How Might Christians Invest in Peace Instead of War?
{Excerpt} …I can understand Hedges’ and Niebuhr’s point that war is, at times, a necessary evil, though to this day, I wrestle hard with it. I can see how, at times in history, war seems to be the only solution to a conflict that has sunk to levels of baffling complexity. World War II is most often offered as an example of this kind of conflict. Hedges cites, as another example, the war in Bosnia. Sometimes evil regimes become so powerful and so depraved that nothing but a greater show of violence and force appears able to stop them.
But the argument that Christians should adopt methods of violence to address situations like those described above, fails to acknowledge the role Christian recourse to violence often plays in creating those situations in the first place. Many of the conflicts of the past century reached the point at which war seemed inevitable because people who called themselves Christians had, for years, allowed themselves to practice violence and domination. Christians in Germany allowed hatred and racism—natural corollaries to war—to take root among them. They in turn empowered Hitler. Likewise, Christians in the former Yugoslavia allowed criminals to lead them into a war fueled by racism and manufactured enmity. Today, the war playing out in Israel/Gaza has tentacles stretching to the earliest centuries of Christianity and to Christian antisemitism, and farther back still…. {Read remainder of article on Patheos HERE.}