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Title: Christian Support for Killing Iraqis
Source:
Antiwar
URL Source: http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2009-02-06.asp
Published: Feb 7, 2009
Author: Jacob Hornberger
Post Date: 2009-02-07 08:48:33 by Ada
Keywords: None
Views: 270
Comments: 13
Among the things about the Iraq War that I have never been able to understand is how American Christians have been able, in good conscience, to support this war. After all, no one can deny that neither Iraq nor the Iraqi people ever attacked the United States. That makes the United States the aggressor — the attacker — in this particular conflict. How could American Christians support the killing of Iraqis in such a war of aggression? How could they reconcile this with God’s sacred commandment, Thou shalt not murder. One possibility is that Americans initially viewed the Iraq War as one of self-defense. Placing their trust in their president and vice-president, they came to the conclusion that Iraq was about to unleash WMDs on American cities. Therefore, they concluded, America had the right to defend itself from this imminent attack, much as an individual has the moral right to use deadly force to defend his life from someone who is trying to murder him. But once the WMDs failed to materialize, American Christians did not seem to engage in any remorse or regret over all the Iraqis who had been killed in the invasion. It was all marked up as simply an honest mistake. At the same time, hardly anyone called for a formal investigation into whether the president and the vice president had intentionally misled Americans into supporting the war based on bogus exaggerations of the WMD threat. After the WMDs failed to materialize, American Christians had an option: They could have called for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops. Instead, they did the exact opposite. They supported the continued occupation of Iraq, with full knowledge that U.S. troops would have to continue killing Iraqis in order to solidify the occupation. That’s when Christians began supporting a new rationale for killing Iraqis: that any Iraqi who resisted the U.S. invasion or occupation was a terrorist and, therefore, okay to kill. Since terrorists were bad people, the argument went, it was okay to support the killing of Iraqis who were resisting the invasion and occupation of their country. Yet, rarely would any Christian ask himself the important, soul-searching questions: Why didn’t Iraqis have the moral right to resist the invasion and occupation of their country, especially if that invasion and occupation had been based on a bogus principle (i.e., the WMD threat)? Why did their resistance convert them into terrorists? Why did U.S. troops have the moral and religious right to kill people who were defending their country from invasion and occupation? Instead, people in Christian churches all across the land simply just kept “supporting the troops.” I suspect part of the reasoning has to do with the mindset that is inculcated in public schools all across the land — that in war, it’s “our team” vs. “their team,” and that Americans have a moral duty to support “our team,” regardless of the facts. Among the most fascinating rationales for supporting the killing of Iraqis that American Christians have relied upon has been the mathematical argument. It goes like this: Saddam Hussein would have killed a larger number of Iraqis than the U.S. government has killed in the invasion and occupation. Therefore, the argument goes, it’s okay to support the invasion and occupation, which have killed countless Iraqis. But under Christian doctrine, does God really provide for a mathematical exception to his commandment against killing? Let’s see how such reasoning would be applied here at home. Let’s assume that the D.C. area is besieged by two snipers, who are killing people indiscriminately. Let’s assume that they’re killing people at the rate of 5 per month. That would mean that at the end of the year, they would have killed 60 people. One day, the cops learn that the two snipers are parked in a highway rest area. There are also 25 other people there, all Americans, men, women, and children, and all innocent. The Pentagon offers to drop a bomb on the parking lot, which would definitely snuff out the lives of the snipers. The problem is that it would also snuff out the lives of the other 25 people. Under Christian principles, would it be okay to drop the bomb? I would hope that most Christians would say, No! As Christians, we cannot kill innocent people even if by doing so, we rid the world of those snipers. If we cannot catch the snipers except by dropping the bomb, then we simply have to let them get away. God does not provide a mathematical justification for killing innocent people. Yet, isn’t that precisely the mathematical analysis that has been used by Christians to justify their support for the killing of Iraqis. What’s the difference? In their blind support for “our team” and for “supporting the troops” in Iraq, American Christians seem to have forgotten an important point about government and God: When the laws or actions of one’s government’s contradict the laws of God, the Christian has but one proper course of action — to leave behind the laws of man and to follow the laws of God.
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#1. To: Ada (#0)
The answer is simple. They are deluded. And they are cowards.
Click for Privacy and Preparedness files And it doesn't take much clear thinking to come to that conclusion. And yet tomorrow when I go to church, their will be no discussion of Gaza or Iraq. Unless I fart and bring it up.
"Satan / Cheney in "08" Do that, and expect to be kicked out as a smelly troublemaker.
Click for Privacy and Preparedness files I've had many discussions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the things done by bush, his administration and congress with individuals at church. I was shocked how many still believe what bush says and that he is a true Christian. For awhile my wife and I were somewhat ignored/shunned and it got to the point that I told the Pastor that we were looking at other churches because we were beginning to feel out of place. We had a long discussion and over the next few weeks he came down pretty hard in his sermons about those who were doing this type of thing. Fortunately, our pastor is not a fake or fraud like Dobson, Robertson and many of the others and, as a result, his sermons lately have been about what is happening and what Scripture says about it. I am just amazed at what some of these people blindly accepted just because bush said he was a Christian. Some still believe that the WMD were moved to Syria or Russia, that Iraq was a threat and getting ready to attack Israel and the U.S., that we have almost completely rebuilt Iraq and Afghanistan and the people are happier and better off than before the U.S. began these immoral wars. Makes a person wonder.
The Christian paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation's educational decline, but it probably doesn't matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up. Asking Christians what Christ taught isn't a trick. When we say we are a Christian nation—and, overwhelmingly, we do—it means something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly, these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans. And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox—more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese—illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture. Ours is among the most spiritually homogenous rich nations on earth. Depending on which poll you look at and how the question is asked, somewhere around 85 percent of us call ourselves Christian. Israel, by way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish. It is true that a smaller number of Americans—about 75 percent—claim they actually pray to God on a daily basis, and only 33 percent say they manage to get to church every week. Still, even if that 85 percent overstates actual practice, it clearly represents aspiration. In fact, there is nothing else that unites more than four fifths of America. Every other statistic one can cite about American behavior is essentially also a measure of the behavior of professed Christians. That's what America is: a place saturated in Christian identity. But is it Christian? This is not a matter of angels dancing on the heads of pins. Christ was pretty specific about what he had in mind for his followers. What if we chose some simple criterion—say, giving aid to the poorest people—as a reasonable proxy for Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they'd fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What would we find then? In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita we each provide fifteen cents a day in official development assistance to poor countries. And it's not because we were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies, to twenty-one cents. It's also not because Americans were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the least among us you want to propose—childhood nutrition, infant mortality, access to preschool—we come in nearly last among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin. The point is not just that (as everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly in all these categories; it's that the overwhelmingly Christian American nation trails badly in all these categories, categories to which Jesus paid particular attention. And it's not as if the numbers are getting better: the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last year that the number of households that were “food insecure with hunger” had climbed more than 26 percent between 1999 and 2003. This Christian nation also tends to make personal, as opposed to political, choices that the Bible would seem to frown upon. Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that of our European peers. We have prison populations greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations (which at least should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting the prisoners). Having been told to turn the other cheek, we're the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest. Despite Jesus' strong declarations against divorce, our marriages break up at a rate—just over half—that compares poorly with the European Union's average of about four in ten. That average may be held down by the fact that Europeans marry less frequently, and by countries, like Italy, where divorce is difficult; still, compare our success with, say, that of the godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent. Teenage pregnancy? We're at the top of the charts. Personal self-discipline—like, say, keeping your weight under control? Buying on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need to ask? Are Americans hypocrites? Of course they are. But most people (me, for instance) are hypocrites. The more troubling explanation for this disconnect between belief and action, I think, is that most Americans—which means most believers—have replaced the Christianity of the Bible, with its call for deep sharing and personal sacrifice, with a competing creed. In fact, there may be several competing creeds. For many Christians, deciphering a few passages of the Bible to figure out the schedule for the End Times has become a central task. You can log on to RaptureReady.com for a taste of how some of these believers view the world—at this writing the Rapture Index had declined three points to 152 because, despite an increase in the number of U.S. pagans, “Wal-Mart is falling behind in its plan to bar code all products with radio tags.” Other End-Timers are more interested in forcing the issue—they're convinced that the way to coax the Lord back to earth is to “Christianize” our nation and then the world. Consider House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. At church one day he listened as the pastor, urging his flock to support the administration, declared that “the war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse.” DeLay rose to speak, not only to the congregation but to 225 Christian TV and radio stations. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “what has been spoken here tonight is the truth of God.” The apocalyptics may not be wrong. One could make a perfectly serious argument that the policies of Tom DeLay are in fact hastening the End Times. But there's nothing particularly Christian about this hastening. The creed of Tom DeLay—of Tim LaHaye and his Left Behind books, of Pat Robertson's “The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today”—ripened out of the impossibly poetic imagery of the Book of Revelation. Imagine trying to build a theory of the Constitution by obsessively reading and rereading the Twenty-fifth Amendment, and you'll get an idea of what an odd approach this is. You might be able to spin elaborate fantasies about presidential succession, but you'd have a hard time working backwards to “We the People.” This is the contemporary version of Archbishop Ussher's seventeenth-century calculation that the world had been created on October 23, 4004 B.C., and that the ark touched down on Mount Ararat on May 5, 2348 B.C., a Wednesday. Interesting, but a distant distraction from the gospel message. The apocalyptics, however, are the lesser problem. It is another competing (though sometimes overlapping) creed, this one straight from the sprawling megachurches of the new exurbs, that frightens me most. Its deviation is less obvious precisely because it looks so much like the rest of the culture. In fact, most of what gets preached in these palaces isn't loony at all. It is disturbingly conventional. The pastors focus relentlessly on you and your individual needs. Their goal is to service consumers—not communities but individuals: “seekers” is the term of art, people who feel the need for some spirituality in their (or their children's) lives but who aren't tightly bound to any particular denomination or school of thought. The result is often a kind of soft-focus, comfortable, suburban faith. A New York Times reporter visiting one booming megachurch outside Phoenix recently found the typical scene: a drive-through latte stand, Krispy Kreme doughnuts at every service, and sermons about “how to discipline your children, how to reach your professional goals, how to invest your money, how to reduce your debt.” On Sundays children played with church-distributed Xboxes, and many congregants had signed up for a twice-weekly aerobics class called Firm Believers. A list of bestsellers compiled monthly by the Christian Booksellers Association illuminates the creed. It includes texts like Your Best Life Now by Joel Osteen—pastor of a church so mega it recently leased a 16,000-seat sports arena in Houston for its services—which even the normally tolerant Publishers Weekly dismissed as “a treatise on how to get God to serve the demands of self-centered individuals.” Nearly as high is Beth Moore, with her Believing God—“Beth asks the tough questions concerning the fruit of our Christian lives,” such as “are we living as fully as we can?” Other titles include Humor for a Woman's Heart, a collection of “humorous writings” designed to “lift a life above the stresses and strains of the day”; The Five Love Languages, in which Dr. Gary Chapman helps you figure out if you're speaking in the same emotional dialect as your significant other; and Karol Ladd's The Power of a Positive Woman. Ladd is the co-founder of USA Sonshine Girls—the “Son” in Sonshine, of course, is the son of God—and she is unremittingly upbeat in presenting her five-part plan for creating a life with “more calm, less stress.” Not that any of this is so bad in itself. We do have stressful lives, humor does help, and you should pay attention to your own needs. Comfortable suburbanites watch their parents die, their kids implode. Clearly I need help with being positive. And I have no doubt that such texts have turned people into better parents, better spouses, better bosses. It's just that these authors, in presenting their perfectly sensible advice, somehow manage to ignore Jesus' radical and demanding focus on others. It may, in fact, be true that “God helps those who help themselves,” both financially and emotionally. (Certainly fortune does.) But if so it's still a subsidiary, secondary truth, more Franklinity than Christianity. You could eliminate the scriptural references in most of these bestsellers and they would still make or not make the same amount of sense. Chicken Soup for the Zoroastrian Soul. It is a perfect mirror of the secular bestseller lists, indeed of the secular culture, with its American fixation on self-improvement, on self-esteem. On self. These similarities make it difficult (although not impossible) for the televangelists to posit themselves as embattled figures in a “culture war”— they offer too uncanny a reflection of the dominant culture, a culture of unrelenting self-obsession. Who am I to criticize someone else's religion? After all, if there is anything Americans agree on, it's that we should tolerate everyone else's religious expression. As a Newsweek writer put it some years ago at the end of his cover story on apocalyptic visions and the Book of Revelation, “Who's to say that John's mythic battle between Christ and Antichrist is not a valid insight into what the history of humankind is all about?” (Not Newsweek, that's for sure; their religious covers are guaranteed big sellers.) To that I can only answer that I'm a . . . Christian. Not a professional one; I'm an environmental writer mostly. I've never progressed further in the church hierarchy than Sunday school teacher at my backwoods Methodist church. But I've spent most of my Sunday mornings in a pew. I grew up in church youth groups and stayed active most of my adult life—started homeless shelters in church basements, served soup at the church food pantry, climbed to the top of the rickety ladder to put the star on the church Christmas tree. My work has been, at times, influenced by all that—I've written extensively about the Book of Job, which is to me the first great piece of nature writing in the Western tradition, and about the overlaps between Christianity and environmentalism. In fact, I imagine I'm one of a fairly small number of writers who have had cover stories in both the Christian Century, the magazine of liberal mainline Protestantism, and Christianity Today, which Billy Graham founded, not to mention articles in Sojourners, the magazine of the progressive evangelical community co-founded by Jim Wallis. Indeed, it was my work with religious environmentalists that first got me thinking along the lines of this essay. We were trying to get politicians to understand why the Bible actually mandated protecting the world around us (Noah: the first Green), work that I think is true and vital. But one day it occurred to me that the parts of the world where people actually had cut dramatically back on their carbon emissions, actually did live voluntarily in smaller homes and take public transit, were the same countries where people were giving aid to the poor and making sure everyone had health care—countries like Norway and Sweden, where religion was relatively unimportant. How could that be? For Christians there should be something at least a little scary in the notion that, absent the magical answers of religion, people might just get around to solving their problems and strengthening their communities in more straightforward ways. But for me, in any event, the European success is less interesting than the American failure. Because we're not going to be like them. Maybe we'd be better off if we abandoned religion for secular rationality, but we're not going to; for the foreseeable future this will be a “Christian” nation. The question is, what kind of Christian nation? The tendencies I've been describing—toward an apocalyptic End Times faith, toward a comfort-the-comfortable, personal-empowerment faith—veil the actual, and remarkable, message of the Gospels. When one of the Pharisees asked Jesus what the core of the law was, Jesus replied: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Love your neighbor as yourself: although its rhetorical power has been dimmed by repetition, that is a radical notion, perhaps the most radical notion possible. Especially since Jesus, in all his teachings, made it very clear who the neighbor you were supposed to love was: the poor person, the sick person, the naked person, the hungry person. The last shall be made first; turn the other cheek; a rich person aiming for heaven is like a camel trying to walk through the eye of a needle. On and on and on—a call for nothing less than a radical, voluntary, and effective reordering of power relationships, based on the principle of love. I confess, even as I write these words, to a feeling close to embarrassment. Because in public we tend not to talk about such things—my theory of what Jesus mostly meant seems like it should be left in church, or confined to some religious publication. But remember the overwhelming connection between America and Christianity; what Jesus meant is the most deeply potent political, cultural, social question. To ignore it, or leave it to the bullies and the salesmen of the televangelist sects, means to walk away from a central battle over American identity. At the moment, the idea of Jesus has been hijacked by people with a series of causes that do not reflect his teachings. The Bible is a long book, and even the Gospels have plenty in them, some of it seemingly contradictory and hard to puzzle out. But love your neighbor as yourself—not do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but love your neighbor as yourself—will suffice as a gloss. There is no disputing the centrality of this message, nor is there any disputing how easy it is to ignore that message. Because it is so counterintuitive, Christians have had to keep repeating it to themselves right from the start. Consider Paul, for instance, instructing the church at Galatea: “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment,” he wrote. “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” American churches, by and large, have done a pretty good job of loving the neighbor in the next pew. A pastor can spend all Sunday talking about the Rapture Index, but if his congregation is thriving you can be assured he's spending the other six days visiting people in the hospital, counseling couples, and sitting up with grieving widows. All this human connection is important. But if the theology makes it harder to love the neighbor a little farther away—particularly the poor and the weak—then it's a problem. And the dominant theologies of the moment do just that. They undercut Jesus, muffle his hard words, deaden his call, and in the end silence him. In fact, the soft-focus consumer gospel of the suburban megachurches is a perfect match for emergent conservative economic notions about personal responsibility instead of collective action. Privatize Social Security? Keep health care for people who can afford it? File those under “God helps those who help themselves.” Take Alabama as an example. In 2002, Bob Riley was elected governor of the state, where 90 percent of residents identify themselves as Christians. Riley could safely be called a conservative—right-wing majordomo Grover Norquist gave him a Friend of the Taxpayer Award every year he was in Congress, where he'd never voted for a tax increase. But when he took over Alabama, he found himself administering a tax code that dated to 1901. The richest Alabamians paid 3 percent of their income in taxes, and the poorest paid up to 12 percent; income taxes kicked in if a family of four made $4,600 (even in Mississippi the threshold was $19,000), while out-of-state timber companies paid $1.25 an acre in property taxes. Alabama was forty-eighth in total state and local taxes, and the largest proportion of that income came from sales tax—a super-regressive tax that in some counties reached into double digits. So Riley proposed a tax hike, partly to dig the state out of a fiscal crisis and partly to put more money into the state's school system, routinely ranked near the worst in the nation. He argued that it was Christian duty to look after the poor more carefully. Had the new law passed, the owner of a $250,000 home in Montgomery would have paid $1,432 in property taxes—we're not talking Sweden here. But it didn't pass. It was crushed by a factor of two to one. Sixty-eight percent of the state voted against it—meaning, of course, something like 68 percent of the Christians who voted. The opposition was led, in fact, not just by the state's wealthiest interests but also by the Christian Coalition of Alabama. “You'll find most Alabamians have got a charitable heart,” said John Giles, the group's president. “They just don't want it coming out of their pockets.” On its website, the group argued that taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor “results in punishing success” and that “when an individual works for their income, that money belongs to the individual.” You might as well just cite chapter and verse from Poor Richard's Almanack. And whatever the ideology, the results are clear. “I'm tired of Alabama being first in things that are bad,” said Governor Riley, “and last in things that are good.” A rich man came to Jesus one day and asked what he should do to get into heaven. Jesus did not say he should invest, spend, and let the benefits trickle down; he said sell what you have, give the money to the poor, and follow me. Few plainer words have been spoken. And yet, for some reason, the Christian Coalition of America—founded in 1989 in order to “preserve, protect and defend the Judeo-Christian values that made this the greatest country in history”—proclaimed last year that its top legislative priority would be “making permanent President Bush's 2001 federal tax cuts.” Similarly, a furor erupted last spring when it emerged that a Colorado jury had consulted the Bible before sentencing a killer to death. Experts debated whether the (Christian) jurors should have used an outside authority in their deliberations, and of course the Christian right saw it as one more sign of a secular society devaluing religion. But a more interesting question would have been why the jurors fixated on Leviticus 24, with its call for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. They had somehow missed Jesus' explicit refutation in the New Testament: “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. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” And on and on. The power of the Christian right rests largely in the fact that they boldly claim religious authority, and by their very boldness convince the rest of us that they must know what they're talking about. They're like the guy who gives you directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track. But their theology is appealing for another reason too: it coincides with what we want to believe. How nice it would be if Jesus had declared that our income was ours to keep, instead of insisting that we had to share. How satisfying it would be if we were supposed to hate our enemies. Religious conservatives will always have a comparatively easy sell. But straight is the path and narrow is the way. The gospel is too radical for any culture larger than the Amish to ever come close to realizing; in demanding a departure from selfishness it conflicts with all our current desires. Even the first time around, judging by the reaction, the Gospels were pretty unwelcome news to an awful lot of people. There is not going to be a modern-day return to the church of the early believers, holding all things in common—that's not what I'm talking about. Taking seriously the actual message of Jesus, though, should serve at least to moderate the greed and violence that mark this culture. It's hard to imagine a con much more audacious than making Christ the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or war in Iraq. If some modest part of the 85 percent of us who are Christians woke up to that fact, then the world might change. It is possible, I think. Yes, the mainline Protestant churches that supported civil rights and opposed the war in Vietnam are mostly locked in a dreary decline as their congregations dwindle and their elders argue endlessly about gay clergy and same-sex unions. And the Catholic Church, for most of its American history a sturdy exponent of a “love your neighbor” theology, has been weakened, too, its hierarchy increasingly motivated by a single-issue focus on abortion. Plenty of vital congregations are doing great good works—they're the ones that have nurtured me—but they aren't where the challenge will arise; they've grown shy about talking about Jesus, more comfortable with the language of sociology and politics. More and more it's Bible-quoting Christians, like Wallis's Sojourners movement and that Baptist seminary graduate Bill Moyers, who are carrying the fight.
You are fortunate. I just wish the good ones would have preached against it before it even started. If someone like me could guess the outcome, surely they could have too. Too late now.
Click for Privacy and Preparedness files National Defense and the Bible Martin G. Selbrede November 20, 2008 • Rev. 2 Is war Biblical? We can find hope in Isaiah’s prophecy that as the knowledge of the Lord continues to flow over the earth, the nations will flow into His kingdom desiring to be instructed out of God's Law how to walk in His paths (Isa. 2:2-4). As a result, “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore,” securing “an abundance of peace that shall endure until the moon be no more” (Psalm 72:7). Although war will continue to be a part of life under the curse on our fallen planet until the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, we are not left without guidance in this area, as God has much to say about it throughout Scripture. “Just War” theory: There is a popular tradition, developed from Augustine through Thomas Aquinas to the present, that attempts to set forth the parameters for a just war. Some of this reasoning holds biblical water, and some of it does not. This paper affirms the biblical parameters solely and owes nothing to the traditional construction, except where it intersects the Scriptures. Augustine was steeped in Aristotle and humanistic ethics and didn’t entirely shake their influence, but we should be able to do better. Self defense: Although some Christians decry all war, even defensive war within our nation’s boundaries after those boundaries have been violated, the failure of the civil magistrate (or in modern terms, the civil government) to defend its citizens from invading attackers is a transgression of God’s eternal law. We are commanded, “Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor” (Lev. 19:16). Psalm 50 further expands on the idea of “standing idly by,” indicating that it constitutes actual consent to the evil being perpetrated. And to consent to murder is regarded by God as being a party to that murder, based on (1) Psalm 50:18’s elaboration of Lev. 19:16; (2) Saul of Tarsus’s consent to Stephen’s stoning at Acts 8:1 and his later application of this law to himself at Acts 22:20 when he confessed that “when the blood of thy martyr Stephen was shed, I also was standing by, and consenting unto his death” (to stand by Stephen’s blood was to consent to his death); (3) Christ’s charge to the scribes that, “you consent to the deeds of your fathers, for they killed the prophets and you build their tombs” (Luke 11:48 ESV), which is the ground upon which He added, “the blood of all the prophets shed from the foundation of the world will be charged against you” (Luke 11:50 ESV), proving that consent to murder is to be party to murder, for which reason Christ imposed the penalty for murder on the consenters in this passage. It further follows that to fail to defend oneself is to consent to and be a party to one’s own suicide, for (1) we are not to stand idly by the blood of our neighbor, and (2) we are to love our neighbors as ourselves; therefore, (3) we are not to stand idly by our own blood. The only exception is when we lay our lives down to save another (evidencing the greatest love possible in so doing). War according to God’s Law The Bible provides the moral parameters for self-defense at the national level. The civil magistrate & internal justice: Rom. 13:4 speaks of the sword wielded by the civil magistrate that is to be a terror to evildoers. The context and wording limit precisely where that sword can act: inside the borders of the nation. The sword does not have international scope, because the sword of the other nation was just as fully appointed to execute justice on its own citizens (the precise teaching of this verse). The word for sword in Greek is machaira, the Roman short sword used for execution of Roman citizens inside the empire’s borders. Paul himself was killed by one. This sword is the biblical symbol for internal justice. Foreign conflict: Rom. 13:4, Gen. 14:14-16, and Esther 9:2ff have been appealed to as justifying other than defensive war. Rom. 13:4 was examined above. In Gen. 14 Abram launches a private rescue of a kidnap victim (his nephew Lot) and restores stolen property, while in Esther 9 the certainty of the coming attack is backed by the king’s irrevocable order and is thus entirely actual, not merely hypothetical. The truth is that the Bible forbids a nation from having the apparatus necessary to launch a foreign war. Deut. 17:6 forbids the king from “multiplying horses to himself,” which in that culture banned the capability of conducting foreign war because a cavalry was needed to invade foreign lands, whereas an infantry (Ex. 17:9-10, Num. 1:2-3) was more than adequate to defend the homeland from outside attacks. On the principle that “the things that happened to them [Israel] are examples written down as warnings for us” (I Cor. 10:11), we must remember that all of Israel’s military campaigns that she initiated independent of God failed and that all of Israel’s legitimate wars were either defensive or involved the unique one-time disinheritance of Canaan (where God destroyed societies that had become exceedingly wicked after having rejected Him completely over many generations; God warned Israel: “Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you: … and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants,” Lev. 18:24- 25). The greatest and most righteous king in Israel’s entire history, Josiah, was killed when he mounted a preemptive war against Neco II, Pharaoh of Egypt. In terms of domestic policy, Josiah did everything required in God’s Law, putting in place the most amazing religious reformation Israel ever experienced. His undoing came when he indulged the presumption that military aggression against Egypt for the purpose of aiding Carchemish was a legitimate action. The tragic tale unwinds at 2 Chron. 35:20-25, where we learn that all the good Josiah had accomplished within Israel (2 Chron. 34:1-35:19) was undone by his initiation of this biblically unjustifiable war. He died, and his nation went into exile shortly thereafter, ironically at the hand of a nation other than the one Josiah had wrongly feared as being a threat to Israel. Limitations on how war is waged: God’s Law articulates detailed instructions for waging defensive war that forbid total war and wanton destruction. Deut. 20:19-20 specifies that even fruit trees and nesting birds must be protected in a military campaign. General Sherman’s campaigns against civilians and property during the Civil War were a deliberate breaking of these laws. In the mid-20th century, America set the minimum age for soldiers at 18 years, violating God’s command in Num. 1:3 that the minimum age to wage war is 20 years old. In these cases and others, American actions set ungodly precedents that she and other disobedient nations now continue routinely to follow. Conduct of soldiers: We read at Deut. 23:9 that when soldiers are called to action, they are “to keep from every wicked thing,” to be extra punctilious to avoid evil actions, for the military camp is holy (v. 14). John the Baptist used this law to instruct soldiers in personal righteousness (Luke 3:14). Modern War Policy Modern states engage in power politics, power balancing, socalled “Realpolitik," to secure manipulative goals that are biblically illegitimate. A prime example of the Bible's repudiation of such policies is provided at 2 Kings 13:14-19, wherein Elisha gave Joash the God-guaranteed opportunity to fully defeat invading Syria in five or six military campaigns (symbolized by Joash driving five or six arrows into the ground, each arrow symbolizing a military victory). Joash deliberately drove only three arrows into the ground, choosing not to defeat Syria but to keep it intact as a buffer state against Assyria, on the other side of Syria. Joash was playing modern power politics, and Elisha condemned his manipulation in the harshest terms possible (in fact, Elisha was furious with him, vs. 19). In other words, fear of Assyria motivated Joash's refusal to fear God and do what was right, motivated him to act in terms of international politics and power balances rather than to trust and obey God in the interest of his own people. His fear of Assyria revealed his disbelief that God alone is sovereign, and was unfounded in light of God's commandment that all nations, as nations, are to become Christ's disciples (Psalm 22:27, Isa. 45:22-23, Matt. 28:18-20). In Isa. 19:23-25, the prophet foretells the future conversion of Israel's two bitter enemies, Egypt and Assyria, putting them on an equal footing with Israel as followers of God; Paul elaborates on this in Rom 11:25-26. National armed forces: Lev. 26:6 informs us that when a nation keeps God’s law, “the sword shall not go through your land.” The citizens’ militia referred to in the Second Amendment was based on biblical precedents followed by ancient Israel when her kings were not apostate (e.g., 1 Sam. 11:8). America today needs the large number of armed forces we have because we have forsaken God, exchanging divine sovereignty for state sovereignty (Jer. 2:11) and self-reliance for reliance on the state (a vastly more costly and less effective course). And to this, Scripture attaches a curse: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man, who makes flesh his arm” (Jer. 17:5). The verse concludes by calling such an attitude “turning our heart away from the Lord.” It takes strength of character to keep one’s heart stayed on God, as the scribe Ezra testified when he led a perilous expedition to Jerusalem: “I was ashamed to ask the king for soldiers and horsemen to protect us from enemies on the road, because we had told the king, ‘The gracious hand of our God is on everyone who looks to him, but his great anger is against all who forsake him.’” (Ezra 8:22). God protects the nation that leans on Him (Isa. 4:5: “upon all the glory shall be a defence”) while calling upon the civil magistrate to exercise its rightful jurisdiction inside the nation’s borders. “Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain” (Ps. 127:1), for “horses and chariots” aren’t sufficient protection (Psalm 20:7). Global war on terror: Biblical law offers nations a basis for establishing extradition treaties for the pursuit of justice and prosecution of criminals crossing international borders. Extradition treaties exist primarily because nations recognize one another’s spheres as inviolable, and because their signatories share a common notion of justice sufficient to undergird such treaties. America’s pursuit of terrorists across international borders undercuts the basis for establishing biblical extradition treaties in the future. Christians are commanded not to fear anyone or anything but God and by so doing are set free (Heb. 2:15) to think and act toward furthering Christ’s kingdom. When we wage war based on fear of terror, which is an abstraction and not an actual enemy, we disobey God’s Law, risk interfering with Christ’s redemptive work on Earth, and remove our nation from His protection and covering. The way to peace: Most modern nations transgress God’s Law by both maintaining the forbidden means of making war for purposes other than national self defense, and by seeking their own ends. This will never bring about peace. The only way to end international warfare is by spreading God's Law into all lands and making disciples of all nations through proclaiming the gospel (Isa. 2:2-4, Matt. 28:18-20). Zech. 9:9-10 tells us that the Messiah “shall speak peace to the nations.” Since all power on heaven and earth is given unto Jesus Christ (Matt. 28:18), the strongest defense for any nation is to obey Him. “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord” (Zech. 4:6). Psalm 127, which is actually about national defense, teaches that godly homes and children (likened to arrows) are a nation’s best defense, so that “the sword shall not go through your land” (Lev. 26:6). Psalm 2 puts it very clearly: “Therefore, you kings, be wise; be warned, you rulers of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest He be angry and you be destroyed in your way, for His wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in Him.” No wise and God-fearing nation would knowingly desire to stand in opposition to the Messiah’s omnipotent work by engaging in international conflicts and wars. Any nation that recognizes its true King, and obeys its true King, will liberate itself from the enslaving doctrines of international power politics and international wars. One day, “the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever” (Rev. 11:15). Godliness and national obedience are by far the strongest defense for any country.
I just read today from the paragonfoundation.org that it took Thomas Jefferson seventeen days to get our Declaration of Independence as he wanted it to be. The eight points, that he thought most important, were our un-a-lien-able rights; which were God-given to all his children here on earth...not just to we 'Americans,' but to everyone on this planet. We have so lost sight of this truth.
They don't. As a Christian I do not support any war of aggression. A defensive war is ok but to attack people who have not harmed you is wrong. No one can justify attacking people who have not harmed them. And no true Christian does.
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. You can't square the Gospels with the things we are doing. No, no, no.
Join 2x4 Tuesdays & protect your RKBA. Is an oxymoron that gets to the 'heart' of the seeming paradox. Christendom has, by and large, crawled into bed with the Adversary. Yes, this was foretold in the prophecies. As was the 'source' of this seduction by deception. The same source that 'molded' Saul into the bounty-hunter that he was. Eventually, Saul 'saw the light' rather literally. So will we all, eventually... The Anti-Christ today is the same as it was back then.
Makes a person wonder. Yes it most certainly does.
"Satan / Cheney in "08" No argument there. It's Satan's world, until it's not.
#2. To: PSUSA (#1)
#3. To: tom007 (#2)
#4. To: PSUSA (#3)
Do that, and expect to be kicked out
#5. To: Ada (#0)
#6. To: bush_is_a_moonie (#4)
Fortunately, our pastor is not a fake or fraud like Dobson, Robertson and many of the others and, as a result, his sermons lately have been about what is happening and what Scripture says about it.
#7. To: All (#5)
#8. To: Ada. all (#0)
When the laws or actions of one’s government’s contradict the laws of God, the Christian has but one proper course of action — to leave behind the laws of man and to follow the laws of God.
#9. To: Ada (#0)
How could American Christians support the killing of Iraqis in such a war of aggression? How could they reconcile this with God’s sacred commandment, Thou shalt not murder.
Lord Acton
#10. To: lodwick (#8)
www.righttokeepandbeararms.com
#11. To: lodwick and All who precede... (#8)
Judeo-Christian values.
#12. To: bush_is_a_moonie (#4)
Some still believe that the WMD were moved to Syria or Russia, that Iraq was a threat and getting ready to attack Israel and the U.S., that we have almost completely rebuilt Iraq and Afghanistan and the people are happier and better off than before the U.S. began these immoral wars.
#13. To: SCPO Blackshoe Retired (#11)
The Anti-Christ today is the same as it was back then.
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