Bishops and the Armed forces - the difficulty with loving your enemies when you are responsible to care for those comissioned to kill the aforesaid

Jonathan Bartley had some acute comments earlier this week on the difficulty of trying to follow the call to Love your enemies when you are responsible for caring for those commissioned to kill the said enemies. here's what happened when Stephen Venner, Bishop to the Armed Forces in the United Kingdom, managed to get himself into  of hot water over comments he made regarding the Taliban, and this against the background of ongoing public debate about whether the British Army should be in Afghanistan.

the story unfolded as follows as reported by Jonathan Bartley in Ekklesia:

This is what the bishop said:

“We’ve been too simplistic in our attitude towards the Taliban.”

“There’s a large number of things that the Taliban say and stand for which none of us in the west could approve, but simply to say therefore that everything they do is bad is not helping the situation because it’s not honest really.”

“The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other.”

He has now apologised although it has an element of the “I-have-been-misinterpreted-by-the-media” line which we hear from so many bishops these days (sometimes justified) which is wearing a little thin now for many people.

You can see what the bishop was trying to do. He seems to have been attempting an intervention, urging a reassessment of how the Taliban are viewed. It was an attempt to move away from the demonisation of enemies toward a fuller understanding of what orthodox Christianity teaches - that all are made in the image of God.

But the problem he faces is institutional. As Bishop to the Armed Forces he stands at the centre of a far-too-close relationship between the church and the military, which compromises the Christian message, and results in fudges ...

The Church has been kidding itself for years that it can easily square its current position with Jesus’ teachings about war, forgiveness and violence. It can’t. Jesus was unequivocal in his command to love enemies, forgive and turn the other cheek. This has of course been wrongly interpreted down the centuries as appeasement and passivity in the face of evil, rather than active, nonviolent resistance.

But even 'just war' theory acknowledges that war is always an evil. However, as bishop to the Armed Forces he can’t say this – particularly at a time when military leaders are propoing that in order to support the armed forces you have to support the mission in Afghanistan too. So what he has ended up doing is trying to scrabble around to find some things that we might be able to love enemies for such as their “loyalty” or “conviction”.

But the point of Jesus message is that we are called to love when there is absolutely nothing to praise enemies for. When they are committing the most heinous acts of evil, then that is when Christians believe that we are called to forgive. This is after all what Jesus did as soldiers nailed him to the cross. It was not “forgive them father, because these Romans are really loyal to their cohorts” or “forgive them because they believe that I really am a danger to the empire”. Rather it was “forgive them for they don’t know the evil they are committing”.

When you aren’t able to stand up, stand up for Jesus, as the “soldiers of the cross” are called to do, then you end up with fudges which are always going to cause trouble, doing more damage than good.

The bishop's message was neither distinctively Christian, nor helpful. The church does have a scandalous message. But it’s scandalous for a different reason. And it won’t be able to deliver it until the church stops being theologically hamstrung and puts a greater distance between it and the armed forces.

This needn't mean abandoning its pastoral role. Indeed, care and love for members of the armed forces should be entirely compatible with active peacemaking. But it would involve reimagining that relationship in a way that gives more space to a Christian perspective on peace and war. We have suggested that a good start would be to have a bishop to the 'unarmed' forces too, to recognise the work of many Christians and churches in peacemaking and conflict prevention.

The Bishop will now backtrack and feel he has to throw his support behind not just the soldiers in Afghanistan, but the mission itself. But let’s give Stephen Venner a break and a bit of forgiveness. Like those before him, he too “knows not what he does”.

Subvertising

Jonathan Bartley in his column in Ekklesia in commenting on the Atheist advertising on the buses in the United Kingdom raises questions about the Christian response by a Bible Society affiliate, Theos, to this campaign, questions that address the issue of the commodification of religion and the need to understand what this really means.

Christians in Australia might care to think about his comments and transpose them to the Australian context. He is I think on to something.

No sooner had the atheist campaign been announced, than Theos – the Bible Society’s thinktank - made a £50 donation. It was of course a public relations stunt which attempted to take the wind out of atheist sails in the ongoing war between some religionists and secularists. But it sought to make a point. They suggested that the adverts would backfire. The campaign would, they said, inevitably point more people in the direction of their own product (faith in God).

Beyond a charge of 'cynicism', nothing much wrong with their tactics many Christians might argue. Except that churches are amongst those who in recent years have been the most vocal critics of consumerism, and the advertising that drives it. Advertising is usually destructive. More often than not advertising is built around creating and fostering a sense of inadequacy or fear, in the hope that the product on offer will be seen as a cure, and bought in large quantities.

Theos chose not to make this point. Quite the reverse in fact. They have instead bought into the advertising strategy. Indeed, it is what they are banking on. They have supported the campaign in the hope that the atheist ads will sow enough doubt and discord to get people looking at their own alternative brand. In their zeal to upstage and subvert their secular opponents, the religionists have taken on the very consumerist values that Christianity ought to stand against.

The atheists it is claimed are poor advertisers for leaving room for diversity of viewpoint, or questioning. “Where did that ‘probably’ come from? It doesn't suggest the sales staff is overly confident about its product” ...

The Christian faith on offer, by implication, seems to be one which leaves little room for doubt. Gone are the notions of spiritual journey, exploration and discovery. But this is a dangerous route to take. Where does it stop? Do we also dispense with Christianity's message of weakness, vulnerability and sacrifice? Turning the other cheek and love of enemies would perhaps have to go too. Such things will only weaken the appeal of our faith in an increasingly competitive market, after all.

... The message must not change to suit the medium. Playing the consumerist game and supporting your opponent's ad campaign because you believe it will work in your favour, isn't the best way to go about it. Better surely to show that your faith can challenge and transform the values of society rather than pander to them.

Bartley suggests that Christians should be into subvertising.

Ekklesia on Christmas

Delayed reference to a couple of columns on Christmas from Ekklesia. Links to the full columns. Always worth a read.

Simon Barrow on "Rescuing God from our attempts at Belief"
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/8223
The God who is portrayed in the Gospel stories about the birth of Jesus is indeed a stranger to dominant ideas about divinity ...

When human beings go about making gods to worship, they are able to do so only as projections of their own image. This is particularly true of the infantilising cosmic tyrant who haunts the imagination of those who would use faith as a self-asserting weapon, and those (like Richard Dawkins) who see this kind of false deity as the be-all and end-all of God-talk.

The god of human imagining is, as someone once put it in my hearing, “a person like us, only much bigger and able to do anything at all.” In contrast to such fantasy, the God whose nature and purpose is disclosed in the flesh of Jesus is neither a metaphysical proposition, nor a cosmic being nor an unassailable entity. God is, rather, unconditioned and unconditional love – a reality beyond definition, description and specification, but revealed in the truth of self-giving.

As recent tragic events in Britain have confirmed, a small child is dependent and defenceless. The story of Jesus is of a birth into obscurity at the edge of Empire in debatable circumstances and of dubious parentage.

Moreover, this child grows up to become someone who defies the attempts of religious and political authorities to capture God for their own purposes. For them, unbounded grace and healing for the ‘impure’ is too much to bear. He is subjected to a criminal’s death and his vindication is not by might but by the gift of life beyond captivity.

There is no way that this picture of God can ever ‘fit’ in with our conventional expectations, religious or otherwise. The god of human construction operates through inviolable fiats, inerrant texts, incomprehensible commands and unquestionable ....

We are faced with a ...God beyond all our concepts of ‘god-ness’, being found not as an alien intruder, a competitor or a member of a class of things called ‘gods’, but as unfathomable life encountered in and through our vulnerability – not over and against it.

When we get to the heart of the Christmas story we find ourselves challenged to become more, not less human. We are asked to stop treating each other, and God, as ‘objects’ to be contemplated, traded, argued about and disposed… but instead as “mysteries to be loved”...


Jonathan Bartley "Christmas means compassion not crusading"
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/8233

... attempts to put Christ back into Christmas through conquest sit uneasily with the political message that lies at the heart of the Christmas story, which challenges those who would seek to dominate and control. According to St Luke's account of the nativity, it's a sentiment that Jesus' mother recognised particularly well.

There is a tendency to think of Mary as a victim – a slightly passive but worthy virgin, chosen to bear the god-child because she has wouldn't hurt a first-century fly. But Mary's response is not one of benign resignation. She celebrates. She bursts into song. And the song she sings is about an end to tyranny and oppression. She anticipates that the powerful will be brought down, the hungry fed, and the rich sent away with nothing. The world will be turned upside down by the baby growing inside her.

The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), as it came to be known, is a profoundly political song of subversion. But it is also entirely in keeping with the tone of the Christmas story. Oppressive Romans are seeking to extend their control and tax the Jewish population through a census. A despotic ruler sees Jesus as a potential threat, and commits a terrible atrocity in his desire to eliminate the risk. Jesus' family become asylum seekers and flee to Egypt. The baby has clearly come to cause trouble – and he subsequently does so for both the religious and political authorities of his day.

It's all a long way from the "Little Lord Jesus", so gentle, meek and mild, he doesn't cry in his manger bed. But Christmas was rebranded long before the existence of "politically correct" councils. In fact there isn't any record of Christians in the first few centuries after Christ celebrating Christmas at all. Following the fourth century conversion of Constantine, Jesus was embarrassing for a church now in bed with the same empire that had put him to death. It has suited both church and state, in assorted alignments for the next 1700 years, to have a romanticised and sentimentalised story, not a subversive one. Even the Magi (wise men) were made into "kings", rewriting history to create a close association with power, rather than a challenge to it.

Mary's song has far more in common with The Red Flag than We Three Kings. But if it makes uncomfortable reading for the Church keen to attract people with a warm, fuzzy message at the one time of year when church attendance seems to actually increase, it is equally challenging for governments.