| Bishop's Corner
The Christian Dilemma In War
By Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker
 When a nation goes to war its
citizens must learn to live with anxiety. The uncertainty of a war’s
outcome, the danger faced by young men and women in the armed forces,
and the grief and injury suffered by the people whose nation is being
attacked produce a profound disquiet.
War affects Christians in
additional ways. There are some Christians for whom war provokes a
spiritual crisis. They feel compelled to try to understand war in the
context of their faith in God and then to take a position. Regardless
of the position a Christian takes, she or he will be caught in a
dilemma.
If a Christian chooses pacifism
he will be true to the highest ideals of our faith expressed in the
Sermon on the Mount where Jesus taught, “Blessed are the
peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.” Yet, the
Christian pacifist cannot escape the accusation that he is guilty of
moral responsibility by refusing to acknowledge that lawless and
wicked acts have to be restrained by a legitimate use of force.
If a Christian justifies the use
of force to restrain evil she will identify with a responsible
tradition of moral realism based upon the knowledge that the kingdom
of God Jesus announced in the Sermon on the Mount has not arrived into
fullness and that the evil which persists in the world must be
restrained by the governing authorities. Yet, the Christian realist
must be willing to share in the guilt for the death and destruction
caused by the war she supports.
If a Christian believes that his
vocation is not to get involved directly with the world, but to make a
witness to the divine wisdom that is not of this world, he may try to
play the role of a gadfly who mocks the folly of the human race and
point out the acts of our own government that have contributed to the
cycle of violence. Yet, he must live with the guilt of failing to take
a definite stand for or against the use of force at a critical moment
in history and also be prepared to be mocked in turn for his
self-righteousness in staying above the fray.
However a Christian responds to
war, she or he is faced with a dilemma. We may assume that there is
something wrong with our faith because we cannot figure out how to
resolve the deep dilemmas we face. The Catholic theologian Hans Urs
von Balthasar said that it is important to understand that the “dilemma
is not caused by the Christians, but by the ambiguity of the world
itself, which oscillates between being a good creation and shutting
itself up in hostility, against the love of God…” Our dilemma in
war is caused by the finitude and futility of the world that God has
chosen to liberate from its bondage to sin and death, but that has not
yet been liberated to be the new world where “nation shall not lift
up sword against nation” (Micah 4:3) and “mourning and crying and
pain will be no more” (Revelation 21:4).
Not being able to resolve the
dilemmas we encounter, we must learn how to live in humility and
trust. Christians must humbly acknowledge that we are not given any
clear-cut recipes for solving the problems we face, but, as von
Balthasar said, “Christians like others must wrestle with
deciphering of the riddles of nature and history.”
Most of all, being confronted
with the dilemmas we cannot resolve, we realize more than ever the
depths of the human predicament. We cannot overcome our predicament,
but God has acted in Jesus Christ to do for us what we cannot do for
ourselves. The tragedy of the human predicament is taken up and
overcome by God’s love for the world revealed in Jesus Christ. The
seeming foolishness of the news that Jesus Christ died for our sins is
the divine wisdom beyond all human reckoning that, by faith in Christ,
we who are caught in the predicament of not being able to be right are
forgiven and justified. The astonishing news that Jesus Christ was
raised from the dead is our hope that the whole creation now subjected
to futility is destined to become the new creation when God’s name
is hallowed, God’s kingdom is come, and God’s will is done, on
earth as it is in heaven.
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