Opinions

Bonhoeffer and Pacifism

Courage and cruelty, honor and horror, miraculous escapes and damning coincidences are the stuff of film and novel, but also — at singular moments of history, for some few people — the stuff of life. In the wild days of World War II, a mild-mannered young German pastor, a theologian of some note and a… more »

Just Peacemaking in the Context of Terrorism and Nuclear Threat

For too long, people have interpreted Jesus’ teachings of peacemaking practices as Platonic ideals, high and beautiful, but not practical in real life. But when Jesus taught the leaders in Jerusalem that they needed to practice peacemaking or the temple would be destroyed, he was talking realistically about a real threat and about the practical… more »

Love and War in the Early Church

We shouldn’t be surprised that the early church struggled with the morality of war. Protestants, like myself, too often assume that the return to the sources demanded by Renaissance humanists and the European reformers necessarily renders earlier better, or at least simpler. It is my contention that while we should recognize the important insights of… more »

War as the Perversion of Creation

In the beginning, God created all things, and He saw that all of them were good. Above creation, God set man as a steward. We were told to watch over creation and utilize it wisely and responsibly to further God’s purposes. The Lord wills that we be fruitful and multiply, and so we farm the… more »

Let Them Sing: Being Christian in a World of War

The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’ – Matthew 25:40

Gripping his beloved guitar, 20-year-old Bawi Shin Thang arrived in Spokane, Washington in September 2008. Captured by the Myanmar military junta after they burned his Chin Nation… more »

The Church, Israel, and the End Times: Issues with Rapture Theology

One of the distinctive features of popular American Christian eschatology is belief in a pretribulational rapture, “a Second Coming [of Christ]… known only to believers and resulting in their deliverance from earth,”[1] which will precede the “great tribulation” mentioned in the book of Matthew[2].  A number of works about the rapture, including Hal Lindsey’s The… more »

In Memory: Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

Father Richard John Neuhaus lived an inimitable, outsized, and altogether unlikely life, starting from a small town in Ontario and winding up as probably the most influential Christian American intellectual and clergyman since Reinhold Niebuhr. The obits in the newspapers point first to the many conversions in his life — from protesting the war in… more »