be careful not to label every international adversary as a terrorist,” he said. “We must draw appropriate distinctions between the struggle against the international Islamist terrorist network and ongoing problems in Iraq. And our nation [must] make every effort to pursue peacemaking initiatives that can ease tensions between our own nation and the countries and peoples of the Arab world.”
Glen Stassen, professor of Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., went further. “Jerry Falwell is showing that he is infected by a demon, and unfortunately it has spread to many others. The demon is the assumption that either we kill people in war or they kill us.”
Stassen, co-author with Gushee of “Kingdom Ethics,” advocated “just peacemaking” as an alternative to war.
“Falwell's strategy was adopted by Russia against the Muslim terrorists in Chechnya, and it only increases the anger and the recruits to terrorism and the killing, as in North Ossetia,” he said, referring to the recent massacre at a Russian school.
“Turkey instead used just peacemaking practices with its Muslim terrorists among the Kurds, and the Kurdish terrorism is completely ended,” Stassen said. “They are not killing 'here' or 'there.'”
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