How I wish those committed to Biblical inerrancy and the plain reading of God’s Word would direct their crusade for a high view of the Scriptures to the fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t know how much more clear “Love your enemies” can be — not for the country’s political leaders, who may or may not be Christians and who may or may not hold to a high view of Scripture in anything not involving sex if they are, but to every born-again believer in Christ Jesus in this or any other country.
Government may act in a way that honors both God and God’s intention for civil authority. Or, as is more often the case, it may not. But governments are established, endorsed, and empowered by the people in them, people who may know Christ as Savior, who may be sufficiently Christian-ish to do good, or who act virtuously or maliciously as adherents of any faith. Worse, of course, and my focus here, are those who claim the name of Christ Jesus and then act, as agents of government, in ways that are utterly inconsistent with his teachings. They lead us into war, and those of us who follow Christ must decide how to respond.
Prayer is always the first response, and for the Christian who seeks to fully live out Christ’s teachings and who, like me, fails miserably, supplication must be accompanied by submission — to a God greater than ourselves, and to the bitter confession that we live in a world in whose evil we more than gladly participate. In war, our nascent pacifism or our embrace of Augustinian “Just War” criteria must be enlivened by genuine concern for our soldiers. In this case, they were sold a lie (Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and wasn’t a WMD threat) or are lambs sacrificed in a game (Afghanistan) that has no possibility of victory until the U.S. acknowledges its errors, takes responsibility for the loss of life and the loss of its standing in the eyes of Muslim and other nations, and leaves Afghanistan to its own people.
The soldiers, as soldiers, aren’t at fault. Most are dedicated patriots who need our support and our prayers for the healing that only Christ can offer. Others — this has to be acknowledged — likely enlisted so they could kick some Muslim ass, and they need our rebuke and guidance and our prayers for the cleansing that only Christ can offer. And woe be it to a nation that lies to and lures its young into war and then fails to care for them — physically, mentally, emotionally and economically — when they return from having done what it bade them to do.
God cannot be pleased with the original response to 9/11, with the origin of this war, with the thousands of acts of unnecessary violence committed by or perpetuated against our soldiers, and with the War on Terrorism’s desperate continuation in the hope that somehow we’ll all be made safer. The Gospels give us clear teaching on how to respond individually to violence; the corporate response is only made possible by hundreds of thousands of individual responses, a reality that calls to mind an anti-war poster I had hanging in my bedroom while growing up that I’ll paraphrase here:
What if they gave a war and all of Christ’s disciples were so committed to the Bible that they refused to show up?