Tag: just war

I want to be a pacifist until…

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At the gym yesterday I finally finished watching Prince of Peace/God of War on my Zune.

The documentary shares the views of folks who subscribe to Christian pacifism and those who subscribe to the Christian Just War Theory. I think it became clear which side the producer/director came to side with, but I think both sides were presented fairly.

Towards the end of the movie there’s a great contrast. Is violence justified at any time? (starts at 52:10) Is there a need for violence over Love Your Enemy?

At 55:42 in the movie Dr. Victor Shepherd, Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, ON, says he wants to be a pacifist with all his heart until he hears of the horrors of the holocaust and the horrors of those being oppressed around the world. And I was agreeing that yeah, that makes sense. I think we should be on the side of the oppressed and the hurting. We should be willing to stand up for them.

But then at 56:41 Dr. Tony Campolo, Professor at Eastern University at St. Davids, PA, shares a story that almost brought me to tears on my exercise bike.

Despite Bulgaria’s alliance with Germany in World War II, the leader of the Orthodox church in Bulgaria comes walking up to a train station in the middle of the night, where countless numbers of Jews were waiting to be taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The leader of the church is followed by 300 members of his church.

He walks to the fenced in area where the Jews are being kept and the guards tell him, “Father you’re not allowed in there.” He laughs and brushes their machine guns aside as he walks into the gated area. The Jews gathered around him, waiting to see what the Christian leader in Bulgaria would say in their moment of despair.

As they cried and begged for help the leader of the Bulgarian church quoted a simple verse from Ruth.

Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. (Ruth 1:16)

The Jews cheered. The Christians outside the fenced in area cheered. The noise became so loud that it woke up everyone in the community and they came to the train station and heard the news. Quickly the hundreds grew to thousands.

The Nazi soldiers suddenly realized there was no way they could overcome everyone there. There was no way they’d be able to get away with carting off the Jews to the concentration camps. The train left a short time later with none of the Jews on board and never returned again. And after that point, no Jews from Bulgaria were taken to a concentration camp of any sort.

“Because the Church of Jesus Christ boldly stood up and said we’re not going to kill the enemy, we’re going to identify with the suffering and suffer with them. This is Jesus’ way.”

Take an hour and watch download the movie to your desktop for free.

What about you? Are you a pacifist? Are you a pacifist until…? Why or why not?

UPDATE: The site where this movie was originally hosted may not be working now. But the entire documentary is available on YouTube:

Newt Gingrich on InTouch

UPDATE: With Gingrich rising in the polls for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, this post is getting a LOT of hits now. I apologize for the broken link. It appears that InTouch has removed the video mentioned. I’ll try and update the links if I can track it down elsewhere. On the same topic you may be interested in how the 2012 GOP candidates view America going to war in light of the Just War Theory.

A friend in Austin sent me a link to video of Newt Gingrich on InTouch with Dr. Charles Stanley.

Still trying to watch/listen to the video. It’s taking forever to buffer. Update: Lowered the quality and it works a lot better now.

Gingrich talks about the “just war theology” based on St Augustine, Gideon and David in the video.

From the website:

Dr. Stanley and In Touch Ministries are happy to introduce a special guest speaker for our July 4th program. History professor, author and public speaker, Newt Gingrich shares insights into the spiritual climate during the time of our nation’s birth. He explains that, in our country’s history, the author of freedom was not the state or the founding fathers, but God. You don’t want to miss this exciting and informative message! If you would like more information, please check out his book, “Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation’s History.”

Related ::
InTouch Ministries
Wikipedia :: Newt Gingrich
Wikipedia :: Charles Stanley

Do conservative evangelicals regret justifying the Iraq war?

The Baptist Standard has an interesting article about how some conservative evangelicals may be changing their stance on the war in Iraq – despite justifying it with a “just war theory” before the wary began.

By Robert Marus – ABP Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON (ABP)—As the number of American soldiers killed passes 3,000 and Congress debates President Bush’s latest strategy for winning the war, some Christians who supported invading Iraq in 2003 are wrestling with whether the invasion was a “just war” after all.
While most progressive evangelicals, mainline Protestant leaders and the Roman Catholic Church opposed the war prior to the March 2003 invasion, many Baptists and other conservative evangelicals justified the war in Christian theological terms.
“Military action against the Iraqi government would be a defensive action. … The human cost of not taking (then-Iraqi dictator Saddam) Hussein out and removing his government as a producer, proliferator and proponent of the use of weapons of mass destruction means we can either pay now or we can pay a lot more later,” said Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s ethics agency, in a Sept. 2002 article published by the denomination’s news service.
Land later organized a group of prominent conservative evangelicals who signed an open letter arguing that the proposed Iraq invasion satisfied classic Christian theological criteria for justifying a war—often referred to as just war theory.

The article references a letter by Chuck Colson who wrote argued that the classical definition of the Christian just war theory should be “stretched” to accommodate a new age in which terrorism and warfare are intertwined. He concluded that “out of love of neighbor, then, Christians can and should support a pre-emptive strike” on Iraq to prevent Iraqi-based or -funded attacks on the United States or its allies.

David Gushee, a Southern Baptist ethicist and professor at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., was much more cautious about the war than many of his fellow evangelicals from its beginning.
But Gusheee has turned increasingly against it in recent months. In a Dec. 11 column published by Associated Baptist Press, he cautioned his ideological cohorts.
“The massive carnage in Iraq should serve as a permanent reminder to my fellow Christian conservatives that war is a moral-values issue,” he wrote.
“Indeed, war is a sanctity-of-life issue. Every day’s body count in Iraq should drive this point home with greater and greater urgency. Every body that turns up with holes drilled in it, every head torn apart by gunshots, every soldier whose helicopter crashes and ends his life, every veteran who will spend the rest of his or her life with three or two or one or no limbs, is a human being of immeasurable worth, made in the image of God.”