Tag Archives: war

Electing Faithfulness: Part 1: Considering Third Roads

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Considering Third Roads
or
What’s Wrong with These Guys?
or
Egyptians or Amorites?  Who’s it Gonna Be?

You heard a debate the other day.  It was between two guys likely to take the role of single individual holding the most official power in America.  Seems like a big deal.  It is, in a way, but when you look at the big picture, it ends up not being much of one at all.  Still, a pretty big deal.

So many of you will likely think of picking choice A or B.  I see why.  I mean, this is how the game seems to work, right?  People give you two choices and you pick one of them.  And to be fair, in all likelihood, it will be one of these two fellas.  That’s how the system tends to work.  I will tell you now that I don’t intend on voting for either of these guys.

One way in which it has been explained is this:

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_Not Worth Fighting For_ Review: Part 10

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The last chapter dealt with what it meant for “every soul to be subject to governing authorities“.

Chapter 10 Samuel Wells deals with a puzzling statement made by Jesus.  Now we ask, “Didn’t Jesus say he came not to bring peace, but a sword?”

Matt. 10:34-39 is the central text in this chapter.  Jesus did in fact say these words: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

The irony Wells points out is that nearly every Christian will tell you Jesus didn’t “come to bring the sword”, and yet so many Christians act as if he did, whereas he said he did “come to bring the sword”, and yet his life and the lives of his followers after his ascension show the opposite.  So something’s strange here, right?

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_Not Worth Fighting For_ Review: Part 9

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Chapter 8 addressed the violence in the Old Testament and how we reconcile that with Christian nonviolence.

Chapter 9 deals with a single passage that gets abused quite a bit: “Let Every Soul be Subject”.  Lee Camp tackles what this passage means in context, instead of in the absurd isolation in which it is often quoted, violently ripped from God’s word in order to serve agendas of violence.

If you read the entire passage of Romans 13, you realize that this one phrase was never meant to be a military mantra.  We are to “present [our] bodies as living sacrifices” before God, and commanded not to “conform to the age” (often translated “the world”).  Since we are a new creation, we live according to a new age.  So whatever authorities we are under, they’re not ours.
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_Not Worth Fighting For_ Review: Part 8

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In the last chapter Greg Boyd argued that God expects all Christians to “turn the other cheek,” but he may not necessarily hold nations to a standard only held within a covenant with him.

Chapter 8 begins the other side of the book.  Before, we looked at “practical” questions that apply scripture to situations.  The second half deals more with interpreting and understanding what scripture says on the matter, beginning with Ingrid Lilly’s question “What About War and Violence in the Old Testament?”

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_Not Worth Fighting For_ Review: Part 7

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I remember one time we were with some friends watching How to Train Your Dragon with some friends who had children.  I said, “I wonder if there’s some critics who say this film is bad because it’s telling us to love terrorists or something.”  The guy said, “yeah, can you believe people actually believe that?”  I think he meant the loving terrorists thing.  Of course the whole point was that the dragons weren’t the real enemy, but the monster they were serving.  So is there a kind of person we are not called to love?

While the previous chapter focused on soldiery, in chapter 7 Greg Boyd asks, “Does God Expect Nations to Turn the Other Cheek?”  We actually may be surprised by his answer.  I had previously read Boyd’s book The Myth of a Christian Nation, a terrific read that asks us to reconsider the naive notion that America is “Christian” in any tangible sense, by looking at scripture.

He reminds us that Jesus’ instructions are unconditional, and that God has even the worst, most violent of our enemies in mind, not just meanies down the block, in Matt.5:38-48; Luke6:27-36; Rom.12:14-21; 1 Peter 3:9,14-18.  Imagine, he says, that Al Qaeda ruled America, and you will know the animosity the Jews felt toward Rome.  But since what Jesus did for isn’t just what he did, but reflects what he wants us to do (be willing to die innocently loving our enemies and not harming them), Christians don’t have the right to choose who they will and won’t love, will and won’t show loving action toward.
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_Not Worth Fighting For_ Review: Part 6

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“They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.” -Revelation 12:11

“So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” -John 8:36

Happy International Peace Day, everyone.  A day we should all celebrate.  In part 5 of the review we looked at the difficult question of how to be or work with policing in a peace community.

Chapter 6 is a message easier for me to accept up front, and is a conclusion I have already drawn.  Justin Bronson Barringer asks, “What About Those Men and Women Who Gave Up their Lives so You and I Could Be Free?”  A question which he feels “seems an attempt to shame the one to whom it is directed as one who dishonors soldiers.”  As if to say that the people who don’t love soldiers are the ones who want them to come home, not the ones who want to send them out to shoot and get shot on the sender’s behalf.

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_Not Worth Fighting For_ Review: Part 3

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Chapter 2 discussed the hope of the resurrection and the life of Jesus as the core of Christian nonviolence.  We dealt with the question of helping a neighbor who is being attacked and how a Christian committed to nonviolence may handle such a situation and why.

Chapter 3 leaps right into a very very difficult question: “What would you do if someone were attacking a loved one?”

I have a wife and a child.  I love them and want to protect them from evil.  Because of this, many things in this world are unsettling to me even more than they would be were I single and childless.  Whatever I believe and do, I must live like Christ.
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_Not Worth Fighting For_ Review: Part 2

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“Pacifism is not a monolithic stance or approach to war, violence, or politics.  There are varieties of it.”

The first chapter of the book distinguished between pacifism and passivity.

In chapter 2 D. Stephen Long deals with the difficult question “What About Protecting Third Party Innocents?  Can we just let our neighbors die?”

Long doesn’t pretend all this is easy.  He’s a reluctant pacifist who came from a military family.  He doesn’t let us choose pacifism for some bogus reason.  He rejects that liberal pacifism where we just say we hate war but perpetuate the conditions that make war “necessary”.  He rejects the notion that war is bad because all soldiers are bloodthirsty savages.  Many soldiers are and have been decent, loving, exceptional, faithful people who seem to be incapable of harboring hate, and what we call good soldiering requires “self sacrifice, disciplined community, and moral attentiveness.”  He rejects the notion that pacifists are better because they don’t like war and everyone else does.  Practically nobody loves war (except immature American boys who play Call of Duty all day and think war would be fun).  Even the most battle-hardened want to avoid it, with few exceptions.  So we can’t reject violence for cheap reasons.
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Announcing: A by-chapter review of _A Faith Not Worth Fighting For_

Posted by Caleb Coy on

I will take away the chariots from Ephraim
and the warhorses from Jerusalem,
and the battle bow will be broken.
He will command peace to the nations.

-Zecheriah 9:9-10

I’ve been looking forward to reading a certain book for a while, now that I’ve had some friends recommend it to me.  The book is called A Faith Not Worth Fighting For, a collection of essays about Christian nonviolence.  It is a book that I already know will challenge me, will set the voice of scripture up against some things people sometimes tell me who also read that scripture a lot.

I’d like to thank Carl Jenkins for really getting me interested in the reading, and for giving me bits and pieces of his reading along the way.  He did a book review.  I’m doing a full chapter-by-chapter throughout the next month or so.

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