Roll Down

So, my good friend Valerie made the terrible mistake of asking my opinion on a deep and controversial topic, and so I wrote her a book.  Oops.  Here it is:

Man, you bring up great conversation!  So, a warning: I am not a pro on Just War Theory, I really only know the broadest outlines, but as with everything, I still have an opinion (I guess just that I have a my own developing theology of violence and warfare).  So: Just War is generally wrong.  There are two very difficult facts that have to be addressed by any theory of war, which is really just a theory of violence writ large.

Violence in the Old Testament

One, the violence of the Old Testament (and to a lesser extent, the violence in parts of the New Testament/Revelation).  That it happened is undeniable, and the responses tend to be either 1) “God chose them as his people, thus all of their violence is divinely appointed to cleanse the land and establish them” or 2) “The stories of violence are retroactively explained as divine actions by authors of late date justifying the terrible acts of one nation against another”.  One is the standard conservative response, the other the standard liberal response.  The problem with both of them is that for all the books ever written from those perspectives, the conclusions are simplistic and un-nuanced.  One reads violence as an almost genetic right in perpetuity based on irrevocable Chosen-ness, and the other invalidates the possibility of God doing things we don’t like and binds his hands to our current moral landscape.  To use the histories of the Bible for modern interpretation, one needs to accept the possibility that God might have actually communicated something concrete and offensive to modern ears, yet not read backwards into history the cultural justifications of a dominant people (eg Americans, Brits, whoever is powerful at the moment).

And Now, Jesus

Which brings us to the other fact - Jesus did say something about “an eye for an eye” (the fun Latin term for that is lex talonis):

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. (Matthew 5:38–39, NRSV)

So in fact, Jesus gives a “new” order, the inversion of an Old Testament decree in fact.  At this point, many Just War-ers would point out that he is talking to individuals, so clearly it can’t be applied to governments.  Paul even goes so far as to say that the king is given the sword to punish wrongdoers, so that further justifies their point that state violence and individual violence are two different things, and Jesus is fine with the US of A dropping a bomb where they wouldn’t want an individual to shoot someone.

The problem with that line of thinking is two-fold (a lot of twos on this one): one, a government is only just made up of individuals, and at the point those individuals aren’t accountable for the actions of their government, we have a dangerous situation on our hands.  Two, both Paul and Jesus wrote or spoke from the bottom up: they were the crushed minority speaking to power, and their descriptions of the role of government has to be read as the people of the time would have read it.  When Paul wrote that the government obviously uses its power to punish the wicked and help the righteous, there were already persecutions breaking out against nascent Christianity all over their world.  Paul himself had been a member of the power structure, and been given legal authority to punish, jail, and kill Christians by the religio-political powers, so when he writes of the rightness of the authorities, one has to realize the difference between what is written and what it means to the reader.

Clear As Mud, And Dietrich

Long story short, here’s my opinion: it’s tricky.  It’s unclear.  For a while I was leaning more and more strongly like I needed to be a pure pacifist (which I would suck at), but as I read more and more about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his process and thoughts caught me off guard and shifted the argument for me.

See, he was a die-hard pacifist from way back, but when WWII exploded on the world, he entered into the risk and suffering of the Jews around him, and it took away his easy answers.  He had said to himself, “God is a god of peace, he wills that in all times and all places men should be at peace, therefore there is never moral license to commit violence against another.”  And that rule served him well for a time, but as the war ground on, and the body count went up, and the insatiable hunger that the German leadership showed, the inhuman calculated destruction of a whole race, and the insanity and denial of all peace efforts by the Fuhrer, it began to falter.  He felt that God was calling him to do something, be involved, and even commit violence to stop it.  His critical moment was when he realized that he was essentially following a law about God (pacifism), instead of following living Spirit of God.  So he joined Operation Valkyrie and tried to assassinate Hitler, and paid for it with his life.

He was not a Just War theory person.  In the end, he was not a pacifist.  He tried his best to give up rules about God, and instead listen to the Person of God - which sounds pretty familiar.

Somewhere Elsewhere

I would say that OT stories clearly show some times when God directly commands terrible and terrifying things, offensive things, one might even say evil things, from our modern perspective.  We don’t face an enemy who executes our people held captive on pikes around their cities.  There is no use cutting out these stories as if they didn’t happen, or making ourselves more comfortable with them by saying that the Israelites wrote their own history to justify themselves, because their are MANY conflicts listed in the OT that are clearly not ordered by God, and others that are outright condemned by God.  In the record their are both divinely ordained atrocities, and atrocities all of our own making.  We deny God reality and authority when we just dismiss violent stories, and the possibility of God demanding violence.

However, the far greater danger in the history of man has been the opposite - reading divine ordination into our violence, especially at the state level.  Just as Israel had a way of fighting, and then asking God to help them win, modern states still invoke divine cause, but I haven’t seen a real prophet around these parts in a long time.  Just as we can’t deny the violence of the OT, we can’t ignore the entire sacrificial love posture of the NT.  Everything in the NT is wrapped up in the story of the self-injuring love of the Crucified One, who took in the world’s violence, soaking it up and ending the cycles we are trapped in.  As individuals and as a social structure the Christians of the first centuries were persecuted, yet took the demand to Love Your Enemy as gospel - a part we seem to leave out or modify, that love of enemy and love of friend uses “love” in two very different ways.  And as the leaders of our world, so many of whom wrap themselves in the rhetoric of divine love and humility, baptize their conflicts in holiness and justice, we have to ask for the biblical point at which they are no longer individuals, but now something other that is no longer accountable to the gospel.

The answer of Christ, therefore the Christian answer, to violence is clearly to absorb it, and to end the cycle.

The Tighter You Grip It

Yet even in that, there is not law, but the frightening unpredictability of grace - a grace that can cause Ananias and Sapphira to drop dead at Peter’s feet.  A reading of Revelation without context can be a horrifically violent look at the world and God’s action in it.  But that is not the contradiction or cancellation of the Gospel of Self Giving, but the horrific corollary to the real meaning of a God who is infinite in perspective and power.  A God who is mystery to us, beyond us, will at some point have to offend us, telling us to sheath our sword when we don’t want too or to draw it against our desires.

And in all this, we are reading Scripture hanging upside down.  We, collectively the West, have more power than Rome, more science than Greece, more gold than Babylon, and more merchants than all of them.  We read scripture as people who do not have the daily taste of violence and conflict that so many in the world have.  This serves to make our interpretations biased either by having no idea of the sufferings of oppression and collateral damage, or arrogant disgust at those who would resort to violence.  Even our war of Independence was not fought because of real oppression, mother and child enslaved, land scorched - it was because we (that is, the upper class aristocrats) didn’t want to pay taxes.

In the end, the answer seems to me to be this: what does God want at this moment, in this place?  And as a way to guide that thought, what action would look most like absorbing the violence and sin of the world?  Laws and rules call us to lean on our understanding, rather than the Living God whose pillar of smoke and fire leads the way.

We Do What We Know

The impossibility of this on the level of ourselves, let alone the State, is in a big way the effect of only having a hammer for 6,000 years - everything looks like a nail.  The hammer of violence has reigned in man everywhere, but many (and Christ being the chief) have new tools, better ways.  A book I read summed it up this way: we have at this moment 6,000 years of history, trillions of dollars, millions of men and women, and an uncountable number of bullets and bombs dedicated to the cause of war - of course it will seem like war is the only answer to our conflicts.  But what if we dedication even billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of people, and whatever resources besides to peace?  Basically, the world has never even remotely given peace the same chance it has always given war.  Until we do that, no one can call it unrealistic, they can only call it untried.  When millions of people are as willing to die for peace as are currently willing to die in violence, only then can we say that we have tried peace, and only then will we know if it is found wanting.

The Bumper Sticker Answer

So my take on it?  God is a mystery, love everyone ‘til it kills you, and if God tells you to do something directly, you should probably do it, after you check in with your community of faith to make sure you aren’t crazy.

A brief note partly on immigration by a friend today sparked a relatively fierce discussion, that I just had to stick my nose into. As I processed the opinions and perspective of others, I realized that really, deep down, the phrase “love first” kept coming up. In all this talk of laws and jobs and economics and effort, love first just kept dawning on me.

What I mean is that most of the conversations that we tend to have about love are conditional - that is, they hold prior ideas like the legality of border-crossings or the sinfulness of sex outside of wedlock. We carry with us these pre-judgements that we don’t even think of as judgments. To us, they are just the truth, and for us, the truth precedes love. Because it isn’t loving to untruthful, right?

Except that is the catch - because love is truth, and love is a greater truth than any contingent law, moral or political. Love is more truth than gravity, than the sun rising tomorrow, because it is the truth that gives them all connection and power. So when we talk about immigration, our first response shouldn’t be to look toward law, anymore than our first response to the homeless man should be to his life choices. Because as the Man said - do to others what you want them to do to you. Not a single one of us, starving and cold, would want, really want someone to tell us “Well, you shouldn’t have spent that last money on booze” - though it be true. We wouldn’t want someone to say “No, your family has to stay in a drug and bullet rich environment, and you can only work for a few pesos a day, because that is the law here.” Right or wrong, we would simply want love - the love of a meal, the love of a chance.

Until you love first, without comparison and simply because that person before you is the image of God, Christ in his distressing disguise, and your very self on trial, then you don’t yet have the right frame to start understanding how to deal with them. Asking the first question “How would I want to be dealt with” shifts the entire legal question of immigration. Not that it would throw law out the window, but that law would not strand your family in the darkness.

Of course, it can’t stop there. Not if it is real love, oh how frightening the thought. Real love does embrace truth, that is, all the truthes a person has. It is true that the drunkard should stop drinking. Just as equally true that he will have no reason to stop until he is loved. It is true that a Mexican woman should not break the law - as true as giving her a stake in the land whose laws she is to follow. Loving a person takes a long time, and means telling some truths to them, and hearing some truth from them. What could a teen mom teach you? What can a homeless vet show you? Until you can seriously consider that they might have something to offer, you are loving them as a pet and not a person. If I am to be loved, I expect to participate in that love, not just receive - but if I am never given the chance, I can never grow to my full stature.

Love, unconditional uncritical undefeatable love, has to come first. First implies a second, and so love should continue to desire the best for someone and the removal of all those things which so easily entangle, but first it must simply embrace. And if you feel unable to make the first move of love, let alone the harder prospect of the long term second form, then just keep silent and pray God grows you into it. And if you find that after all that you are unable to embrace the alien, the stranger, and the sinner then be very frightened - because that is what God has done for you, and the Man said if you don’t carry forward that gracious embrace, you cannot possibly expect God to hold you.