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Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

March 9, 2022

Vladimir Putin and God and War

“Nevertheless, you have rejected and humbled us and do not go forth with our armies” (Psalm 44)

Everybody claims a corner on God. Everybody who believes in God believes God is in their corner (even those who do not believe in God believe this – but that is for another day’s notes). I’m thinking this morning of how Vladimir Putin of Russia believes that God wants to create a Russian empire, or he, Putin wants such and is using God (take a look at Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill), ordained by God to rule with impunity and that he, Putin, will be God’s agent for this destiny. Read Psalm 44 from Putin’s place and his view from there of Ukraine’s Zelensky and people: “you (God) have made us fall back before our adversary, and our enemies have plundered us” as he, Putin, worries that his invasion of Ukraine isn’t going as smoothly as planned. 

We, of course, should leave God out of it. When there is a brawl or a war, we should leave God out of it.  And, of course, it is impossible for us to do that. I say “of course,” of course, because it is entirely too evident that we all go through our days claiming justification for our wanton self-centeredness and self-absorption and we will stop at no boundaries claiming support, including any boundary on the temporal and the human. “The eternal and the divine are on our side, thank you very much.  Can’t you see that!?” 

It’s all pathetic. Not only the warring world but the hauling in of God to defend destruction. The Bible’s narrative is thick with Israel’s claim that God actually killed on Israel’s behalf. And that claim is staked by stating in true self-righteous fashion that Israel trusts God to do the victory and does not trust their own measly strength. Oh, how humble of you. At least that same narrative is honest and forthcoming enough to say that God, their own most amazing God, turns the tables often enough and kills them, Israel, just as well. 

Just who is this God who kills both the righteous and the wicked, no matter who claims to be which? What is the story being told here? What is the destiny being written?

The moment you put God into the equation of our territorial and economic and political pursuits is the moment you have to do gymnastics with theodicies. 

Better to just leave God out of it (the equation) and see what you have left. What is left of the human condition and what is left of God?

What is left of the human condition is a massive mixture of good and bad, seemingly devolving, it seems to me at least, as we see in our economic exploitations, political oppressions, social injustices and environmental degradations of this our 21st century. 

What is left of God is One who is, well, God – which means to say not us – not doing anything related to us. 

But then, follow the Christian Biblical narrative until it ends, which means to say, until Jesus. Hebrews 1 puts it like this:  “In many and various ways God has spoken to us in the prophets, but now in these last days he has spoken to us in his son.” The account of Jesus, when you tell the truth of it and don’t try to turn it into a glory story to support your own self-righteous positions (which again, is just what we do – “you do you!”), taking the Resurrection account as a story that claims God defeats all the bad guys in the end rather than what it is: God leaves all the bad guys and the good guys to their own devices and simply closes the door on all that song and dance to mean anything for eternal destiny and simply and profoundly declares “mercy” on the whole shootin’ match, on us, on all. 

When we take the glory story out of the Jesus story (call it “the hero’s journey” of literature and lore of every culture since the dawning of time) because we see that there actually is no glory there, only suffering and death, we see that the Resurrection account is not to tell us that suffering (of God: we do, like it or not, suffer from the likes of God’s Godness) and death (death to our own ego and self-project) are defeated but are actually the way of life, are redemptive. We see that love is the only redemption. 

The Resurrection is an exclamation point on the suffering and death of Jesus (and us!), not their obliteration. We see then that the Jesus Story is all about God staying out of our power struggles (and wars) and declaring it all for naught and replacing it all with mercy. Everybody dies. Everybody is to blame. But fear not: mercy!

What is left of God? Mercy. Unmerited and Unconditional Mercy. 

Take God out of our warring madness and let God loose on what and who is God: Mercy. If the Christian story is anything (and not, again, a stand-in for our own claims to superiority and status) it is that. God has not left the building. God is in the building as it collapses and shouts aloud with borasco-like ferocity: “Mercy!”. On us all, and all creation, as the whole thing turns to rubble and dust. 




2 comments:

  1. Putin's War presses me to the edge of my theological and emotional boundaries. Part of me prays for his demise and his end. (Ie. Bonhoeffer) Part of me wants to unleash holy hatred - and I could even look to the imprecatory Psalms for justification. Eg. #137 ("By the Waters of Babylon" check out vs. 9) Or #139 ("I will hate them with a perfect hatred" v.22) But ultimately, I can't go there, into the cave of self-justification. Rather...here are some words and wisdom from Wolhfart Pannenberg:
    "The universality of sin forbids the moralism that will not accept solidarity with those who become the instruments of the destructive power of evil. Sin’s universality show such a moralistic attitude to be hypocrisy. The Christian doctrine of the universality of sin has the specific function, for all the need to check manifest evil and its consequences, of helping to preserve solidarity with evildoers, in whose conduct the sin that is latently at work in all of us finds expression. This antimoralistic function of the doctrine has often been underrated. In the modern world it has fallen victim to the dissolution of the doctrine of Original Sin when a different doctrine of sin’s universality has not replaced it. If such views for their part are based on the idea of actual sin, moralism can add be advocated only in part and at the cost of enhanced guilt feelings. Weakening of the conviction that a universality of sin precedes all individual acts has opened the door to the moralism that either seeks evil in others or by inward aggression produces self-destructive feelings of guilt.” (Systematic Theology II:238)
    Please note two things: 1) Acknowledging the universality of sin does not relieve us from the moral obligation to check the aggression of the evildoer so far as it is in our just power to do so. 2) It helps us not at all to demonize the aggressor as the incarnation of some supernatural evil when the aggression actualizes a potentiality latent in all of us fallen sinners. What helps is the recognition of our own sinfulness with our own culpability for our own acts of aggression. This checks our own self-righteous fanaticism in the execution of a solemn duty to defend victims of manifest evil.
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    Nathan Hilkert
    Pannenberg brings to mind what I think I remember Augustine saying about a Christian's duty in waging war: to bring the benefits of a just peace to our enemies. He also sums up precisely my problem with so much of fashionable progressiv

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  2. There is evil in all of us, to be sure, but, as you say, acknowledging this doesn't let us off the hook of working to check the aggression of another evildoer. But....just what is that work? I want to say it is non-violence at all costs, but I am too weak to say so let alone do so. Violence (only?) begets violence. Nothing will stop the violence until the violent have no more victims to demolish. But how can we stand by as others are demolished? We cannot and still say we are bound by an ethic of love.

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