Thanks for the invite....
Submitted by Forgiven on February 25 2002 13:24:51
In reply to Re: Humbug submitted by Bach on February 24 2002 18:45:55
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The fundamental error that a lot of Christians make is to assume that the New Testament changes everything; that after the death of Jesus the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who bought the Israelites out of Egypt, used them to exterminate the Canaanites and bought the Assyrians and Babylonians along to kick them out of the land has gone out of business. Two very specific examples help us see this: an angel striking down Herod for his blasphemy in Acts 12 v 20f, and the fact that the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem and the temple destroyed in AD 70, as prophesied by Jesus (Mk 13 etc) The clear teaching of the old testament is that the fate of nations is in God's hand (Is 14 v24f is an interesting example of this). Things don't 'just happen' - but God really is in control. To me, as a Brit, our survival against silly odds in WW2 is such a miracle; the number of things that we had to get right (Dunkirk and Bletchley Park being two clear examples) to survive is remarkable. Unfortunately as with Israel in the Old Testament our response soon afterwards was to assue we could do it all ourselves and therefore to turn our backs on God. Given such a high view of God's working through states, and given that the bible tells us not to murder, but clearly endorses killing on legitimate authority, I really don't have a problem with appropriate, justified wars; they are merely an extreme example of the police power to 'execute [God's] wrath on the wrong doer' Rom 13 v 4. (If war is a special category, does this mean that if a country is invaded by a bunch of criminals, as happened in the Comoros not so long ago, then its allies must ignore the theft of the country?) Clearly there are rules of war - which should be enforced vigorously; one of the virtues of having Christians in the front line is that they should have a reputation for conforming to those laws - and by their presence encouraging others to do likewise. And there should be a commitment to a high view of human life - WW1 was rightly infamous for the evil calculation that if at the end we had 100,000 men left and he had only 10,000 we would have won, regardless of the fact that both sides had lost over 20 million. But in the end the legitimate authority has been given by God to state, and 'the state' is responsible to God for its behaviour; when push comes to shove we must obey. Much of this line of argument comes from taking the LONG perspective; in a few thousand years when we will still have forever to spend with God in his perfect environment, all these things will be distant memories. And justice will be done when God judges the world - though that many will be forgiven things that we struggle to forgive will no doubt be hard. |
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