Theses 19 - 22

I would like to hear further elaboration from you on the ideas I raised in my response to your other post. I guess this is where your culture and my culture collide - you don't see how it is possible or how one should pray for the sins of a nation in which you are residing, and Mennonites, traditionally, never having believed that those two masters could be served, but nonetheless, having been citizens of whichever country would have them, are experts at it by now. At least the theology behind the idea isn't new to me as a Mennonite. I don't mean to imply that it was easy to differentiate, only that in theory, that was what Mennonites tried to do. They did not always succeed.

There is a great difference between understanding something and even agreeing with it, and being able to actually do it, like forgiving your brother seventy times seven. That is the goal to reach for - but it is not always or maybe even usually reached, even by those who want to reach it.

I don't know if I will have any time to post tomorrow. I had nothing but unannounced company all day, so all the Martha stuff I had intended to do, went undone. So I'll go on (although I am very interested in your response to my other post) to some of the other Theses.

As far as Theses 19 is concerned, I generally agree because of the very principles of Christian pacifism. That two wrongs do not make a right. That in war, innocent people die. Christians from one country bomb their fellow citizens in God's kingdom because they are in another country. If all Christians, particularly in the Judeao-Christian west, refused to take up arms for that reason alone - that they will not risk killing their Christian brother or sister since war does not discriminate - would the second world war even have happened?

If German Christians had put Christ before Hitler, before country and patriotism - would there have been enough soldiers to fill out the ranks of Hitler's armies? German Christians believed a lot like American Christians or British Christians. They thought patriotism was a good thing. They dedicated churches in Hitler's name and gave thanks to God for him. They were patriots. They didn't have devil horns and ears, and cloven feet. And Hitler used that against them. He played on their faith and their patriotism. They weren't more Jew-haters than Americans or Canadians of that time.

But Hitler gave them an enemy. Nothing stirs up the patriot in people more than having a focus, like Osama bin Laden, or Saddam Hussein. To kill people, you first have to dehumanize them and pretend they are somehow different than you and me. That somehow they don't share 'our' values. That they love their children less. Nothing unifies a country like a common enemy, hearing all the time that your very liberty and values as a people is in jeopardy from others. Kinda like Iraq now and seeing a terrorist behind every bedpost.

They (the powers-that-be) lead up to it - they don't say it all at once because it would sound crazy and paranoid. They lead populations up to it and by the time you realise it was all a lie, you are well and truly done for. This is the spirit of the anti-Christ that is in the world today.

In some regions the US may indeed have acted for the good. Bad people sometimes do good things and good people sometimes do bad things. That doesn't change the fact that the US has very often acted badly, especially in South America because there is no power strong enough or influential enough to challenge the US policy in that area of overthrowing democratically elected governments, and there are no resources there that right now, any other powerful and influential country in the world cares to make more than a token objection about.

You wrote several posts ago, that the US is a target because it is powerful and if it wasn't the US, it would be some other country. You are absolutely right. Whoever happens to be a powerful country is a corrupted country because power corrupts. I don't see how that minimizes the bad things that the US has done. If I have less to criticise Canada about, it is only that we are not a world power, not because we are more innately good or because I am anti-American. There are plenty of areas in which Canada has behaved terribly and which I am ashamed of. And if Canada has not so openly abused its power, it is only because it didn't have enough power, not because it's citizens are morally superior to American citizens.

It isn't a virtue on anyone's part if they have never sinned because they have spent their lives on a desert island. "Virtue" comes in when you are confronted by a temptation and manage to say no. It doesn't happen when you have never been tempted.

I also therefore totally agree with the 20th Theses, that the kingdom of Heaven needs no violence to defend it. Which, I think the writers of the Theses are tying into the point of the next Theses, which is that the US is not the Kingdom of God. It trusts in its own power, not God's. But it acts and talks like it is behaving on behalf of God.

Which brings us to the 22nd Theses, that "liberty" - and only the US definition of liberty - is the main thing Americans value because they have come subconsciously to associate the US definition of liberty with the will of God and the liberty of God. I have heard that a lot of churches in the US display the American flag along with the cross in churches. That floors me. Can Baal and Christ share the same space? Any national flag and the cross of Christ are completely at odds with each other.

There is a word for that and that is arrogance. And God overthrows nations who are arrogant, who say, by my own strength I have done this. That is why he did what he did to Babylon and to Nebuchadnezzar. And personally speaking, I think that is why the US is in the trouble it currently is now, with the war in Iraq, and general world opinion because God does not reward arrogance. He humbles people and nations who are proud, who believe their achievements and victories are the result of their own superior strength and doing.

He says (Daniel 4) The kingdom is departed from thee. And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee, until thou know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will.

It is very easy to think that the Germans were somehow stupid or flawed in some moral sense - more flawed than the rest of us, but that is not true. That is the real lesson of the second world war and one, I fear, we are doomed to repeat.

Layla