ie:missional

The subject of war has always been interesting to me. My Dad served as a United States Marine, stationed in Okinawa, Japan, between the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. Though he never saw combat, he’s always considered a Marine to be a cut above the Army, Navy and Air Force and will probably insist that Semper Fi be carved into the lid of his casket.

I grew up in the cold war, believing that the Carter administration had left us vulnerable to a potential Soviet attack and being thankful for the arms buildup under Reagan. I remember watching on TV, January 20, 1981, as a senior in high school as the Iran hostages were released just 20 minutes after Reagan’s inauguration, ostensibly as a result of the incoming president’s promise to secure the hostages’ release from Tehran, via the United States military. The biblical doctrine of Just War is one that I still hold believing it to be a valid interpretation.

The struggle that I have had since September 11, 2001, is that although the scripture allows for just war, all wars are fought by humans many of whom are not just and those who’d like to be are not necessarily equipped to lead nations or armies. What should be the position of a Christian who’s country has the biblical basis for either attacking or defending yet the leaders are either not believers or are incompetent? How do we know that when Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” he was not referring to political enemies? Believers in Jesus really should be careful when we cede to political entities and political leaders the right to determine who our enemies are or should be. Did Jesus not shed His blood for Afghan warlords as well as American school kids? One of the more thought provoking lines I’ve heard lately was this: When Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” He probably meant don’t kill them. I’ve always thought, based on Ephesians 6, that those who “despised, persecuted and hated” me were not the enemy, but victims of the Enemy.

Recently, I ran across full video of Academy Award winning director Errol Morris’ excellent documentary, The Fog of War. The entire 107 minute movie is based on the actions of Robert McNamara in his role as Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, including events from his life leading up to that time. It is worth watching even if you have to break it up into several sections.

In a very thought provoking sequence, McNamara ponders the fire bombing of Tokyo in which 100,000 civilians died in a single night (March 9-10, 1945). He insists that General Curtis LeMay’s thinking along with his own planning led to the fire bombing. Approximately 67 Japanese cities were bombed in the same way, many of them more than 50% destroyed along with substantial loss of life. The facts of the raid, though, are not what caught my ear. It was McNamara’s admission that had the U.S. lost the war, that he and LeMay would likely have been prosecuted as war criminals. Quoting McNamara, “He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.”

Then has asks the unanswered question, “What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

Indeed.

I thought that, as believers, we were being held to a higher standard, a standard, in fact, that reflects the ethics of the Kingdom of God. I’m not saying that I have answers about Just War or war in general, but I do have many more questions that I once did.

The late minister and poet Thomas John Carlisle penned a series of poems based on the prophet Jonah, whose story is recorded in the biblical book of the same name. Writing from Jonah’s actions, attitudes and perceptions, this short volume of poems is as insightful as its poems are brief. The book, You! Jonah!, included poems that Carlisle had published in various newspapers and magazines both sacred and secular, as well as previously unpublished poems on the same subject matter. The book was first published in 1968, but has been out of print for 35 years.

Here are four of my favorites:

Coming and Going
The word came
and he went
in the other
direction.

God said: Cry
tears of compassion
tears of repentance;
cry against
the reek
of unrighteousness;
cry for
the right turn
the contrite spirit.

And Jonah rose
and fled
in tearless
silence.

Reprimand to a Naive Deity
I will not advertise
this crazy scheme
of Yours.

God, what a farce
that men should sin and find
escape.

I mean, of course,
not me
but all our mutual

antagonists.
Dear God, kind God, don’t listen
to their prayers.

Sunk
A man overboard
gasping and drowning,
does he actually look
at his own disappearing
identity?

Jonah could see
only an admirable
ambassador of God
sunk by his own
superior
opinions.

Personnel Problem
Jonah cherished chips
on both his shoulders.
He was in the wrong
business. On the accounts
he clamored to handle
he was calculating
to liquidate
the customers.
However, his Employer
computed profits
on another basis
and kept the dynamite
too readily
defusable.

While specific to the SBC, this article hits many of the same issues that I posted previously. When you hear over and over that the issue is getting “back to the basics”–the same basics that most churches never left–you know that any denomination’s leadership is as clueless as they can be about the reality surrounding their own decline.

The issue is that “the basics” are no longer a part of the culture, thus getting “back to the basics” doesn’t affect the culture. Sadly, it gives us a sense of false hope as if merely doing things by rote is the answer. “Pray more.” What about responding to and living out the answers to prayer that God is already giving? “Pray more.” What if God has given the answer, but we’ve so assured ourselves of what the answer should be that we don’t recognize the voice of God when He speaks? “Pray more.” What happens when the answers to those prayers are then equated with “worldliness” or “cultural accommodation”?

“Witness more.” Really? What if it takes years to prepare the soil so that the seed of the gospel can even be watered, much less take root? Have we forgotten that seed thrown on hard soil can actually be washed away by water, not to mention plucked up by the Devil? All those smashmouth evangelism efforts may have accomplished absolutely nothing in the way of preparing human hearts. “Witness more.” What if damage control from a thousand hypocritical Christians has to be put into place before the unbeliever will even give us a hearing? “Witness more.” What if they have never understood one word of our gospel spiel since we are, for all intents and purposes, not speaking a language they understand?

“Don’t be like the culture.” I’ve got news for you we are already like the culture. Our presence is part of what makes the culture. What we do not need to be like is the world: living by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. Playing an Eagles song in a worship service is no more worldly than going to an opera the night before. “Don’t be like the culture.” And how, exactly does one suppose to get the gospel into it? Open the windows of the temple and throw the seed toward the target? If we are not living in the culture, not only are we not living like sojourners and pilgrims, we are not living like Christ.

How about let’s get back to these basics: (1) Exegeting the culture so as to infiltrate it with the kingdom of God. (2) Befriending those who are victims of the Enemy rather than treating them like the enemy. (3) Using stones to create God-honoring landscapes, rather than throwing them at those who aren’t like us (that’s actually a metaphor). (4) Actually being salt and light in our cultures rather than thinking that we already are by virtue of being saved. (5) Leaving behind all the quasi-religious, expired denominational, hindering traditions that weigh us down so that we can run with endurance the race that is set before us.

End of rant.

Christian Post recently carried an article featuring Evangelist/Pastor John Hagee’s attempt to help solidify Israel’s control over a united Jerusalem with a financial gift of $6M to various Israeli national causes. Hagee, a well known Christian Zionist made the following comment at a speech:

Turning part or all of Jerusalem over to the Palestinians would be tantamount to turning it over to the Taliban.

Indeed.

He shared the stage with Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Israel’s hard-line opposition Likud Party and a former Prime Minister of the Middle Eastern nation. Christian Zionism according to Hagee is

the belief that every Jewish person has the right of return to Israel, and the right to live in peace and security within the recognized borders.

Apparently there is no concern that the Palestinians enjoy the same.

While I appreciate Hagee’s attempt to support any country’s infrastructure and education issues, I fear that this issue is much more complex than he, in his apparent attempt to hasten the return of Christ, is willing to admit. A few thoughts:

1. This issue of Palestinian homeland, almost always tied to Hamas and the Islamic Jihad predates either of them while giving place to the rise of one Yasser Arafat, . The realities surrounding this, stemming from the parceling of the land in 1948, are astounding. If I may digress…

Following World War 2, United Nations recognized that the fallout from the Holocaust could be addressed by the establishment of a “Jewish homeland.” Many Jews did not want to go back to a Europe that had either turned a blind eye to the genocide of their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters or, like America, turned a deaf ear to their cries. The establishment of this homeland had been talked of for years preceding. From Wikipedia:

Whilst the possibility of a Jewish homeland in Palestine had been a goal of Zionist organizations since the late 19th century, it was not until 1917 and the Balfour declaration that the idea gained the official backing of a major power. The declaration stated that the British government supported the creation of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. In 1936 the Peel Commission suggested partitioning Mandate Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, though it was rejected as unworkable by the government and was at least partially to blame for the 1936-39 Arab revolt.

It seems lost on modern Christian Zionists, bent on helping God fulfill the promises of the Abrahamic Covenant, that there are people in Palestine who are not Muslim, certainly not Hamas, but are of all things Christians! So supporting Israel’s actions of destroying West Bank settlements so that they may have all of Jerusalem can certainly have the effect of displacing our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ; and this occurring at the hands of those who know not Jesus. Even a casual perusal of a book such as Blood Brothers by Elias Chacour would reveal a much different beginning to the current State of Israel than many modern Christian Zionists are willing to admit or, possibly, even face. (This book was called, by a former UPI correspondent in Israel, “An accurate, moving account worthy of careful attention.”)

Imagine being in your home on the land that has belonged to your family for generations, cultivating olives, playing in the vineyards then hearing a rumor that Palestine has been parceled up to form a new homeland for Jewish people from all over the world. So? Maybe that means the opportunity for new friends. Then imagine that a few weeks later, heavily armed soldiers show up at your door demanding that your entire family leave and giving you a short time in which to do so. You would be paid nothing for your home, your land, your crops. Upon their return you would face the possibility of violence or even death if you did not comply. Imagine taking what belongings you could load up and heading out like a band of gypsies to camps in Jordan (whose government did not want you either). In the case of Chacour’s family, the military duped an entire village into leaving for their “own protection” and then occupied their homes forbidding them return.

Historian Christopher Sykes noted that

Zionism…found itself closely bound to imperialism…[It] depended for its foundation and early growth on the success of British imperialism.

2. The aggression and violence in the newly demarcated Israel was not carried only out by Palestinians dissidents, but by some of the future leaders of the tiny ancient/new nation: Menachem Begin (whose stated goal was to “purify” the land of the Palestinian people) and Moshe Dayan for example. Concern over this behavior was raised by Harry S. Truman even before May 1948. In an August letter of the previous year, he wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt

I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath.

About Dayan’s political philosophy it was written:

[Israel should] threaten the Arabs and constantly escalate the level of violence so as to demonstrate her superiority and create the conditions for territorial expansion.

This Zionist version of Manifest Destiny could have been phrased thusly: “God has given us the land and woe to any who stand in our way.” Almost incomprehensibly the very people who had faced genocide five years earlier now seemed poised to foist it upon the native inhabitants of Palestine. Chacour notes how unfairly the Palestinians, in the struggle to retain their own homes and lands, were characterized in the world’s press:

Palestinians, who in any other country being overtaken by a foreign force would have been called freedom fighters, were “terrorists” and “guerillas.” Hence, the widely used term, “Palestinian terrorist” was ingrained in the Western mind.

There can be little doubt that the same duplicity still exists today.

Also seemingly unknown to Hagee is just how unjust the original partitioning seems to have been. According to one source:

In 1947, the United Nations partitioned Historic Palestine, giving 55% to the Jewish population and 45% to the Palestinian population. The indigenous Palestinians rejected the division of the land on which they had lived and farmed for centuries. At the time of partition, the Jewish population owned less than 6% of Palestine.

(Check out this enlargeable map of the 1947 partition plan. It’s quite different to what is in the back of your Bible.)

3. The biblical fulfilling of the Abrahamic Covenant’s “land grant” is accurate, I believe, but is there any clear biblical teaching that it will be fulfilled in our lifetime? It seems that Christian Zionism is so linked to a “pre-mill, pre-trib” eschatology that it leaves no possibility that this current Jewish occupation of “the land” is not necessarily the permanent possession of it. I’ve never seen any scripture that precludes at least a potential situation in which the Jews could be again dispersed and regathered at some future point. (I don’t believe that to be the case, but I just can’t rule it out biblically.)

It’s also worth mulling over that one can do an interesting comparison to America’s history. The colonies declared independence from England. We were determined to have our own country. The response of England was to send the Army and Navy that they might set straight those who were rebelling against the crown. In response to this aggression, we fought the Revolutionary War. The heroes of that time are called “The Founding Fathers.” In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict comparison, we equate with the Palestinians, yet, as Chacour noted, we called their fight “terrorism.”

It is clear, to me anyway, that God worked in some pretty miraculous ways in Israel’s early modern days to allow her to remain in existence (the Six Day War, for example), but the fact remains that the modern Jewish state is a nation of people walking in spiritual darkness. Paul makes it clear that a veil remains over the eyes of those of Jesus’ physical kin who do not believe in Him (2 Corinthians 3), while the god of this world strives to keep them blinded so that the light of the gospel will not enlighten them (2 Corinthians 4). Simply because God has a future plan for Israel does not give them a free pass on each and every decision that their politicians make in this day and age. In fact, there are many times when I watch the news and wonder if their leaders have ever read the Old Testament prophets at all. Where is the justice and mercy that God sought throughout the days leading up to the deportation of both Israel and Judah? It seems that they have again become focused on the land of the promise rather than the God of the promise.

I’m concerned that John Hagee has done the same thing.

(HT: Kevin Bussey)

Additional quotes from How Israel Was Won, by Baylis Thomas and A History of the Middle East, by Peter Mansfield.

Like many pastors, I try to read a wide variety of books in a good variety of disciplines.   I enjoy the growth that the variety brings and the “cross pollination” of ideas.  It seems that it makes for better preaching…but that’s just me.

This month, though, I made a decision to only read the Bible.  I still read a little news each day, but it has been cut way back and at times I would normally reach for another book it is the Word instead.

By the end of this evening, I should finish Exodus.  It seems that all 66 books might be within reach in 29 days, but I’ll let you know.