But this isn’t the God of the Bible. In this text, we have a God who is constantly in conversation with humans and an active participant in the events in their lives, both as the subject and object of influence. He is sensitive to the sighs of His creations, touched by their griefs, and affected by the consequences of their actions.

Consider the events which unfolded in the midst of perhaps the greatest crisis of King Hezekiah of Judah’s reign. One day, while Hezekiah lay bedridden, God told His prophet Isaiah to go to Hezekiah in his bedchamber and tell him the outcome of his illness. The news of impending death could not have come at a worse point in Hezekiah’s life. At this time, Jerusalem was in imminent danger at the hands of the king of Assyria, and Hezekiah still lacked an heir. If he died, who knows what havoc and confusion the Israeli nation would be thrown into, without a descendant of David to lead them?

Hezekiah turns his face to the wall in despair. He bitterly weeps out the following prayer, “Remember, O Lord, how I have walked before you faithfully and with wholehearted devotion and have done what is good in your eyes.” His prayer is answered — before the prophet Isaiah even left the middle court of the palace. This is significant because it shows that immediately after Isaiah left him alone, Hezekiah turned to God, and immediately after Hezekiah uttered the last word of his prayer, God responded through Isaiah. “I have heard your prayer and seen your tears,” God says to Hezekiah. God took the human time to listen to Hezekiah’s lament and then displayed a cosmological efficiency by acting in the micro-second after a finished prayer.

After God heard Hezekiah’s prayer, He reversed the prior sentence of death and gave Hezekiah 15 more years to live. He also swore to Hezekiah that the mortal enemy of the Israelites, the Assyrians, would not take Jerusalem. Three years later, Hezekiah’s wife, Hephzibah, gave birth to a son. And seven centuries later, Hezekiah’s descendant Joseph married the mother of Jesus. God used Hezekiah’s seed to bring about the birth of His own Son.

Admittedly, God does not answer in this expedient way in most instances. There are times in a person’s life when serious faith through long, arduous nights seems unrewarded and even mocked by the unanswering air. On the one thousandth utterance of the same desperate plea, a weary pilgrim fraught with the burdens and sighs of one thousand nights begins to doubt either the power of his own prayers or the ability of God in answering them. Are our groans short of the bitterness and gravity of Hezekiah’s? Or is God truly uninterested in the state of our affairs? No wonder there are many who resort to a classical theist God of inaction, immutability, and invulnerability to explain his seeming absence.

But this view of God is not equal to the God of Hezekiah and of the Bible who plays an alternately effectuating and responsive role. A counterview to the problem of an apathetic God asserts that, because He is omniscient and knows what’s best for us, we should allow God room to answer “No,” or, “Wait.” God knows which of our desires are good and which are stumbling blocks, and God, like a father, desires to give to his children only the gifts which are good for them. God also knows when we are unready for a specific fulfillment of prayer and waits for us to grow and mature into readiness before He hands us the inheritance we have been asking for.

This is the rational answer, at least, but it may not be immediately emotionally or spiritually satisfying. We can reasonably intellectualize that God must be an ever-present being, but we do not always feel that He is eternally acting with our best future in mind. Even when we are told that God does strain his ears to hear our weeping and does send answers to our tears, we may still have doubts about the sufficiency of those answers, especially when they are so different in timing and shape than what we envision. How can the answer, “Wait,” be satisfying to us who live in the present? How can we emerge from another uneventful hour spent on our knees to say that it is good to be the supplicant?

Perhaps we can find the answers to these questions when we shift our attention away from ourselves and onto someone in a similar situation, someone who may be able to provide complete empathy and solid support, if not a perfect solution. Let’s look to the Son of God, our sympathizer, and there we shall find that even the prayers of God’s own Son were not always answered according to the Son’s wishes. They were, however, always answered with deference to God’s sovereignty. The first of two last requests Jesus made of God his father was that his Church would be one. He lifted his face toward heaven and literally pleaded with God, over and over again. “That they may be one…That they may be one…” Later that night, in an obscure garden, Jesus would pray another prayer three times right before his arrest: “Abba, Father, take this cup from me.” Jesus is still patiently waiting for the first prayer to be answered. But the response he got to his second prayer was simply, “No. My will is thus.” If Jesus, our paradigm, had to contend with these unwished-for responses from God, perhaps they are the rightful answers to some of our own invocations, and, like Jesus, we should not be fazed by their lackluster appearance or brand God as coolly impassive.

Having recognized that God’s will was not to take away the pain of Judgment, Jesus bent his will to the will of His Father and carried the Cross to Calvary. As a result, God was killed in the act of taking on all the pain and blame of the fault-ridden actions of His creation. The Godhead was torn asunder as Jesus descended into Hades because of our sins. Classical theism takes the divine characteristics of the Christian God, transcendent, self-sufficient, and eternal, and paints an incomplete picture of Him, because classical theism forgets this — God is vulnerable in his relationship with his creation. With Christ’s ascension and conquest of death, we have a God who is utterly affected by our actions.

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Ruirui Kuang ‘12, a History concentrator living in Mather House, is the Assistant Design Editor of The Ichthus.

Risking his standing with the religious establishment, Christ preached radical teachings that confounded the Pharisees.  Gambling his image with society, he frequently crossed cultural and social taboos to eat with the lowest of the low, teaching his followers to do the same.  By investing in twelve uneducated Galileans who were prone to failure, Jesus, fully human, risked his own expectations and patience.  And ultimately with Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, he risked and gave his life for us sinners.  From the life of Jesus Christ, we see what true boldness looks like—a willingness and readiness to risk all aspects of our lives for the sake of the Gospel, fully confident that the sovereign God reigns over our actions.

There is a great difference between a professor teaching military tactics and the field commander leading his men against the enemy.  The boldness of Jesus is manifest in his entire life, not merely his words.  Jesus lived with those to whom he ministered.  He shared his entire life with them, eating with sinners and tax collectors (Matt. 9:10) and sitting down with adulterers (John 4).  Investment and risk go hand-in-hand—one’s investments reflect the risks that one is willing to take.  Jesus certainly possessed the wisdom and power to be a famous and popular teacher.  Yet Jesus’ foremost investment is not in his popularity or image.  Jesus chooses to live a humble, impoverished life among the sinners that he sought to save.  To teach with great wisdom or to give grand displays of power would bring no risk to Jesus.  Instead, he lives boldly by patiently investing his life in relationships, risking disappointment, betrayal, and sorrow.  His model of ministry actively engaged in risk because he sought to invest in broken and sinful people.  Through Christ, we see that the God of the universe is bold enough to take on flesh, exposing himself to all the risks brought forth with life surrounded by sin.

The greatest risk and the greatest evidence of boldness in Christ’s ministry is his willingness to form meaningful relationships.  A televangelist may boldly preach the gospel to millions, yet form relationships with none.  The man at a busy subway station may boldly distribute tracts to hundreds of travelers, yet a printed tract does very little in terms of relationship.  Relationships simply cost more.  They take time and energy and are unpredictable.  Rather than explain to people who he is, Jesus connected and invested in people in order to show them who he is.

Before ascending to heaven, Jesus does not command us to preach from afar, but rather He commands us to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19a).  The purpose of evangelism is not merely to make converts, but disciples.  The word matheteuo is a command to make learners, people who will be trained by other Christians.  Jesus devoted time to teaching the Twelve, explaining his parables and challenging their faith (Luke 8:9, Matt. 14:29).  The Apostle Paul invested so much in Timothy that Timothy became like a son to him (Phil. 2:22).  In the Great Commission, we are commanded to invest in relationships for the purpose of maintaining lifelong growth in Christ, and such an investment carries heavy risks.  Actively seeking to reflect Christ and advance the Gospel in our relationships in the face of rejection or disappointment demonstrates a constant and internalized boldness.

Given the centrality of building relationships, where do we see Christians act boldly on campus?  Perhaps a student goes out on a limb and invites a friend to church, at risk of introducing an awkward dynamic to a friendship.  Some may take small stands for the faith in conversations with classmates or professors.  The particularly bold may loudly preach the gospel open-air during campus outreach events. Actions such as these mean very little in isolation.  What would be the point of engaging in a “bold Christian event” once a year, but then avoid risks the rest of the year?  Jesus knows the state of our hearts, and it is that internalized boldness that matters.  At the same time, it is better to engage in a modest act of boldness than to do nothing at all.  The simplest solution for feeling reluctant to be more vocal about Jesus amongst friends, for example, is to go out on a limb and take a small stand for the faith.  There is no easy way around doing something—one simply must do. As these small stands become habitual, this will naturally lead to the development of an internalized attitude of boldness.

A natural consequence of a bold life is that people will notice. As Jesus began his ministry in Galilee, “a report about him went out through all the surrounding country” (Luke 4:14).  A woman who fought her way through a crowd because she believed that just by touching Jesus’ robe, she would be healed (Luke 8:46).  Five thousand men followed Jesus as He traveled around the Sea of Galilee because they recognized Jesus as a healer (Mark 6:32).  Even a centurion knew of Jesus’ reputation for healing, asking Jesus, “Say the word, and my servant will be healed” (Matt. 8:7).  Clearly, Jesus became well known during his ministry as a great healer and a teacher with authority. This image of boldness naturally follows His actions.

In considering what it means to be bold, from the condition of our hearts to the decisions we make, we cannot underestimate importance of faith—the confidence that God reigns over our actions.  We can be bold because we know that the One who calls us to be bold now sits on a throne in Heaven.  We know that our hope is in Christ and that He is and will be victorious.  Because of the redemptive work of Christ, we have nothing to fear, freeing us to be bold.  We also cannot emphasize the importance of being filled with the Spirit.  The love of Christ enables us to sustain even the most difficult relationships.  The wisdom that comes from the Spirit enables us to act appropriately.  The Spirit also supplies us with the courage to even act at all.  We cannot be bold without the sustaining love of Christ, perfectly expressed when He died for us.  I just pray that we would be bold enough to live for Him.

As the famous verse goes, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Phil. 4:13, NKJV)

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Tony Shen ‘12, a Neurobiology concentrator living in Quincy House, is Special Projects Coordinator for The Ichthus.

The standard responses to the problem of evil focus on the third part of the equation, God as all-good.  In order for good to exist there must also be evil.  Good would not make any sense or have any meaning without the absence of good with which to compare it.  Moreover, moral evil is the result of human free will, which is necessary to show the full glory of God. God is glorified when God’s creation voluntarily chooses God.  Evil is an unfortunate consequence of the path to a higher good.  Another response claims that evil is the training ground for the good.  We learn from bad things and become better and more mature humans as a result.  The journey towards our final unity with God depends on our moral training through experiencing and reacting to evil.  Yet one more response asserts that the good is beyond our conception.  God sees all.  God is behind all things.  Everything happens for a reason and fits into God’s grand design.  What might seem evil to us might be good from the perspective of God.  Our role is to grin and bear it.

Liberal theologians in the 20^th century asked whether there was not another way forward.  Perhaps instead of solving the problem of evil by re-examining what we mean by good, we can address the problem of evil by reconsidering our notion of God as all-powerful.  These thinkers assert that our common conception of God as transcendent and eternally unchanged owe far more to Greek philosophy than to the Bible.  The God of the Bible is not unaffected by human action.  The God of the Bible seeks out relationship with humanity.  There is a certain symbiosis between God and creation.  After all, God makes a covenant with Abraham.  God chooses Israel to be God’s own people.  Abraham negotiates with God to avert the destruction of Sodom if there are only ten good people in the city.  God speaks through the prophets to warn Israel of destruction and to call the nation back into proper relationship.  In the New Testament, one of the defining aspects of Jesus’ relation with God is its intimacy.  Jesus calls God “Abba” or Father.  Christians believe that God’s Word became incarnate in Christ in order to restore relationship and reveal God more fully to humanity.  None of these portraits of God present God as unchangeable and atemporal.  God changes over time; God evolves alongside creation and in relationship with creation.

This untraditional view of God and God’s relationship with creation is supported by a particular reading of Genesis 1.  The standard translation of the first verse of Genesis reads, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.”  Yet, more recent translators, including the highly respected Jewish Publication Society and the translating committee of the New Revised Standard Version, opt for a different reading.  The NRSV reads, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” (emphasis added).  The key word is “when.”  If you read these first verses as one sentence and if you make the first verse a dependent clause, then the beginning lines of Genesis argue for pre-existent matter.  God’s role in creation is not to create something out of nothing, but to order the “formless void” into something intelligible.  God is not absolutely powerful.  Matter existed before God.  For certain liberal Christians this creation myth contains an important theological lesson: God is not the only force in creation.

All of this reasoning leads to interesting conclusions when you begin to reconsider the problem of evil.  If creation is not wholly dependent on God, then an earthquake does not have to be “an act of God” but can be simply two tectonic plates rubbing against each other without any inference from God whatsoever.  Cancer does not have to be a result of the will of God but can be merely the mutation of an oncogene.  You also no longer have to say that human evil derives from a mythical “fall” in some past time.  If God is all-good and if God created everything out of nothing, then the original state of nature had to be likewise all-good.  You must posit a fall from that original state in order to justify evil in God’s all-good creation.  In the liberal scheme that I have outlined, you no longer have to invent some pre-historic fall, which becomes theologically problematic when you try to make it into a pure myth.  Instead, you can claim that creation, of its own, seeks chaos; it seeks to return to its original state of “formless void.”  God creates order and invites humanity towards the way of God, which is the way of love.  God desires a relationship with humanity, but humans have the free will to say no.

The great benefit of this system is that it maintains the fundamental goodness of God above all else.  God is good without question.  God does not will your son or daughter to die of cancer or some freak accident.  God did not sit by and let the Holocaust happen.  God did not curse the people of Haiti with an earthquake because of a two hundred year old pact with the Devil.  God is love and God works to bring order and goodness to creation.  God is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being” and not some absolute monarch who rules over all of the universe, rewarding friends and punishing foes. Jesus instantiates the love of God for us.  Jesus does not compel us but invites us into fellowship with him, just like God.  Whether or not you agree with this view of God, it is at least worthy of consideration.
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Reverend Jonathan Page is the Epps Fellow at Memorial Church and a Chaplain to Harvard College.

Why is that? How did a religion that offers so many reasons to be happy develop communities so lacking in joy? In a spirit of good cheer, I’d like to skip over criticizing others and, instead, briefly review the reasons we have to celebrate. My conviction is that as we develop a theology of joy, God will transform us into a heroically joyful people.

To begin this theological project, we can start with the opening words of Scripture, which teaches that the whole universe, in all of its indescribable grandeur and awesome beauty, was created by an incredibly powerful and good God. The abundant extravagance of this creation involved making over 350,000 species of beetles alone. The apex of all God’s creative work, though, was us – with spleens, brains that are 80 percent water, and twenty-some feet of intestines wrapped up inside. We are, by some terrific mystery, made in the very image of this Creator God. So before we even get out of Genesis 2, Christians have a lot to celebrate! After all, “and God saw that it was good” seven times.

Admittedly, evil and injustice make the third chapter of our Scriptures a sobering wake-up call. But the Bible offers us moral clarity and guidance for navigating an all-too-ambiguous and confusing world. Our answers to the burning question of our age won’t have a paint-by-numbers simplicity, but let’s be happy that Jesus taught us the Golden Rule! Moreover, after battling night and day against injustice with all the goodness, love, and kindness we can muster from the strength that God provides, isn’t it truly wonderful to get together with others to remember that God delivered a subversively fatal blow to evil through Christ’s death and resurrection?

And this is just the beginning! The Bible gives us dozens of other reasons to be glad, from the gift of the Holy Spirit to the promise of heaven to a daily intimacy with our Father in heaven. We need to draw deeply from these sources of truth if we are to recover a thoroughgoing joy in our communities. As we recover these promises for our lives, we also need to become relentlessly courageous and imaginative.

We need to be courageous because theology is useless if it doesn’t become deep-seated conviction. In the midst of adverse situations, it will take courageous, bold men and women to stand on and live out a joyful theology. Maintaining perspective is hardest when you get thrown into the mud. So without hardiness of character and close friends to encourage us, we’re going to get pulled back into the same old way of life. Choosing joy, no matter what, because of who God is and what He has done, takes real nerve.

We’re also going to need to imagine a different kind of joy. The syrupy-sweet, Jesus-is-a-friend-of-mine act isn’t going to cut it. Standing out like that is just annoying. We need a resilient joy that can sustain us through suffering, loss, hardship, persecution, and sacrifice. We need an enduring joy that isn’t rooted in material abundance or academic success or landing the hottest summer internship, a comforting joy that can coexist with feelings of grief, sadness, anger, and disappointment without being overwhelmed. In short, we need to recover and develop a genuinely theological set of reasons to be happy in Christ, the kind of ideas that can withstand any circumstances because they’re rooted in the soil of Scripture.

I’ve outgrown some of my happiest childhood memories, precious as they are. And I’ve come to learn that circumstantial happiness really does come and go. But I know I’ll never outgrow
contemplating and celebrating the goodness of the Living God. Those are the truths that can sustain  our joy in every situation. May our theology develop us into a heroically joyful people!
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Carson Wietnauer works with the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship.

If God is omniscient, are our actions truly free? The Bible leaves no question of God’s omniscience or our free will. Yet if God’s knowledge is perfect, then it seems that He must know everything we will do before we do it. And if we have no alternative but to do what God already knows we will do, it looks like we have no choice in the matter. We are thus presented with a problem. The thesis that “infallible foreknowledge of a human act makes the act necessary and hence unfree” is known as theological fatalism.1,2

The argument for theological fatalism goes as follows:

1. God knows, with certainty, everything in the past, present, and future.

2. Therefore, at time t = -1, God knew that Jack would go up the hill at time t = 1.

3. Because the past is unchangeable, Jack cannot change God’s knowledge at t = -1 that he would go up the hill at t = 1.

4. If Jack cannot choose to behave in a different way, then he does not have the ability to freely exercise his will in the matter.

5. Therefore, Jack cannot go up the hill freely.

A typical response to this problem is to declare that God is timeless and thus not capable of being understood within our conception of time. As C.S. Lewis puts in Mere Christianity:

“Suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call ‘tomorrow’ is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call today. All the days are ‘Now’ for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday, He simply sees you doing them: because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not. He does not ‘foresee’ you doing things tomorrow, He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow’s actions in just the same way – because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already ‘Now’ for Him.”3

In the context of the above argument, it seems that Lewis denies the second premise because he believes that God’s timelessness means He cannot be described as being (or knowing) at a particular time t. Perhaps this response even seems reasonable considering that God created the universe of space-time and thus (we might think) must exist outside of it. Yet Lewis’s explanation of the nature of God’s timelessness fails to resolve the issue because it is based on an inadequate understanding of God’s perspective. It depends on the idea that God experiences everything in the present, in the now.

Yet if He is beyond the time-line, then He isn’t experiencing all events as “in the now”; He should instead be seeing all of the points on the time-line at once. And if He is observing all the points on the time-line, then the points must be fixed in place. If the points are fixed in place, then it seems that it is outside of our power to change them. God may not “foresee” our actions from his perspective, but he certainly “foresees” them from ours.

Although Lewis rejects premise 2 from God’s perspective, it is still true from Jack’s and our perspective. The claim is that because God is timeless, He cannot be characterized as knowing future events at a prior point in time. That is, God only knows what occurs at time t = 1 because he observes it happening at that time. Yet because He lies beyond the time-line and can observe the actions at all points on it, He should see the events at time t = 1 before they occur. A better characterization from our time-bound perspective is that God knows all the events at all points. At time = -1, God does know what Jack will do. At the point at which Jack is deliberating whether or not to go up the hill, God already knows the outcome he will choose. There are a few ways to try to escape this problem. Lewis could reject the first premise and claim that God chooses not to observe the time-line beyond the particular point in time that Jack is experiencing. He could claim that even if God knows all of our actions, He does not force us to choose the particular action that we take. Yet both of these solutions would require arguments beyond God’s timelessness. The argument by timelessness alone cannot resolve the apparent contradiction of foreknowledge and free will.

[1] Zabzebski, Linda. “Foreknowledge and Free Will.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Mar 13, 2008 <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-willforeknowledge/#2.5>.

[2] It is important to note that the lack of free will stems from foreknowledge and not from causal determinism. God’s timeless nature implies that he should be aware of the future and what our actions will be, not that his infinite knowledge of the past enables him to predict by a causal chain what will occur. If it were the case that free will were denied because one’s actions are contingent solely upon one’s past experiences, then God would be entirely unnecessary to the discussion. Determinism alone would suffice. However, I am unaware of any passage in the Bible that would justify determinism, and therefore I will not discuss it here.

[3] Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. HarperCollins Edition 2001. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Print.

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Jordan Monge ‘12, a Philosophy and Religious Studies concentrator living in Currier House, is the Opinions Editor of </em>The Ichthus.

The key to Bonhoeffer’s thought is an understanding of what he means by “deeds of free responsibility for the sake of the other.” [1] The necessity of a situation can call for acts of violence (hence, an individual is called to be “responsible”), but this does not mitigate the sin entailed in violence (hence, the act is “free”, not ordered by the law of God).

There is now no law behind which the responsible man can take cover, and there is, therefore, also no law which can compel the responsible man to take any particular decision in the face of such necessities. In this situation there can only be the complete renunciation of every law, together with the knowledge that here one must make one’s decision as a free venture, together also with the open admission that here the law is being infringed and violated and that necessity knows no commandment. [2]

Bonhoeffer here is talking about “law” in two different senses. In the first sentence, he points out that violence cannot be mandated as part of the normal course of life. The decision to take violent steps for “the greater good” can never be formulated as a strict law to be followed; all violence must be seen as nonnormative action. Choosing the lesser of two evils should not be the course charted out in everyday life; it is reserved for extraordinary circumstances, when all other choices fail. The second sentence takes law instead to mean both “generally accepted moral principles” [3] and the call of conscience, which traces itself back to some “universal law of good.” [4] Although these laws must sometimes be broken by the responsible person, necessity does not expiate the guilt of their violation. Bonhoeffer rejects the attitude that places the individual’s own holiness and guiltlessness at the center of his action, rather than the well-being of others.

Living for the other, Bonhoeffer says, is simply following the example of Christ, who is the perfect “man for others” [5]. Because Christ did not live for himself, but lived for us, so too we must not live for ourselves. Bonhoeffer points out, “Jesus is not concerned with the proclamation and realization of new ethical ideals; he is not concerned with Himself being good (Matt. 19:17); he is concerned solely with love for the real man, and for that reason he is able to enter into the fellowship of the guilt of men and take the burden of their guilt upon Himself.” [6] However, Bonhoeffer’s explanation is deeply problematic. The fact remains that Christ was “tempted in every way, just as we are — yet was without sin” (Heb 4:15). Moreover, He calls us to be “perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48). If this is so, how can we justify breaking God’s law? How is any possible rationalization of violence adequate?

This is a difficult objection and cannot be sidestepped. It is not right to say that we must give up our convictions and break God’s laws for the sake of the “greatest good.” Similar arguments have been used to justify atrocities. On the other hand, the Great Commandment, to love others as you love yourself, is “the entire law summed up in a single command” (Galatians 5:14). There seems no clear way to decide what to do when absolute purity and love for the other conflict. Bonhoeffer’s answer is that “this does not mean an everlasting conflict, but the winning of ultimate unity; for indeed the foundation, the essence and the goal of concrete responsibility is the same Jesus Christ who is the Lord of conscience.” [7] If one’s conscience, which is bound to the law, is subservient to Christ, who is the ultimate example of free responsibility, then somehow the two can be reconciled. Bonhoeffer points not to ideals or principles, but to the person of Jesus, our example and Lord. It is by looking to Him alone, not to a formula, that we can resolve the tension inherent in the decision to violate laws for the sake of others.

How, then, can Bonhoeffer’s thought help us to live our lives? After all, as Bonhoeffer points out, there can be no concrete guidelines set out beforehand to govern when violence should be used. He cannot help us to decide when we must use it, and when to abstain. Perhaps the greatest benefit of Bonhoeffer’s argument is not to give practical help on deciding when violence must be used, but to guard against two different, competing views. The first is the argument of strict pacifists, that we must never stoop to any sort of violence whatsoever, even if it seems to be for the most just cause. Bonhoeffer argues that to refuse to take on guilt for the sake of others is to refuse to follow the example of Christ. On the other hand, his argument also guards against the mistake of those who say that violence should simply be another ordinary aspect of life. Violence of necessity must be used under only extraordinary circumstances. It must not be countenanced except when absolutely necessary for the good of others, and even then it is not a morally easy choice. The difficulty of this is, of course, in the contingency of it all; it would be much easier to simply say that either violence is never acceptable or that it is always acceptable, provided it is used in a well-intentioned way.

However, life constantly presents situations that are not simple or morally clear; the nuance of Bonhoeffer’s thought fits the complexity of the world. Bonhoeffer’s thought, which led to such heroic and costly action done for the sake of others, tells us where we can stand: not fixed in strict obedience to unbending laws, nor in a chaos of relativity without recourse, but looking to the lordship of Jesus Christ.

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[1] This concept is elucidated in Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Reality and Resistance, by Larry

Rasmussen (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005).

[2] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. New York: Macmillan, 1955, pp. 208-209.

[3] Ethics p. 207.

[4] Ethics p. 212.

[5] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. New York: Macmillan, 1953,

p. 210.

[6] Ethics, pp. 209-210.

[7] Ethics, p. 216.

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Anne Goetz ‘ll, an English concentrator in Pforzheimer House, is Books & Arts Editor of The Ichthus.

For too long, people have treated Jesus’ teachings of peacemaking practices as if they were general principles. This diverts us from building our houses on the rock — actually living out Jesus’ words.

What is Just Peacemaking?

We have fashioned just peacemaking by beginning with Jesus’ teachings of peacemaking practices — as the way of realism — and connecting with analogous effective practices in our time. Our ten just peacemaking practices are concrete practices that are working in real history to prevent the destruction of war. Each just peacemaking practice is a historically contextualized teaching of Jesus analogously contextualized for our time. And each is being demonstrated to work effectively to prevent numerous wars, as attested by recent historical experience and the disciplines of political science and international relations. The new paradigm with its practices was developed by thirty interdenominational Christian ethicists and international relations specialists — the majority supporters of just war theory, and the minority pacifists — and is now being adapted by leading Muslim and Jewish scholars, based on the texts of their faiths. [1] We do not agree on the justice of making wars, but we agree on the need to prevent wars by specific practices that work. The ten practices of just peacemaking are:

1.   (Mt 5:38-42) Support nonviolent direct action, as practiced by Mohatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent direct action has toppled dictators such as Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the Shah in Iran, and Erich Honecker in East Germany. It is based on Jesus’ way of transforming initiatives.

2.   (Mt. 5:38-42) Take independent initiatives, as developed by the social psychologist Charles Osgood. This practice is how President George Bush senior and Gorbachev got rid of half their nuclear weapons.

3.   (Mt. 5:21-26) Use cooperative conflict resolution. President Carter used this practice to achieve peace in the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel; many other negotiations have prevented wars. [2]

4.   (Mt. 7:1-5) Acknowledge responsibility for conflict and injustice and seek repentance and forgiveness. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa used this practice to end longstanding historical injustices, and president Obama is nudging Turkey to use it to heal deep resentment over the Armenian genocide in 1915.

5.   (Mt. 6:19-33) Advance human rights, religious liberty, and democracy. During the 20th century, democracies with human rights fought no wars against one another.

6.   (Mt. 6:19-33) Foster just and sustainable economic development. Political scientist Ted Gurr has demonstrated that the most frequent cause of intranational violence, civil war, insurgency, and terrorism is not absolute poverty, but deprivation relative to expectations. [3]

7.   (Mt. 5:43ff.) Work with cooperative forces in the international system. International cooperation is crucial for progress toward abolishing nuclear weapons worldwide.

8.   (Mt. 5:43ff.) Strengthen the United Nations and international efforts for cooperation and human rights. Unilateral policies cause more wars. The unilateral policies of the previous U.S. administration have demonstrated the point, engaging the U.S. in the War on Terrorism, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War. This calls for the present administration to engage in healing initiatives of cooperation.

9.   (Mt. 26:52) Reduce offensive weapons and weapons trade. Reducing offensive weapons, especially nuclear weapons, and also the arms trade in weapons to developing countries, makes war less likely.

10.   Encourage grassroots peacemaking groups (Jesus’ strategy of gathering disciples and starting groups in villages). [4]

Just Peacemaking in Today’s World

Can this new paradigm for the ethics of peace and war, Just Peacemaking, guide us to more effective and preventive policy in our time of terrorist threat in the presence of nuclear weapons?

One thing is clear: declaring war on terrorism, on Afghanistan, and on Iraq, while abdicating responsibility for justice for Palestinians and for security for Israel, has not decreased terrorism but increased it. In fact, declaring “war on terrorism” is a euphemism for war on Muslim terrorists and two Muslim nations (Afghanistan and Iraq). The anger of Arabs and Muslims has increased accordingly, along with recruitment of terrorists. The official report of the U.S. Department of State on international terrorism shows the astounding increase in terrorist incidents worldwide since the Iraq War and the torture of prisoners:

208 terrorist attacks caused 625 deaths in 2003;

3,168 attacks caused 1,907 deaths in 2004.

Approximately 14,500 attacks caused 22,605 deaths in 2007.

The just peacemaking practices of human rights and sustainable economic development are crucial for halting recruitment to terrorism. This is how Turkey has basically ended the PKK terrorism of its Kurds. Economists Alan Krueger and Jitka Malecková5 show that “when Palestinian college enrollment doubled in the early 1980s, coinciding with a sharp increase in the unemployment rate for college graduates,” and “the real daily wage of college graduates fell by around 30 percent,” then frustrated and angry Palestinians turned to the popular intifada of 1988. When “the Israeli occupation of the territories and lack of an effective capital market or banking system…prevented the labor markets in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from equilibrating,” the violent intifada of 2000 broke out.

Another thing is clear: avoiding talking with North Korea for seven years, and avoiding talking with Iran ever since the hostage crisis in 1979, while threatening them as the axis of evil, has not decreased their determination to produce plutonium or enrich uranium. North Korea has produced the plutonium for about nine atomic bombs, and tested one bomb. Iran is now enriching uranium to 3.5 percent, enough to run electricity generators, but not to be fissile material in bombs. They would need to enrich to 85 percent for a bomb. Their level of enrichment is being monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. If they expel the IAEC monitors and switch their centrifuges to producing highly enriched uranium, it would take them a month or two to have enough to construct a bomb. It would probably take a couple of years to perfect the technology to build a bomb.

Just peacemaking has a better response than refusing to talk. Its practices of justice, cooperative conflict resolution, and international cooperation are crucial. In fact, the Bush administration, led by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, finally allowed Christopher Hill to talk with the North Korean representative, and in two days he worked out the agreement for them to shut down their reactor and hopefully to give up their plutonium, depending on how relations go during the Obama administration.

Influential editorials in The Wall Street Journal (January 4 and 13, 2007) by seventeen conservative U.S. former national security policy-makers, including George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, James Goodby, and Sam Nunn, declared that the existence of large numbers of nuclear weapons in the world threatens to destroy untold numbers of humankind; and it decreases U.S. security. Today’s problem is preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons into more dangerous hands. They agree that the United States would be far more secure in a nuclear-free world. The power of the U.S. military to deter a conventional attack is more effective than nuclear weapons are against a nuclear attack. This means that if Christians work toward eliminating nuclear weapons, we have influential allies. [6]

These conservative national security experts advocate specific steps: extend key provisions of the 1991 and 2002 treaties verifying and reducing the size of nuclear forces internationally, agree with Russia to move away from operational plans for massive nuclear attacks based on short warning times, ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, affirm the development of the fissile materials cutoff treaty to halt production internationally of nuclear fissile materials for weapons, develop an international system that provides reliable supplies of nuclear fuel for electricity so nations like Iran do not have an incentive to enrich uranium unilaterally, accelerate Nunn-Lugar programs for security for nuclear weapons and for preventing terrorists from acquiring a nuclear bomb, strengthen inspections for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and reach agreement for further reductions in nuclear weapons internationally. The more worldwide reductions in nuclear weapons are achieved, the safer we all are. President Obama has now declared for these steps and has begun to implement them. But unilateral disarmament would not solve the problem. It must be achieved by the just peacemaking practices of international cooperation and cooperative conflict resolution.

Additional Resources

In this space, I cannot explain further how just peacemaking practices help with the threat of nuclear weapons in the context of terrorism. The websites mentioned above help. The book, Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm, (Pilgrim Press) helps more.

See also:

• http://documents.fuller.edu/news/pubs/tnn/2009_spring/1_just_peacemaking.asp.
• “War on Terrorism? A Realistic Look at Alternatives,” in Gerald Schlabach, ed., Just Policing, Not War (Liturgical Press: 2007).
• “Just Peacemaking Reduces Terrorism between Palestine and Israel,” in War in the Bible and Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Richard Hess and Elmer Martens (Eisenbrauns: 2008), 127-148.
• “Humanitarian Intervention, Just Peacemaking and the United Nations,” Concilium: The Return of the Just War, ed. Marìa Pilar Aquino and Dietmar Mieth (London: SCM Press, 2002), 83-93.

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[1] See http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr214.html.

[2] See www.matthew5project.org.

[3] We explain this in the section, “Recruitment of Terrorists,” pp. 5ff. and in chapter 6 of the 2008 edition of Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm.

[4] Every Church a Peace Church (www.ecapc.org) has links to church peace fellowships.

[5] Krueger and Malecková, “Education, Poverty, Political Violence and Terrorism: is there a Causal connection?” manuscript, May, 2002.

[6] See http://twofuturesproject.org/ for the movement toward abolition.

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Glen Stassen is the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, and the co-author of Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context and Just Peacemaking.

In looking for the earliest commentary on war we are met with darkness. We have no accounts of the church’s thinking until the late second-century, and when our historical record begins, discernable Christian views are surprisingly subtle. From the 170s A.D. to the time of Constantine, it does seem clear that most Christians were decidedly anti-militarist. An early martyr, Maximilian, was put to death, for instance, for refusing to become a solider, and writings attributed to the third-century bishop Hippolytus demand that Christians should not become soldiers. Yet we have no evidence of the general acceptance of such a principle or, indeed, evidence that, in the inverse situation, Roman soldiers who converted to Christianity were required to leave military service.

It is worth remembering, of course, that we cannot fully distinguish principle and practice in our interpretation of the distant past. The Roman army’s role in persecution of Christians or a distrust of the lifestyle of soldiers may have generated Christian anti-militarist sentiment as much as thought-through objections to Christian involvement in potential violence.

For answers, the Early Church engaged with the life and teachings of Jesus to determine a morality of war. In seeking to faithfully interpret scripture in its imperial context, the early church did not to resort to proof-texting: the Sermon on the Mount’s injunction to turn the other cheek, for instance, was always interpreted as part of a broader conception of love for God and neighbor. Pastoral concerns, moreover, seemed to play a larger role in developing Christian thinking than systematic theological or ethical inquiry. Specific situations necessitated particular answers: the welcomed reality of soldiers’ conversions was more important, perhaps, than maintaining a single moral position.

Moral discourse about war, therefore, was built from concrete Christian love. Such concreteness led to complexity. While love demands that an individual should not inflict harm, the church came to believe that love calls too for actions that prevent harm, actions that remove harm and actions that promote good. Love does not only call for self-control and individual responsibility, but for constructive action on behalf of others. This would later be classically articulated in the Just-War theory of Augustine.

Christians maintained a strong ethic of self-sacrifice. While most came to accept that love demanded action to prevent harm to others, the use of lethal force was believed unacceptable for self-defense. This logic survived in Christian thought until the middle ages when Thomas Aquinas and others argued that an individual’s own life, as part of God’s good creation, demands protection. To love one’s neighbor as oneself means that one’s life has value. Action to protect one’s life is therefore right, even if it results in the aggressor’s death.

When love is understood as demanding the preventing and removing of harm, human judgment needs to be exercised. There must be discernment of what is just. There must be ways of determining, for example, who is in the wrong when violence occurs. Potential victims need protection.

Now, it seems a certain level of humility is required in any such calculation. All too often in Christian history, there has been too great a certainty in the identification of the transgressor. The zeal to righteous action carries dangers. We should remember, in Ronald Baintons’ words, that in disputes among Christians it is the saints who burn the saints. Caution cannot, however, lead to inaction. There are obvious examples. It would take a particularly brave pacifist to argue that, in principle, the allies’ military action against Hitler’s Germany should not have happened.

There are pitfalls, of course, in looking to the church before Constantine for guidance on the morality of war. Theirs was a very different world. Some recent Christian voices, for instance, often fetishize the early church’s relative powerlessness. These voices respond to the conflicting demands of love by absenting Christians from difficult choices in our current political realities where U.S. Christians have power.

The second-century critic Celsus attacked anti-militarist Christians for enjoying the fruits of Roman order while refusing to play their part in its maintenance. Today, there are Christian voices who too easily appeal to Christianity as a minority position and Christians as resident aliens; just as easily, through the centuries, Christian interests have been equated with national interests.

I am convinced that there is a dangerous avoidance of responsibility when Christians’ duties and interests are understood as peculiarly distinct from those of other citizens’; when others participate in war for an understood common good, while Christians maintain their principles. Such distinctions neglect the pervasiveness of human sin. The structures of our daily lives in communities, institutions and nations continually place us in positions where we harm others even without intention; where any choice, including inaction, brings hurtful consequences for others.

If we accept the intuition of the early church that love demands the prevention of harm to others, we will need to discern and act. We will undoubtedly find ourselves with dirty hands. We will make mistakes. Our choices will be compromised. In such moments, however, our full conception of love will surely allow us to fall back on hope, and the grace and forgiveness we believe comes from God.

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Andrew C. Forsyth is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School. He received his Master of Theological Studies degree in 2009.

Efforts to use creation for other purposes are sinful. When we seek to use sex for pleasure and not love, we are guilty of lust. When we seek to use money for power and not creation, we are guilty of avarice. When we seek to use creation for destruction and not life, we are guilty of militarism.

We as people are called to share in the work of God, and this includes creating and preserving that which God has made. It is God’s will that we continue to create and that we do not destroy what He has made because He has made everything for a good purpose. The plants of the earth give us nourishment and healing, both of which enable us to have relationships with one another. The rocks and minerals of the soil give us materials with which to build houses and other buildings, enabling us to live in safety and comfort. Our own flesh and blood, as the physical projections of our souls, allow us to be the very temples of God in the world. God desires for us to have comfort, well-being, and physical existence. He calls us through the prophets to pray for the prosperity of the cities in which we live and not to take more of creation than we need, in order that all may enjoy the richness of what God has made. He also calls us to treat our bodies as sacred vessels and to provide wisely for them, such that we may give Him honor through them. Partaking in the beauty and joy of God’s creation and having all that we need provided for by Him is one of the greatest ways that the Lord of heaven and earth has reached out to us in every age in love and, in the most literal sense, Providence.

Much has been written about the evil of war. Certainly, war does tremendous damage to spiritual creation. By pitting the passions of men against each other, war blinds us of our common brotherhood before God. By tearing apart families and communities, war wreaks havoc on the love and caritas (unconditional social love) for our neighbors that God has made the purpose of our lives. By turning the world into little more than “we the righteous” and “they the evil,” war hardens our hearts against the commandment of Christ to pray for our enemies. The dignity of the person is also trampled in war.  These are all very real and destructive effects of war on the spiritual life.

There is also no shortage of commentary about the physical evils of war. Crops are burned, leaving children hungry. Homes are turned into piles of rubble, killing sons and daughters of God. Access to medicine, water, and clothing is imperiled, leaving people with no share in the daily bread that God has granted us from His bounty for our survival. The work of generations in building places of habitation, learning, worship, healing, and community is annihilated in an instant. The plethora of Christian relief organizations servicing war-torn communities in Iraq, Gaza, Afghanistan, Somalia, and many other countries shows how much attention has been paid by Christians to the damages wrought by war.

What has been overlooked by many Christians, though, is how much of a perversion of creation war is. Even before the first bullet is fired and the first bomb dropped, and preceding the first torched field and shattered roof, militarism itself is a perversion of God’s creation. Militarism, especially once it hits the stage known popularly as “preparedness,” takes God’s creation and appropriates it for the sake of destruction. Take, for example, what goes into the creation of a single lead bullet.

Obviously, a lead bullet is made of lead. This lead could well be used to make a fishing sinker, allowing someone to partake in eating one of the few foods we know for a fact that Jesus ate and fed people with, or it could be used to help build a car battery, enabling a young woman to visit an ill relative in only a fraction of the time it took for Mary to visit Elizabeth during her pregnancy. Instead, our little chunk of lead is destined to be crafted into a projectile designed to break the flesh God gave a man and tear into the very heart Christ desires to win over.

Before it gets there, though, the lead must be processed. It needs to go to a factory full of machines. Manufacturing machines can be utilized for many purposes. They can, for example, help to shape steel beams to build orphanages. They can also be used to manufacture parts for wheelchairs like the one that lets me go to class and church.  The particular set of manufacturing machines we are talking about here, though, are used to turn lead into little balls able to kill young men decades before they will ever have the chance see their grandchildren. Some of these young men will die before they can even imagine themselves stepping into a church. Others will be plucked from the world before having the opportunity to share the life of Christ with their brothers.

After many hours of labor that could be otherwise spent making clothing, growing food, printing books, building homes, or doing any other manner of work for God’s sake, our little ball of lead will finally be recognizable as a bullet. Should the need ever arise in the mind of a powerful man, that bullet will find its way into the hands of a young soldier clutching a rifle. That rifle will be made of wood and steel, or possibly plastic. We could spend several pages more detailing how any one of these things could have become a desk fit to hold the Bible, or a stethoscope, or a toy to bring joy to a child. For now, though, suffice to say that this rifle, too, has been made out of things never destined by God to destroy.

Neither was the young man’s body. It was meant to beget life and to serve as God’s temple.

Neither was the young man’s heart. It was meant to praise the Lord and love other hearts.

Neither was the young man’s mind. It was meant to contemplate the Word made flesh.

Neither was the young man’s life. It was meant to bring mercy into a world full of cruelty.

Neither was the young man’s death. It was meant to bear final witness of to love and faith.

War is a perversion of creation. There are times when it is justifiable, largely because someone else has already perverted creation. The God of Israel did not abandon His people in Biblical times when they faced dangerous foes; rather, He defended them against nations that practiced horrifying measures such as infanticide and expelled those nations from the land He had promised His people, so long as Israel trusted Him alone and not the strength of their arms. Though the creation of God was used to make weapons in Israel as it is today, the Israelites recognized their complete and total dependence on God for their defense. They were also a people living in a land promised to them by the Lord Himself and thus had a clear mandate from God to protect Israel. Every country has the right to defend itself. The great problem is when creation is appropriated for destruction and not the protection of other countries. For the purposes of this article, I use militarism as a term for the production and maintenance of military equipment and forces above and beyond what is necessary for defense.

Much like the ancient pagans, Americans have embraced militarism. When our own generals state that a military base to house machines of destruction is no longer needed, we ought to cheer and obey the Lord by turning our swords into plowshares. Rather than deconstructing our old battleships and turning submarine pens into marinas, though, we demand that our politicians set aside their political differences and “save” our bases. Rather than commending statesmen for cutting military budgets and streamlining processes such that excesses like 10,000 nuclear weapons no longer exist in our hands, we accuse them of being weak on national security and soundly reject them for reelection. When we should be praising God for creating a drastically more peaceful and less fearsome world since the end of the Cold War, we have been busy clinging to our guns, bombs, and tanks. Ancient Israel excelled in war because, as the Bible affirms at every turn, it trusted in the Lord and not the strength of its arms. God preserves the goodness in humanity found in His people against all who would turn against it. If we embrace Him in humility and a genuine desire for peace, He will extend this same protection to us. To contrast Biblical Israel’s faith with America’s attitude of militarizing to the point of no end while we refuse to take Christianity seriously as a public moral force is nothing short of damning our country according to the standards of Biblical kings and generals.

We continue to beat our plowshares into swords by spending over a trillion dollars annually on our military at a time when there are simply not enough resources to provide for the basic needs of every person. It is unconscionable to maintain forces and armaments capable of destroying all life on the face of the Earth several times over. If we ever get to the point where we actually need a military that is currently worth almost as much as the rest of the world’s militaries combined, we will have suffered a far greater defeat than any opposing commander can deal us. We will have entirely lost our capacity to engage in diplomacy and meaningful communication with other countries, including our enemies. We will have traded our faith in the Lord for our faith in our capacity to demolish every fear and demon in the world by the sheer strength of our will. As in the spiritual life, this attitude of controlling every threat and refusing to turn to Christ for strength greater than any we could imagine will only result in even greater fear and, ultimately, we as a country learning what it means to be in the place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Not all of our military aims are foolish and unjust by human standards. Having the power to annihilate our enemies in North Korea and Iran with the press of a button certainly makes sense according to the world. So does maintaining a military presence in 130 countries such that we will always be near enough to strike any target on Earth within a moment’s notice. Like any country, America has very real enemies, some of whom are quite threatening and spiteful.

God, however, does not look kindly on those who rely on their own strength and judgment, their false “pragmatism,” in lieu of His commandments. We may preach a gospel of preventive conflict until the day the trumpet sounds, but God’s command that we pray for our enemies remains. We may preach a gospel of revenge against all who slight us, but God’s command that we turn the other cheek when struck and offer our coat to the man who robs us remains. We may preach that men must die that we may live, but God’s command that we be harmless as doves remains.

The Lord says that vengeance is His alone and that man need lift no finger if the Lord is with him. America has an attitude, though, that she must be the protector of her own liberty and must rely on her power and pride alone for her safety. Rather than letting God use whatever means He sees fit to secure for us a just and peaceful world, we co-opt His creation and use it for destruction. The Lord does not accept this faithless militarism and this idolatrous worship of weapons. God condemns any country that chooses to rely on its own will and His resources for its power without obeying His laws and commandments.

God has ordered His creation towards His will, which is love and, by extension, peace. There are times when God wills that we utilize creation to procure defenses, always seeking His protection and justification before Him as our only guarantees of safety. God does not, however, accept our theories that militarism is a just use of His creation. Militarism takes good creation that produces and sustains life to give glory to the Lord and usurps it for the sake of destroying our every threat and fear. Rather than seeking peace with all peoples, forgiving offenses, and trusting the Lord as our rock and sanctuary, America has chosen to let fear force it into a state of permanent militarism and armament.

This attitude has meant that God’s creation, which has the power to provide for all that we need and save the least among us from total destitution, is being used in order to sow the most abject poverty and strife the world has ever known. It is essential that, as we call attention to the spiritual and physical destruction of war, Christians make clear that “preparedness” and militarism themselves pervert creation and transform instruments of Providence into tools of destruction. By protesting the celebration of militarism prevalent in America and by criticizing the false gospels of revenge and fear that compel armament, Christians can play a pivotal role in reducing our spending of resources and lives on destruction and liberating creation for God’s purposes.

We can play an essential role in turning people’s hearts away from fear and towards faith in God’s power and in caring for the poor by beating America’s swords into plowshares. We can also do much to further respect for the dignity of human life by treating bodies as temples, hearts as witnesses, and minds as worshippers, rather than as tools of destruction and conquest. We can put down the sword and, in doing so, refuse to perish by it.

The Maccabees and zealots were ready to lay down their lives for Israel when faith in the God of love, peace, and creation was replaced by idols demanding human blood and costly sacrifices. We make these sacrifices with every dollar devoted to unneeded weapons. We offer oblations to Mars with every speech proclaiming the necessity of bringing instantaneous death to people who have no capacity to strike us. We drink blood against God every time we speak of conscripting young men to fight in the wars of other people.

Are we ready to smash these idols and break these cults with the ferocity of Judas Maccabeus in America today? If not, we are doomed to the condemnation of the Lord. If so, then the Lord will bless us beyond all measure and ensure that never again do we have to raise a finger against our enemies. Verily, He alone shall be our rock, our fortress, our deliverer.

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Matt Cavedon ‘ll is a Comparative Study of Religion concentrator living in Quincy House.

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 village, Bawi Shin Thang became a refugee in his own nation. The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), the official name of the Myanmar military junta, is mortal enemies with the Burmese Chin ethnic group and has worked on exterminating this people group, along with the Karen peoples, for forty years. The junta forced Bawi Shin Thang to be a porter in their army, carry hundred-pound sacks of weapons and supplies, and act as a human landmine tester while enduring continuous beatings and starvation. Remarkably buoyant and loyal to his people, Bawi Shin Thang escaped to overpopulated and militated Kualalampur, Malaysia, hoping to blend in and seek work. Chin and Karen refugees are considered illegal aliens in Malaysia and are arrested and imprisoned if found. Bawi Shin Thang served 2 six-month jail terms, escaping each time. The United Nations tries to create channels of assistance for Burmese refugees who are in Malaysia illegally and Thang was eventually granted an I-94 card affirming official refugee status and passage to the United States. As of today, his mother and extended family in Burma do not know where he is.

I live in the booming metropolis of Spokane, Washington, and the Spokane population is so homogenous that when Bosnian, Russian, and Vietnamese refugees began trickling in years ago, my family practically jumped for joy. I remember the first Russian family my church, New Vision Lutheran, sponsored. The couple had around seven beautiful young children and did not speak a word of English. Though the children learned fast through school and their newfound American playmates, the parents struggled to learn English and find jobs. I remember Almir and Simca, a Bosnian couple we sponsored; they fell in love before being captured and sent to different prisons. Nearly five years later, they both independently escaped and coincidentally – or by fate – ended up at the same refugee camp and married soon after. In the refugee camp, Simca gave birth to her little boy. When they moved to the United States a year later, their son cried hysterically night after night, unable to adjust to his new life. My mom dedicated herself to helping Simca, who balanced caring for her disoriented son with finding a job that could pay rent. I remember the Vietnamese children who spent their first years in the US running wildly around playgrounds surrounding my church and the clever teenagers they grew into.

My parents served as missionaries in India before they had children, and when we moved to Spokane to pastor at New Vision Lutheran, their hearts overflowed with love toward the small international community. The influx of refugees into Spokane transformed my dad’s ministry, and his attempts to learn the native language of each incoming group are commendable, though doomed to fail. My small church is one of Spokane’s Christian refugee centers, and we began hosting separate Sunday night Vietnamese and Burmese church services. Training translators and encouraging the people to organize services around their own traditions, the services are more widely attended than our ordinary Sunday morning services.

The incredible worship in these ethnic services teaches me the meaning behind Psalm 5:11: “But let all those who take refuge and put their trust in You rejoice; let them ever sing and shout for joy, because You make a covering over them and defend them; let those also who love Your name be joyful in You and be in high spirits.” Congregants love singing and playing their native music, and though most cannot communicate in English, they all share their love of Christ with each other through song. Forming music groups and choirs, and playing guitars that they brought from Burma, the Burmese sing beautiful praise to Christ.

I met Bawi Shin Thang during Christmas break while attending a Burmese service. Eager to meet the out-of-town Wagley, he immediately asked for a picture with me, and he laughed as he articulated his name and made sure I did not mispronounce it. Along with a few other community congregations, my church works closely with World Relief helping recent Chin and Karen refugees in very practical ways, like finding housing and employment, but more importantly, we are able to foster Christian community. In collaboration with Spokane sponsor churches, new and old arrivals bond together in tight-knit fellowships, by planting the Chin Christian Church and Karen Community Fellowship. The Burmese assist new arrivals with maintaining their native culture of independence, faith, music and family while adjusting to a new way of life.

Abundant joy perfectly describes these Burmese refugees and reminds me of Christ’s love and power. I cannot fully comprehend how suffering leads to contentment or great trials lead to happiness, but Romans 15:13 reads, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Though they spent years running from enemy forces and lost family members, villages, and livelihoods, the Burmese grasp and trust Christ’s hope, which transcends the material. Deep internal peace envelops them and there are no wider smiles or more grateful hearts. After aimlessly living in Thai refugee camps, these people desire physical work opportunities, and the adults are some of Spokane’s best workers. After massive layoffs this fall, many Spokane employers kept the refugees and dismissed longstanding employees. Christ blesses them in this nation, and by delighting in them, He allows us, the bystanders, “to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:18-19).

Massive genocidal efforts by Myanmar’s dictatorial regime began in 1968, constituting the longest civil war in recent world history. The Chin and Karen populations are akin to Aborigines in Australia, ethnic people groups who do not fit in with the majority. They are fundamentally tribal villagers who secretly travel jungle trails to escape the rapes, burnings, and extermination plots of the junta. One million contemporary refugees stagnate in Thai refugee camps, and two million internally displaced peoples (IDPs) cannot cross the border but are continuously hunted by the military regime. Although the United States and other nations long ignored the plight of Burmese refugees, the Bush Administration lifted immigration bans in 2004 against the persecuted tribes, and the US welcomed nearly 30,000 Burmese refugees over the past five years.

In spite of – and perhaps because of – bitter dictatorial inhumanity, many ethnic peoples are strong Christians, while others are Buddhists and Muslims. The Chin, of which Bawi Shin Thang is a member, became Christians after Baptist missionaries visited central Burma in the late nineteenth century. Likewise, around 50 percent of the Karen people are Christians. Chin and Karen ethnic groups compose most of the US Burmese refugees, and their purposeful involvement in Christian community in the US eases their difficult assimilation process. After living nomadically in jungle war zones and anguishing in ill-equipped and authoritarian refugee camps, the Burmese people are eager for the independent American lifestyle, though they know little about how to adapt.

While the US government grants Medicaid, food stamps, and a welfare check to refugees, assistance is only offered anywhere from four to nine months. US churches play a vital role in the integration process by finding refugees homes, jobs, healthcare, and other necessities. Congregations use portions of their offering and individual members expend time and resources to transport and care for these refugees. A startling number of Burmese refugees are settling in smaller or medium-sized metropolitan areas, in addition to larger cities in New York and Texas. Refugees in Indianapolis, Spokane, Utica, Oklahoma City, Boise, and several other cities now dominate the incoming foreign-born immigrants. Many families depend solely on Christian congregations to learn basic life skills that a refugee camp or refugee agency does not provide.

Although the government offers benefits to refugees that regular immigrants do not receive, government aid cannot teach refugees how to navigate city life. When the allotted period of government aid expires, refugees are expected to hold their own. Many Burmese refugees cannot speak English, drive cars, pay bills, buy food, protect their children, and navigate the legal system, though this is hardly an exhaustive list.

When six-year-old Koko Ling learned in school that he should call 911 in an emergency, he took the information very seriously. One afternoon, when his parents left the house, Koko’s brother Joshua ate his serving of rice along with Koko’s serving. Koko declared it an emergency, called 911, and greeted an ambulance and a fire engine at his front door in Spokane, WA. Although imagining little Koko anxiously describing his brother’s foul play is funny, it represents the vast amounts of money that refugees cost communities. A Desert News Salt Lake City article documents Indianapolis’ flood of Burmese refugees in 2007 and how they overwhelmed local and government services. Health departments deal with thousands who must be tested and treated for latent tuberculosis, a rampant problem among the Burmese refugees. Church charities reached out to Congressman Mark Souder who in turn warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of a “backlash from host communities toward the legal refugees at a time when the nation already is hotly debating illegal immigration.” With local programs flooded, churches play a key role in sustaining communities.

Churches integrate refugees into the labor force and teach English, keeping refugees off the streets, out of poverty, and off of welfare, thus assisting US government and society. Far too often, churches are the victims of pointed fingers and verbal attacks; even Christians insult and elaborate on the failures of the church instead of extolling the many successes. Churches truly go above and beyond in their efforts to resettle refugees, and US society and government should laud their work.

As Harvard students, we can also aid refugee populations, either through our congregations, World Relief, or other community service programs. Yet the greatest love and the greatest service is not helping find jobs or apartments. We must be Christ to them and to others in His divine fullness and mercy, welcoming believers with the promise of Christ’s hope in our communities, giving our brothers and sisters places to worship, places to pray, and the faith to greet what is difficult with the heart of Him who is our protector and Redeemer. When we answer to our Savior for the works we have done, “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).

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Rachel Wagley ’11 is a Sociology concentrator living in Quincy House.