The end in Iraq?

Tonight President Obama will give a televised address to the nation which is billed as marking the end of combat operations in Iraq.  There is much that must be said before we hear that address.  The fact is that 50,000 American troops will remain in Iraq; and doubtless some of them will engage in fighting, and some of them will be wounded and die in that fighting.  The Republican leadership in Congress is already crowing about how President Bush's "surge," our latest euphemism for an escalation of violence, "worked."  Yet undeniable facts remain.  Iraq is still politically unstable, even chaotic.  Many months after the last elections they still have not been able to form a government.  Violent attacks continue, and people continue to die.  The press reports say that President Obama will not claim victory tonight, and indeed he cannot.  Iraq's future remains uncertain at best, with violent clashes between warring parties a certainty and stability a distant dream.

Yet there is one fact about the Iraq war that is more important than any of these, one that we must not forget as we mark the happy homecoming of at least some of our troops.  That fact is this:  The Iraq war was illegal and immoral in its inception, and nothing that has happened or will happen later can change that fact.  President George W. Bush began that war on false pretenses.  He claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that it did not have and that he had reason to know it did not have.  More importantly, he orchestrated a highly sophisticated campaign of innuendo and misdirection that gave the American public the idea that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on our country.  A significant number of Americans still believe that falsehood.  Bush knew that Saddam and Iraq had nothing to do with those attacks, but through carefully constructed statements that associated Saddam and 9/11 without ever actually saying that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 the Bush administration created a false idea in the mind of the American public so that he could launch a war that President Bush had been planning even before he became President.  Launch that war he did, and in doing so he broke international law by starting a war of aggression against another sovereign state.  Of course Saddam Hussein was a bad guy.  We all know that.  No one is denying it.  But that's not why we attacked Iraq, and it is no excuse for having attacked Iraq.  There is no excuse for us having attacked Iraq.  So let us not be lulled into complacency by President Obama's claims that our combat mission in Iraq has ended.  It hasn't.  It may have changed its form and scale, but it hasn't ended.  And as we welcome home and support those Americans who chose to serve in the military and who served in Iraq, let us never forget that in starting the Iraq war our nation violated international law and our own most loudly proclaimed values of peace and justice.

And let us Christians never forget that war can never be justified from a Christian perspective.  Jesus taught nonviolence.  He didn't teach pacifism as is often thought.  He taught assertive, creative, nonviolent resistance to evil not passive acceptance of it; but he never condoned violence, not even to save his own life.  After Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire Christians abandoned Jesus' teaching of nonviolence.  St. Augustine and others developed the just war doctrine in its place.  Just war doctrine has a long history in Christianity, but it isn't authentically Christian.  Even if it were the Iraq war would not come close to meeting its requirements.

So even if our combat role in Iraq were truly ending we would have nothing to celebrate.  Rather, we have a lesson to learn.  We can never be too vigilant in the cause of peace.  As Christians we can never let the worldly value of power, we can never let what appears to be expediency, we can never let national arrogance or even true national interest deter us from the pursuit of peace.  The way of the world may be a kind of peace through the use of force.  The way of the Christian is the way of true peace through justice.  As we listen to President Obama tonight, let us not forget that truth.

Madness

So it has come to this.  Some fool who calls himself a Christian pastor is planning to burn copies of the Qur'an on September 11, thinking that this act of desecration is an appropriate way to mark that dolorous anniversary.  Anti-Muslim hysteria has gotten completely out of control in this country, stoked by cynical politicians pandering to the basest instincts of the American public, to their fear, and to their ignorance.  I don't expect many Americans to embrace Islam.  For most of us it isn't our faith tradition.  It isn't the religion within which most Americans find their connection with God.  Fair enough.  It isn't my faith tradition either.  But is it too much to expect people to become informed about a subject before they shoot off their mouths about it in public?  Is it too much to expect people to consider how an unfair attack on Islam will be received in the Islamic world, a world already filled with more than enough tension and more than enough reason to be suspicious of American motives?

The anti-Muslim hysteria that is being stirred up today relies upon the palpably false assertion that the September 11 attacks accurately reflect the teachings of Islam.  That they do not is apparent to anyone who expends even a modicum of effort to learn what Islam really is.  There are things about Islam that we can legitimately question.  The Prophet Mohammad was, among other things, a military leader; and he did not categorically reject violence the way Jesus did.  Rather, he approved the defensive use of force in the cause of justice, much as Christian just war doctrine has done since the early fifth century.  His teaching, like Christian just war doctrine, prohibits causing the death of innocent noncombatants.  Today's Islamist terrorists violate that teaching with abandon.  Islam strictly prohibits suicide, another teaching the terrorists have ignored as they lure gullible and desperate people into acts of suicide with the specious promise of a reward in paradise.  Islam did not commit the atrocities of September 11.  Terrorists did.  Why is that so hard for Americans to understand?

There is a movement under way to have Christian pastors read from the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, during worship on Sunday, September 12.  I intend to do so.  Sura 1, the very beginning of the Qur'an, is an appropriate reading.  There are many others.  I urge my pastoral colleagues to find something of value in Islam's holy scripture to read on September 12 as an act of solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters and an act of defiance toward all the purveyors of hatred who are so vocal among us today, especially those masquerading as Christian clergy.

The Joy of Learning

It is the conventional wisdom in church circles that the critical approach to scripture, that is, applying the techniques of the so-called Higher Criticism to the Bible, destroys faith and drives people away from the church. Although the critical approach to the Bible has been the norm in mainline seminaries for a century or more, very few laypeople in the churches know anything about it because seminary graduates have not taught it to their parishioners.  As a result most laypeople have a simplistic understanding of the Bible and of the Christian faith, even in the formerly mainline denominations.  Yet my experience tells me that this conventional church wisdom is simply wrong.

For the past couple of years or so I have led a lectionary Bible study at Merrill Gardens, the retirement community in Monroe, WA.  We moved the study from Monroe Congregational UCC to Merrill Gardens when three of the church members who participated moved to that retirement facility.  The weekly study continues, but the church members for whom we moved it no longer participate due to death, advanced age, or illness.  The people attending it now are residents of Merrill Gardens with little or no other connection with Monroe Congregational UCC.  They are all in their eighties at least.  They come from diverse backgrounds.  One is from Germany and of unspecified religious background.  One (the most faithful attendee) is a Southern Baptist.  One is an ELCA Lutheran.  The religious experience of the others remains unknown.

Every week they hear the critical approach to the Bible from me.  They hear about the cultural and historical setting of the lectionary texts.  They learn the contradictions in the Bible.  They learn that the Bible contains a great many points of view and theologies and does not tell a single, unified, consistent story.  They learn that in many of its verses the Bible reflects an ancient world view that we do not share.  They hear stories described as myths.  They hear of truths that are not factual.  They hear other religious traditions described as containing truth rather than of Christianity as the only truth.  They get introduced to some of the linguistic niceties and ambiguities in the Biblical texts.  They hear the word "God" defined as a symbol that points beyond itself to a transcendent spiritual dimension of reality that it can never adequately define.  They hear religion defined as a system of symbols and myths through which we find our connection with that transcendent spiritual reality.  And it is clear that all of this is entirely new to them.  No one has ever shared this information with them before.

According to the conventional wisdom that approach should have driven them away from the group.  It hasn't.  The group has grown significantly lately.  True, one person dropped out because she considers Monroe Congregational UCC too "open minded".   But the people who come are captivated by the new (to them) approach they are learning.  They can't tell me often enough how they enjoy and appreciate the group and me.  These elderly folks are sponges for knowledge, knowledge they had no inkling even existed.  These are not a new generation of Christians that we might expect to be more open to the critical approach.  They have been Christians for decades.  They are the people pastors and preachers have been afraid to introduce to the critical approach; yet they can't get enough of it.  It excites them.  It inspires them.  They love it.

There are of course people who the critical approach will drive away from the church.  That's not necessarily a bad thing.  There are lots of churches out there still purveying the simplistic, factual approach to Christianity.  But the churches formerly known as mainline are in desperate need of revival.  The critical approach has revived Monroe Congregational UCC.  It is finding an eager reception among the retirees at Merrill Gardens.  It can revive the church if we will just get over the idea that the people can't handle it.  They can.  They do.  I've seen it.  Thanks be to God.

Welcome to My Blog

I have created this blog as a forum for discussing theological issues like those raised in my book Liberating Christianity:  Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon, 2008.  I will also from time to time post other things I write--essays, sermons, pastoral letters, letters to the editor, letters to politicians, original comments for the blog, and so on.  This is a personal blog.  The opinions stated in it are my personal opinions. They are not intended to express the opinions of anyone other than myself.

One of my great frustrations these days is the difficulty I find in spreading the word that there is a better kind of Christianity than the Christianity most people know.  Perhaps this blog will be a small step toward solving this problem.  If you like what you read here, tell your friends.  If you don't like what you read here, tell your friends too.  We don't need to listen only to voices with which we agree.

I am convinced that both the country that I love and the ancient faith in which I find my connection with God and to which I have devoted my life are badly off course.  Of American politics about all we need to say to sum up the problem is that today uninformed, bigoted, superficial politicians like Sarah Palin are taken seriously.  Palin and the "tea party" movement to which she panders together with most of the current Republican presidential candidates are jokes.  In a healthy political climate they would immediately be laughed off the stage.  The Republican party offers no alternative for our nation other than tax cuts for the very rich and more of the Republican policies of the past thirty years that have nearly bankrupted the country (President Clinton having done nothing significantly to change the disastrous policies of his two Republican predecessors).  Republican politicians pander to American xenophobia and racism, cynically stirring up the basest instincts of the American people for their own political gain.  They are hypocrites about the federal budget deficit.  They want to take away many of the rights Americans have worked so long and hard to attain or are now working to attain.  Not that the Democrats are much better.  In President Obama and the current Congressional leadership we have not "change we can believe in" but a continuation of President Bush's disastrous, militaristic foreign policy in Afghanistan and "reforms," such as the recent health care reform that is based on worn out Republican ideas, ideas that Richard Nixon advanced forty years ago and that Republican Mitt Romney got enacted in Massachusetts.  That isn't real reform, it's delivering millions of new customers to the insurance companies.  It isn't change we can believe in.  The American political climate keeps drifting farther and farther to the obscurantist right, a drift that benefits only the wealthy and the big corporations.  Unless the country changes course, and does it soon, I tremble to think what the consequences will be for our nation and for our world.

In Liberating Christianity I analyze the crisis of Christianity today and offer some solutions.  I won't repeat here what I say there.  If you haven't read it, please do.  It is widely available on line, including from the publisher at wipfandstock.com.  Suffice it to say here that religious literalism is killing the Abrahamic faiths.  Literalism, or what might better be called factualism, taking the words of scripture and of doctrine as fact, renders religion unintelligible and unacceptable to most people today.  If the monotheistic faiths are to survive we must recapture the ancient understanding of symbol and myth that opens us to the wonder, the awe, of an ultimately unknowable yet infinitely gracious God.

May this blog be a small part of these efforts.

Peace.