Was World War II an Unjust War?

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Ted Grimsrud—January 10, 2012

In uncountable discussions I have had over the years about the ethics of war and peace, it seems that when pacifism comes up, so too does World War II. At least for Americans, this war stands not as the “war that ended other wars” nearly so much as the “war that justified other wars.” World War II shows, in the American “good war” mythology, that sometimes going to war is the best option when it comes to dealing with the “bad guys.”

Unfortunately, seeing war as sometimes the best option leads to empowering the societal structures that are needed to prepare for those war—and such empowerment has loosed on American society forces that have transformed what in the past seemingly was an attitude that you go to war as a last resort to our present attitude where so many conflicts throughout the world seem to require a militarized response. Hence, the extraordinary American military presence around the world, the extraordinary way the United States spends about as much on its military as the rest of the world combined, and the extraordinary situation facing American voters in the 2012 presidential election where their choice will surely be limited to two versions of militarism (note the remarkable dynamic in the Republican presidential race where the candidate getting attention for speaking overtly against this militarism, Ron Paul, has as his major source of contributions current military people).

Borrowing from social critic Naomi Klein’s analysis of recent American history, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, we could say that the “shock” of total war in the early 1940s led directly to the takeover of the United States by advocates of the American national security ideology. At that point of vulnerability, permanent structures such as the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the nuclear weapons program were established. As a consequence of the transformative influence of these entities, in the United States, “all politics is a politics of war” (Walter Wink). Continue reading “Was World War II an Unjust War?” →

Christian salvation: Do the questions never end?

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Ted Grimsrud—January 1, 2012

I keep thinking about salvation and related issues—aided considerably by various thoughtful questions and comments. My post this week will be kind of a grab bag of responses to various recent comments that relate to my three-part discussion of Jesus’ death and salvation (“Does Jesus’ death have meaning?” “Jesus’ death and my salvation,” and “Does Paul agree with Jesus about salvation?”).

Life after death

My old friend David Myers in Washington, DC, asked about (I think) salvation in relation to life after death. He wrote: I’m stuck on the word ‘saved’—its forthright, non-theological meaning, especially related to the resurrection. I get that loving God and neighbor saves us into a richer, more meaningful life than we would have if we worshiped the idols, etc. Yet that very life of salvation may well lead to getting killed. So, now we’re dead as a rock, which is a condition I’d like to be saved from. Why then doesn’t the resurrection save us, in the simple, non-theological meaning of the word?

I don’t think my points about the relationship between resurrection and salvation were meant to speak to the issue of life after death one way or another. I believe there is strong continuity between life and in the present and whatever happens after we die. By the nature of the case, we cannot say anything definitive about life after death. And the Bible as a whole is much more circumspect in speaking about that theme than much of later theology. Whatever salvation means, though, I think it should be seen to apply to both life in the here and now and life after we’re “dead as a rock.”

That is, if we enter the “life of salvation” in this life (which is clearly the concern of the vast majority of biblical talk about salvation) there is no reason not to expect continuity in the afterlife. Whatever it is that saves us in the former state surely will save us in the latter state. The problem with much Christian talk of the afterlife is that it seems to assume some kind of discontinuity—we are “saved” for the afterlife by a kind of belief that does not necessarily lead to a “life of salvation” in the present. When Jesus responds to the question about “eternal life” with his call to love God and neighbor, he clearly has in mind life in its fullness in the present—we know we are living in such love when we imitate the Good Samaritan in his risky and costly compassion. But there is no reason not to think this “eternal life” does not extent to after we “get killed” for practicing such compassion. Continue reading “Christian salvation: Do the questions never end?” →

Does Paul agree with Jesus about salvation?

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Ted Grimsrud—December 23, 2011

Jesus’ approach to salvation was simple—he bypassed the sacrificial system and offered direct forgiveness. He answered a direct question about how to inherit eternal life by reiterating what he believed was the essence of the law and prophets: love God and neighbor. He told an amazing story about a terribly sinful son who is welcomed by his father back into the family simply by returning home.

In other words, if we take our cues from Jesus himself, we should not be investing his death with the kind of meaning that sees in his death the one necessary sacrifice that might satisfy God and enable God to bring salvation about. To the contrary, Jesus echoes the prophets by insisting that God operates according to the logic of mercy, not the logic of sacrifice, payback, reciprocity, and punishment. According to Jesus, God’s justice is restorative not retributive.

But what about Christianity’s greatest interpreter of Jesus’ message, Paul the Apostle? How compatible is Paul’s understanding of salvation with Jesus? Do we have to choose between the two? I think not. In this, my third post on salvation (the first was “Does Jesus’ death have meaning?” and the second was “Jesus’ death and my salvation”), I will make that case that Paul was faithful and accurate to Jesus’ main message (with the implication that later Christianity has actually misread Paul).

Like his Jesus and the prophets, Paul understands salvation in terms of God’s merciful intention to bring healing to a broken world.  Paul does not present salvation in terms of retributive justice or a mechanistic view of God’s holiness and honor.  Salvation, for Paul, is a gift of a relational God who seeks to free humanity from its self-destructive bondage to the powers of sin and death. Continue reading “Does Paul agree with Jesus about salvation?” →

Jesus’ Death and My Salvation

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Ted Grimsrud—December 18, 2011

My earlier post on Jesus’ death (“Does Jesus’ Death Have Meaning?”) was rather heady and theological—grappling with this big question in the realm of ideas. This is appropriate, and I have been happy at the discussion that was stimulated by what I wrote.

One extended comment, from Philip Bender, challenged me to think about these issues a bit more personally and existentially. I understand the essence of Philip’s questions to be about how our beliefs about salvation, atonement, Jesus’ death, et al, actually speak to our lives, to our sense of assurance of our connection with God, to our on-the-ground appropriation of the Bible’s message of being reconciled with God.

These are some of the specific questions he raised:

• How do we appropriate Jesus atonement?

• How do personal, structural, and cosmic “at-one-ment” with God happen? How are these processes different and how are they unified?

• What does it mean to “trust in” the forgiving and transforming mercy of God?

• How do I know when I’ve trusted in it? Is it when I say that “Jesus (out of mercy) died for me”? When I endeavor to practice a life of mercy (“works”)?

Rather than respond to these questions head on, one-by-one, I will speak to the general thrust of what I perceive to be involved in these types of questions. Part of my concern in this discussion is that we let Jesus’ own teaching, and how he embodied his teaching, be our main guide. It seems to me that in discussions about atonement and salvation, this rarely happens. So let’s turn to two of Jesus’ most important accounts of how he understands salvation, two stories from the Gospel of Luke: the parable of the Good Samaritan (10:25-37) and the parable of the Prodigal Son (15:11-32).

The Good Samaritan story stands as one of the very few times that Jesus’ directly addresses the basic salvation question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The Prodigal Son story has so commonly been associated with Jesus’ message of salvation that it has come to be called “the gospel in miniature.” Continue reading “Jesus’ Death and My Salvation” →

Does Jesus’ Death Have Meaning?

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Ted Grimsrud—December 11, 2011

I recently read and discussed with my Contemporary Theology class three books on atonement theology. Each answers the question of the meaning (or lack thereof) in Jesus’ death.

Hans Boersma’s Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition, sees the most meaning in the crucifixion of Jesus in his defense of traditional atonement models (his is not simply a straightforward defense of traditional satisfaction and substitutionary views, though).

J. Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement challenges the view that Jesus’ death is necessary for salvation, but as he does still work with the language of atonement, there is some ambiguity in his treatment of Jesus’ death. The death was strictly an act of evil, not something God in any sense willed. But Jesus’ death is part of the story of salvation that in some sense is dependent upon Jesus’ resurrection. The resurrection is the saving act, but—though Weaver does not state it like this—there had to be a crucifixion for there to be a resurrection. So Jesus’ death has meaning in relation to his resurrection.

Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, in their book Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us, utterly reject any kind of positive role for the story of Jesus’ death. They believe that Christian theology that valorizes Jesus’ death, especially that sees his death as necessary for salvation, is actually advocating a kind of “divine child abuse” where the “father” requires the violent death of the “son.”

As it turns out, Boersma’s view is pretty complicated. He tries to hold together all three of the tradition models: satisfaction, moral influence, and Christus Victor. There are other arguments for the satisfaction model and its substitutionary atonement variant that are stricter. One recent example is this book by British theologians Steve Jeffrey, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach: Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution. The subtitle makes the stance of the authors clear.

The two approaches: Satisfaction or mercy “all the way down”

One way to approach this topic is to note that, at bottom, there are basically two ways to think about Christian salvation: the satisfaction view and the “mercy all the way down” view. Continue reading “Does Jesus’ Death Have Meaning?” →

How Does Pacifism (Properly Understood) Work as a Core Christian Conviction?

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Ted Grimsrud—December 4, 2011

[What follows is an essay intended as a kind of thought experiment. It arises from many discussions and much thought in relation to how we best understand theological role of Christian pacifism. It is especially aimed at other Christian pacifists—though hopefully many other people would find it interesting as well. I don’t mean it as a dogmatic statement but as a invitation to on-going conversation and discernment.]

“Pacifism”—A recent and complicated term

The term “pacifism” has a rich if brief history. It was first widely used in English just a bit more than 100 years ago, based on the newly coined French word, pacifisme, that was used of “making peace.” The initial use in English focused on opposition to war, and one of the major ways the term has been used has been to refer to a principled opposition to all war, and more broadly, all uses of violence.

Interestingly, in Mennonite circles, during the short career of the term “pacifism,” its usage has evolved quite dramatically. Perhaps the first significant use of “pacifism” in widely read Mennonite writings came in Guy F. Hershberger’s classic text, War, Peace, and Nonresistance, first published in 1944 to provide American Mennonites with authoritative guidance for negotiating the life of faith amidst a warring society. While forcefully and comprehensively developing a theological rationale for opposition to war, Hershberger differentiated “biblical nonresistance” (the path he advocated) from “pacifism.” Hershberger associated “pacifism” with the non-Christian social change advocate Mohandas Gandhi and with liberal American Protestants who unwisely sought to effect wide-ranging social change. Both Gandhi and the liberal Protestant pacifists departed significantly from the biblical model of Jesus-centered nonresistance that turned the other cheek and refused to use coercion to seek justice for oneself.

Hershberger himself evolved in his views, by the early 1960s actually endorsing the Gandhian social activism of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the American Civil Rights Movement. By this time, due to other factors as well, “pacifism” had begun to gain currency in Mennonite circles as a useful term that connoted a combination of nonresistance’s refusal to take up arms with a new openness toward political engagement heightened by opposition to the U.S war in Vietnam. The term “pacifism” was seen as a more inclusive term than “nonresistance,” carrying the connotation of a broader application of the anti-violence message of Jesus. Increasingly, Mennonites engaged broader peace concerns than simply assuring their own community’s non-participation in war—and “pacifism” seemed like a good term to capture this broadening of the peace position.

In time, though, the term “nonviolence” came to have increased attraction. “Pacifism,” ironically, came to be linked with the more withdrawn stance earlier connoted by “nonresistance.” Perhaps, in part, the word “pacifism” sounded too much like “passive-ism.” Also ironically, “nonviolence,” though negative in construction, came to be seen as a more positive, activist term than “pacifism.

Why “pacifism” remains a useful term

However, the term “pacifism” retains important virtues. Unlike “nonresistance,” “nonviolence,” and “non-retaliation” (a term that has never actually caught on, though it has been suggested by some as a more accurate description of Jesus’ meaning in the Sermon on the Mount), “pacifism” is positive in construction. It could literally read “love of peace.” Continue reading “How Does Pacifism (Properly Understood) Work as a Core Christian Conviction?” →

What about abortion?

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Ted Grimsrud—October 30, 2011

I have to admit that I have never been especially exercised by the abortion issue.

On the one hand, I have never found the strict anti-abortion position attractive. While self-labeled as “pro-life,” it has often struck me as rigid, legalistic, ideological, and too easily co-opted by political forces that in other respects are pretty anti-life. Yet I also have a hard time thinking of abortions as positive or even morally neutral acts. I also am uncomfortable with arguments that present abortion is strictly a matter of the pregnant woman’s personal choice.

And it is not an issue I have ever had close personal experience with. So it has been easy to focus on other issues—as I still do.

However, in the introductory ethics course I teach to mostly first-year college students, I use abortion as one of several case studies we briefly consider. So I do find myself getting more interested.

The success of “pro-life” rhetoric

I am struck more and more with how successful the anti-abortion advocates seem have been in setting the terms of the discussion. Most students seem to take it as a given that human life (in the sense of deserving of full human rights, let’s call this “personhood”) begins when the egg is fertilized. So, abortion at a very early stage is understood to be the taking of a human life, morally equivalent to murder. When pushed to consider it, many of these students would see that even “birth control” methods that prevent fertilized eggs from being implanted on the uterine wall (e.g., the “morning after pill”) are abortion.

This seems to paint people into a corner. We have heard several true-life stories from guest speakers about cases where the strict pro-life belief led to actions that many in the class recognize as seemingly problematic. Continue reading “What about abortion?” →

Käthe Kollwitz: Making Peace with Art

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Ted Grimsrud—October 9, 2011

In the late 1800s, an emerging young graphic artist moved into inner city Berlin with her physician husband—he to serve Germany’s poorest people, she—it seemed—to forfeit her promising career in order to accompany the doctor as he followed his calling.

As it turned out, though, the artist, Käthe Kollwitz, became internationally renowned as one the greatest creators of peaceable art in the twentieth-century. Kollwiz discovered her focus in those hard years in the big city. Like few others, she captured the pain, struggles, and beauty of history’s forgotten people.

With black and white drawings, woodcuts, and sculpture—and with an amazing reservoir of respect and compassion—Kollwitz gave to the ages unforgettable images of dignity amidst poverty and despair, resolve in the face of crushing injustice, and the occasional joy of human celebrations and solidarity.

In spite of her social location, Kollwitz did gain renown as an extraordinary artist. Then came another turn in her choice of subject matter. Beginning in 1914, Germany entered into a terrible dark age. Total war followed by overwhelming famine. Kollwitz had for many years been a political radical—but with the war and its consequences, she became a pacifist and devoted her art to a profoundly moving series of works that capture the trauma, senselessness, and, ultimately, evils of war.

However, though it is protest art, resistance work that can touch and inspire, Kollwitz’s anti-war pieces share the deep, deep compassion and empathy of her earlier portraits of poverty and struggle.

Continue reading “Käthe Kollwitz: Making Peace with Art” →

War and the Old Testament: A Proposal

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Ted Grimsrud—October 3, 2011

It seems to come up all the time in discussions about pacifism. What about all the violence in the Old Testament? I’m not sure why the OT is considered to be a problem especially for pacifists—the violence there should be a problem for any moral person, I think.

I remember my Old Testament teacher, Millard Lind (of Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary), speaking at the University of Oregon and making the point that the violence in the Old Testament creates problems for all Christians. We all say that the OT is revelatory, and it portrays God ordering or performing some horrendous and indiscriminate acts of violence. The OT is not about “just wars” in the sense that the western moral tradition has used that term. It positively portrays acts of indiscriminate murder, acts that are condemned by just about all moral systems.

I had a student a number of years ago who signed up for one of my Bible classes with the intent of refuting the pacifism I taught. To get ready for the class he began to read through the OT, making note of all the materials that went against pacifism. He did not get far into this project before he faced a major crisis in his faith. He realized it was actually too easy to prove his point; his own non-pacifist moral framework was also under assault by the Bible’s stories. Ultimately, he resolved the problem by giving up on the Bible and Christian faith.

So, it could be (1) that those who evoke the OT as evidence against pacifism are being disingenuous in acting as if the OT does not equally provide evidence against the just war theory or any other view that places moral limits on lethal violence used against civilian populations. Thus, it could also be (2) that non-pacifist Christians should be just as concerned about this dilemma as pacifist Christians. That they don’t seem to be is itself an indictment against the lack of moral rigor in the easy Christian acceptance of warfare. Continue reading “War and the Old Testament: A Proposal” →

Gordon Kaufman and theological “orthodoxy”

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Ted Grimsrud—September 18, 2011

Gordon Kaufman’s death has provided occasion for me to reflect on how his constructive theology has shaped my own. I was a pastor when I first started reading Kaufman seriously. I found his thought helpful for me in that setting. He challenged me to recognize the need to present my own theology in my sermons, Bible studies, classes, and conversations as something fallible and finite. Since all theology is human work, it is all to be held lightly. Kaufman helped strengthen my already present anti-authoritarian tendencies. [See my two earlier posts that discuss Kaufman: “Gordon Kaufman, R.I.P.” and “Mennonite Theology and War: Kaufman and Yoder”.]

I had the sense from when I first seriously read Kaufman that what was most important for my purposes was his understanding of theological method. To recognize that every bit of our theology is a human construction would not be to reject out of hand traditional theological “orthodoxy”—rather, it would be to demand that the received beliefs be subject to the same scrutiny as all other human statements. The received beliefs, in light of Kaufman’s theological method, did not have a privileged status that rendered them impervious to criticism, impervious to rational evaluation in light of evidence, or impervious to experiential confirmation (or dis-confirmation). But if they could stand up to scrutiny, they could still be affirmed as true. According to his method, at least, Kaufman had no basis simply to reject a belief because he didn’t like it. His approach called for a quest for genuine objectivity (recognizing that this is never fully achievable) wherein one’s theological conclusions would be based on what is discerned to be true—not based on either an uncritically accepted “orthodoxy” or a knee-jerk anti-orthodoxy. Continue reading “Gordon Kaufman and theological “orthodoxy”” →