Violence

Christian, war is stupid and atrocious. And yet many arenas and features of our culture (I’m particularly looking at entertainment and nationalism here) glorify it.

Christian, don’t contribute to or take part in this glorification of war. It’s a reprehensible thing.

At best war is using lethal force to stop evil, an evil we should wish didn’t exist and need to be met with such force in the first place. At worse it’s a feud that gets taken to a sinful level where we are actually willing to kill because of it (think about that; it’s crazy!) In either case, it is the taking of precious life and is, without exception, outside of God’s original design for this world, i.e., not the way things should be, and, thus, not something we should find in any way attractive or be mesmerized by.

War, in at least certain circumstances, is a definite ethical quandary or dilemma. And I’m not trying to simplify or ignore that reality. In fact, if anything, I’m trying to do the opposite here.

So please, before anyone bombards me with any vicious comments or notifications of their offense, this post isn’t intended to discredit or dishonor servicemen and -women or necessarily to throw out any idea of just war theory or any potential cases of so-called just war (I will leave the pacism v. just war debate to another time and place).

I will just say this: the fact that we as Christians historically have felt the need to engage in such serious reflection about what–if anything–constitutes a just war speaks volumes in and of itself about the nature of war. As I like to say to my more firm just war theory friends, If you’re not at least sympathetic to pacifism, you’re probably not even a just war theorist.