Killing In The Name Of - #3

Professor Richard Hays begins his argument with a story of a picture. The canvas is a window in a small Washington D.C. church. It is a stained-glass window, portraying the Good Shepherd, Jesus, who is carrying a lamb in his arms. At the foot of the window we read, “Testimonial to the boys of the parish who served in the Great War.”

This picture (and many others like it in churches throughout Europe and North America) tells its own story. It bears silent witness to the reality that the church has accepted war as something which is sometimes necessary for Christians to engage in. It may be a lamented reality, a “sad duty”, but its fittingness as occasional Christian practice has rarely been brought into question by the church, according to Hays at least.

The sentiment of the stained-glass window is that the “boys” who fought -- and who possibly died -- in the war are safe in the comforting arms of Jesus. However, Hays highlights the unintentional irony of this iconography in the form of a question: Is it appropriate for those who profess to be followers of the gentle Shepherd to take up lethal weapons against enemies? Broadly speaking, the question being dealt with is the following:

Is it ever God’s will for Christians to employ violence in defense of justice?

Christians can and have come up with a positive answer to this question, albeit with some positive answers being more thought-out and informed than others. Hays cites Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s decision to participate in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler as an example of one such informed answer, and also cites a less known story involving a less informed positive answer to balance the scales. This particular story was reported by a newspaper in 1986 as follows:

An Ozzy Osbourne concert has been cancelled after protests and threats against the singer’s life…in Tyler, Texas, where the controversial British rock star was to appear Saturday. Several groups, including religious leaders and the City Council of PTA’s, said Osbourne represented anti-Christian values… County Sheriff J.B. Smith told Osbourne’s security chief of anonymous threats against the singer, including the use of fire and dynamite.

As Hays muses, ‘When we hear threats to commit terrorist murder as a way of preventing a singer from representing “anti-Christian values”, we cannot help but wonder what “Christian” values are being defended’. Hays sees this mentality as an affliction derived from Cain - that affliction is the impulse to impose our will through violence.

The church has obeyed this impulse in obviously distorted and perverted ways. Pacifists and non-pacifists [?] will of course agree on that, and join together in condemnation of senseless murder - genocide, even (with the recent ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia given as an example of such perversion). “But what are we to say about the Catholic military chaplain who administered mass to the Catholic bomber pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945?”, asks Hays. This incident is quite close to home for us in the West, which is perhaps one of the reasons condemnation of these actions has not been universally meted out. Yet after reading the following penitent words of Father George Zabelka, it is hard to see why that remains the case.

To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to fail as a Christian and as a priest as I see it…I was there, and I’ll tell you that the operational moral atmosphere in the church in relation to mass bombing of enemy civilians was totally indifferent, silent, and corrupt at best -- at worst it was religiously supportive of these activities by blessing those who did them…Catholics dropped the A-bomb on top of the largest and first Catholic city in Japan. One would have thought that I, as a Catholic priest, would have spoken out against the atomic bombing of nuns. One would have thought that I would have suggested that as a minimal standard of Catholic morality, Catholics shouldn’t bomb Catholic children. I didn’t. I, like the Catholic pilot of the Nagasaki plane, “The Great Artiste,” was heir to a Christianity that had for seventeen hundred years engaged in revenge, murder, torture, the pursuit of power, and prerogative violence, all in the name of our Lord.

I walked though the ruins of Nagasaki right after the war and visited the place where once stood the Urakami Cathedral. I picked up a piece of censer from the rubble. When I look at it today I pray that God forgives us for how we have distorted Christ’s teaching and destroyed his world by the distortion of that teaching. I was the Catholic chaplain who was there when this grotesque process that began with Constantine reached its lowest point - so far.

Aside from being a poignant example of repentance, these words speak loud and clearly against the Cainic [?] impulse to impose our will through violence that has so plagued the church for centuries. For Hays, these words of Father Zabelka bring to mind the story of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, because “the things that make for peace” were hidden from her eyes (Lk. 19:41-42).

Before getting into the key text in Matthew 5, Hays briefly touches on the “just war” tradition, which he says “was developed in Christian theology precisely as a check against the indiscriminate use of violence and, at the same time, as a way of articulating norms that would justify the participation of Christians in armed conflict under the authority of the state.” The question is, can the just war tradition be justified on the basis of New Testament teaching? Fr Zabelka’s answer is that the just war theory is “something that Christ never taught or even hinted at”. In turning next to the Sermon on the Mount, we will discover just what level of truth there is in that claim.