American Christians have had plenty of opportunities in the last six years to consider our faith in relation to the fact that we are in a country which is at war. Christians have been disputing the topic for 2,000 years. This post isn’t intended to defend my position, just to point out some interesting articles I’ve read on the topic.
The first article is from 1999 and is discussing Kosovo. (And don’t forget, nearly a decade later we’re still there, and we may soon be hearing a great deal more about it. This current article about Kosovo ends with an interesting quote – “Calm now, Kosovo can blow up unexpectedly. Three years ago in March, Albanian-led riots left 19 dead and forced hundreds of Serbs to flee. The job isn’t finished. “This is one of the places,” says Gen. Earhart, “you have to see through to the end.”“) Here’s the older article – Perennial question, honest answers – the military action in Yugoslavia again brings up the historic question of the proper Christian attitude toward war – Brief Article
Reinhold Niebuhr, who started his writing career with the CENTURY, discontinued his association with the magazine because of its pacifist and noninterventionist leanings in the 1930s. This same dissatisfaction led Niebuhr to launch a new magazine, Christianity and Crisis, which called Christians to what he thought was a more realistic response to Hitler. Some of tiffs history and some of the subsequent permutations of Niebuhrian realism are recalled in the review by Gray Dorrien (see page 652).
Niebuhr’s quarrel was not actually with principled pacifists–those who embrace nonviolence as first and last a gospel witness. The principled pacifists are not worried, finally, about how history turns out; they leave the Hitlers and Milosevics of the world in God’s hands, knowing that the triumph of good is an eschatological category.
What provoked Niebuhr most were those who touted nonviolence as an all-purpose strategy. People who adopted this stance, he thought, often minimized the power of evil, failed to discriminate between greater and lesser evils or between relative forms of justice, and encouraged a sentimental confidence in the short-term triumph of goodness.
Theologian and WWI veteran C.S. Lewis had a similar attitude:
The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are. I think the suppression of a higher religion by a lower, or even a higher secular culture by a lower, a much greater evil. Nor am I greatly moved by the fact that many of the individuals we strike down in war are innocent. […] The question is whether war is the greatest evil in the world, so that any state of affairs which might result from submission is certainly preferable. And I do not see any really cogent arguments for that view. (Why I Am Not A Pacifist – The Weight of Glory)
John Piper’s take on it – Did Jesus teach pacifism?
Terrorism, Justice, and Loving Our Enemies
God wills that human justice hold sway among governments, and between citizens and civil authority. He does not prescribe that governments always turn the other cheek. The government “does not bear the sword for nothing.” Police have the God-given right to use force to restrain evil and bring law-breakers to justice. And legitimate states have the God-given right to restrain life-threatening aggression and bring criminals to justice. If these truths are known, this God-ordained exercise of divine prerogative would glorify the justice of God who mercifully ordains that the flood of sin and misery be restrained in the earth.
Therefore, we will magnify the mercy of God by praying for our enemies to be saved and reconciled to God. At the personal level we will be willing to suffer for their everlasting good, and we will give them food and drink. We will put away malicious hatred and private vengeance. But at the public level we will also magnify the justice of God by praying and working for justice to be done on the earth, if necessary through wise and measured force from God-ordained authority.
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