The carnage in the Middle East has moved me toward the breaking point on the entire business of war. I am genuinely wondering whether as a Christian moral thinker, it is my place to offer support for war, even in those rare cases where I think it might be morally justified. I am wondering whether the world needs that from the church, because the world knows quite well how to justify killing. Why does it need our help?
Of course this issue is not new, and Christian resistance to war must be based on more than the temporary revulsion of the moment–though we could do worse than study the pictures in the newspaper when looking for moral truth these days.
We must go back to the center of our faith, Jesus Christ, the one who taught peace and the things that make for peace. He taught about the dangers of escalating anger and the obligation to go and talk to the adversary. He taught his listeners to take peacemaking initiatives when harmed rather than to respond with an eye for an eye (or ten eyes for an eye). He called his followers to love their enemies, to see even enemies as the children of God. He said that peacemakers are blessed by God.
His followers heard him clearly. The Christian movement was originally a peaceable Jewish sect, and it did not participate in the Jewish revolt against Rome (66-73 AD) that cost so many lives and destroyed Jerusalem. Both biblical and post-biblical writers of the early church constantly described the church as a community seeking to practice Christ's teachings of forgiveness, mercy, and inclusive love. They refused to kill or to participate in killing. They rejected abortion, euthanasia, war, and even the gladiator games as incompatible with Christian commitment.
The church genuinely believed that Jesus was the incarnation of God and the Savior of the world. They risked their lives to affirm that Jesus, not Caesar, was their Lord. Through baptism they took on the obligation to obey his teachings and they held each other accountable for so doing. They had no social power, but instead experienced social rejection and periodically social slaughter. In earliest days, they died willingly (for Christ) and killed unwillingly but mainly not at all.
Once the church gained a growing stake in affairs of state, and growing social power, it developed an elaborate Christianization of “just war” theory and justifications for other forms of violence, such as that undertaken against heretics. The church became committed to helping the state decide how to run its affairs; or, quite often, helping the state justify and enforce its decisions through the church's religious sanction. In return the church gained a privileged position in society and Christians learned to identify and confuse the interests of the homeland with the interests of the church, and of God.
So now when “we” kill terrorists or insurgents in Iraq, some of us think that we kill for God, even for Jesus. Others bracket off their faith from this dirty business while proceeding with it. Either way, our primary loyalty shifts to the state that we live in. Yet because we also want to retain our Christian identification, we weaken and domesticate it. What serves my state serves God. And thus our moral witness is compromised.
Unlike some Christians whose thinking runs along the lines I suggest here, I am not saying that the state can never justifiably employ coercion or violence. Nor am I saying that Christians, in their loyalty to Jesus Christ our Lord, have no stake in their national life.
But what I am saying is that the state really does not need more people urging our nation or other nations on to more killing. And that is not what God needs from the church.
Precisely as Christians, we need a distinctively Christian witness that calls followers of Jesus back to faithful obedience to the teachings of the Bible. We need to analyze dismal human realities, such as war, in light of what Jesus said about them, rather than using merely worldly categories of thought.
We need to weep over the suffering, and to offer compassionate service to broken and terrified human beings, even those classified as our enemies or our friends' enemies. We need to offer the practical insights of Christ's teaching to the world's leaders, and embody that teaching in the life of our faith communities. And we need to keep yearning for, and pointing toward, a better kingdom than any earthly kingdom, when God shall reign, all peoples shall dwell in peace, and every bloody weapon will be laid down at last.
-30-