War(s) on Terror

College football and the NFL are in full swing, and America is wrapped up in all sorts of war and rumors of war. We hear the name Syria, but it is only the current name among others. There were others before, and unfortunately there will be others after. This is not a statement of cynicism; rather, it is a descriptive statement about America's identity being shaped by the politics of war.

Stanley Hauerwas has often made the rather absurd and presumptuous claim that the church is an alternative to war (e.g. War and the American Difference). But what does being an alternative to war have to do with us Christians other than being kind of sad because some people die in war? If Christianity’s essence pertains to having hope and Jesus in our hearts, then the church hardly has anything to do with war and being alternative to war.

But what if the church entails more than being a collection of persons who just so happen to have similar inward commitment to and experiences of the person named Jesus? What if the church is more than being a morass of individuals seeking introspective enlightenment?

In Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenged the supposition that religion and particularly Christianity pertained only to individual inwardness. He refused to be satisfied with Christianity being relegated to such a small and rather superfluous realm of human experience. Rather, he asserted that God is at the center of life, and Christianity has at its core utmost appreciation for bodily existence.

Of course, I rather like Hauerwas and Bonhoeffer. I tend to read them quite a bit. However, it is not simply that I have acquiesced to their ideologies. Their theologies have captivated my imagination only because I was first captivated by the Jesus I encountered in the Gospel of Matthew. The Jesus I encountered there is not meek and mild. Rather, he is tenacious, unrelenting, hurtling directly into precarious territory not with a spear but with forgiveness even, and especially, for perceived enemies. And he called people, particularly the people of “Israel”, to join him, to be such a people of peacemakers in a violent world, in a land occupied by foreign powers, in a region riddled with conflict. In such a landscape, Jesus calls us to do the daring, costly, and shockingly bold thing of being peacemakers.

A few weeks ago, I got caught up in a conversation about violence and praying for our enemies, and my conversation partner said in passing, “But maybe it was easier back then.” She was, of course, referring to the social-historical context of Jesus’ first century listeners. I must say that it most assuredly could not have been easier for people back then, especially the people to whom Jesus was speaking. He was not speaking peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation to theologians in their armchairs. He was speaking to people living in a war-ridden world with rebellion and execution frequently on the airwaves.    

The world we hear reported on the news today is also constantly ruptured by violence and tragedy, and similarly in the late 1930’s Bonhoeffer knew all too well the cost of forgiveness and the dire need for it. When he was thirty-two years old, he gave a sermon in the little village of Gross-Schlönwitz. His sermon was entitled “Loving Our Enemies,” and in it he said,

“This is what Christ did for us. He did not become confused by our evil; he did not let himself be overcome by it. He overcame our evil with good. Let’s repeat how this happens: not by feeding the other person’s evil with our evil, the hatred of the other person with our hatred. Rather, it happens when the evil hits emptiness and finds nothing on which it can ignite. How do we overcome evil? By forgiving without end. How does that happen? By seeing the enemy as he or she truly is, the one for whom Christ died, the one whom Christ loved. How will the church-community win victory over its enemies? By letting the love of Christ win victory over our enemies.”

Until we learn that war does not vanquish evil but leads to sin and death, we will be forever caught up in the false story that war is necessary for peace. War, however, is not the road to peace. Forgiveness is, and peace is a road of righteousness. But in a world of war, righteousness is a road that may very well lead to death; however, there are some things worth dying for. Moreover, until the church learns that its life involves more than individualistic inwardness, it will continue to stand by quietly and do nothing; or even worse, it will misuse its voice by condoning war as it has often done.

To say that the church is an alternative to war may sound a bit idealistic. Peace rather than war is nice; it’s desired, but it sounds hardly more than cute. “War is the real world.” However, what if it were the case that war was easier to wage than forgiveness but that the future made by forgiveness and reconciliation was the only future worth hoping and working for?