Churches' Center Forum
Held February 27, 2003
Introduction
This country, is on the verge of war with Iraq. We believe that Christians, and their churches, need to be engaged in the great national debate that is raging on this issue. What do we have to offer? There is an old Chinese proverb that nine-tenths of what we see is behind our eyes. The perspective we bring to bear upon the facts is crucial to the way we deal with them. Above all, a Christian perspective should help us understand better what is ultimately at stake. My part in introducing this will be to discuss the problem of preaching on the issues and the theological perspectives we can bring to bear. Dr. Casey will explore the ramifications of Christian "just war" doctrine.
How to Preach on the Present Crisis
In a sense, theology should come first. But I choose to begin with the question of how to preach on the war crisis because theology itself can best be introduced in that way. Every time we step into the pulpit we are called to express our faith and, as best we can, to be spokespersons for God.
Not everybody believes that preachers should address the issues of the day! Once, after preaching a sermon on peace, I received the following letter. Taking note that the President of the United States had been in the congregation, the letter-writer said:
"Regarding the sermon last Sunday: I for one felt that there were several "Presidential policy options" embedded in the latter part of your remarks, and I think it is preferable to avoid such specific recommendations when you have "the most prominent parishioner" caught in the congregation. The earlier part of the sermon, when dealing with the exegesis of Isaiah and the theology of Barth, was interesting and sufficiently remote from the current choices facing the country."
But of course the logic of that would be that one should not deal with choices currently affecting anybody in the congregation! As a matter of fact, international policy is a responsibility shared by all citizens. The late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is supposed to have remarked that in a democracy "citizenship is the highest office." Preachers thus address the nation's highest office-holders every Sunday. We may not have the last or wisest word to share–and we should always be clear about that. But to ignore the issue is to convey that this issue has nothing to do with our faith or with God's will for humankind.
If the heart of Christian faith is God's love, expressed through creation and grace, then our preaching has to express that. And that means, whatever we say, we say it with grace! If people sense that we love them, they will usually respond even if they disagree. If our tone is adversarial, people will usually resist no matter how compelling our facts and logic may be.
On seriously controversial issues, it is a good idea to structure times when people can talk it through together.
We should of course be honest about our limitations. Sometimes a sermon can help by focusing upon the questions we should all be asking, even if we don't presently feel we have the answers. Sometimes we can deal directly with the part of an issue about which we feel secure, while noting our uncertainties about the rest.
Theological Perspective
Our central task, in any case, is to struggle with the theological perspective.
Surely it matters that we believe in God, the source, the creator of all that is, and that before the awesome majesty of God a measure of humility is in order. Surely it matters that God's love has been expressed through creation and grace. Tragically it matters that God's purposes are so routinely frustrated by human sin, and that nobody on earth is so free of sin as to be able to render absolute judgments about others. Thus, a Manichaean division of humankind between those who are "evil" and those who are "good" is presumptuous. Still, it also matters that the evils resulting from human sin really destroy, and God's intended vineyard of lovingkindness is supplanted by "wild grapes" in the metaphor of Isaiah 5.
Christians must, of all people, be very clear that war is evil. It does perfectly awful things!
The callous disregard for life, whether destroyed through individual slaughter or wholesale through the detached application of weapons of mass destruction;
The pain and suffering of the injured, the foreshortening of human potentialities that, apart from war, might flower in the creative works of civilized community;
The sorrow of families torn apart, of mothers and fathers deprived of their children, of children turned homeless and fatherless and motherless;
The earth strewn with hidden landmines, promising continued death and injury long after a particular combat has been resolved;
The seeds of bitterness, yielding hatred from generation to generation, borne by memories of evils suffered, forgetful of evils inflicted, ever the basis of yet new conflicts to be engaged by generations unborn;
The destruction of God-given resources, inflicting wounds upon the nurturing environment of humankind and the rest of God's creatures;
The self-righteousness of those caught up in the conflicting absolutes of war, wrong alike in the depiction of one's own goodness and the perceived evil of the enemy;
Above all, the grief of God, who has created humankind for better than this, whose vineyard, in the words of Isaiah, was intended for grapes but instead has yielded wild grapes.
If we Christians are serious about the love of God, we must be very serious about the evils of war! The theologian Karl Barth went so far as to say that
"All affirmative answers to the question [of war] are wrong if they do not start with the assumption that the inflexible negative of pacifism has almost infinite arguments in its favour and is almost overpoweringly strong." (CD 3/4, 455)
[and]
"even if the message of the Church cannot be the simple one of pacifism, it should surely have been a light in the dark world, at least to the extent of arousing and keeping alert a sense of the enormity of war at any rate amongst its own members and even beyond, and thus of constituting and interposing a strong restraining factor in this matter.... The primary and supreme task of Christian ethics in this matter is surely to recover and manifest a distinctive horror of war and aloofness from it."
Barth was not a pacifist. But, he was telling us that the presumption of a Christian should be against war. We should not want there to be reasons for war! In the present situation, we should not want the French and Germans to be wrong about what the UN inspection process can and should do! If there are serious reasons for fighting a war, those who are not pacifists will be open to considering and acting on them. But none of us should want there to be such reasons.
But how are we to think about such things? There is a very long tradition of Christian thought bearing precisely on that question. And we turn to our resident authority on Just War doctrine to explain that.
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