Monday, November 16, 2015
Small Religion
Marcellus was a soldier. Then he became a Christian. Next, he announced that as a Christian, he could no longer serve in the armies of the world. He served Christ. The emperor had Marcellus killed. Upon reflection, I realize that the one thing big religions have in common is that they are ready to fight wars to beat people who don't agree with them or hassle them. Christianity became willing to fight wars, over theology, land, power, and security. It became quite big. Quakers are not so big. Jews got wiped out by Hitler. They did not have an army. Islam is pretty big. Quakers have no country that we call "Quaker Nation." Some places that have armies say that they are Buddhist, but not really. They have no practice of meditation in their armies. Hinduism is big. They have the Bhagavad-Gita. It is about a battle. My religion developed the just war theory. Jesus did not have that. Just war helped us to get over the teachings of Jesus not agreeing with having armies to fight "our enemies." Would we Christians still exist without our armies? Maybe. What do you think?
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Maybe the difference was with the monks who helped the poor. In the book Pillars of the Earth, the author was a non-believer until he researched how the Church developed and build the magnificent churches. Jesus did plant faith here .
ReplyDeleteAll that I know is that Jesus said things like "give the other cheek", or "love your enemies" or even "blessed are those who are persecuted". A very few follow this teaching, and certainly no nation that I know of. We hate our enemies, not love them. Give the other cheek? Forget about it, call it good if we do an eye for an eye, because instead we usually escalate to something harsher than what we've suffered. And of course we don't consider "blessed" those who are persecuted, or at least I haven't heard anybody saying so.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really hard part of our faith, and I struggle with it. I would love to see our Church helping the faithfuls more about it.
"Would we Christians still exist without our armies?"
ReplyDeleteThat's a good question Father. There is no doubt that through out history Christians have pick up weapons and marched to battle. Most historians agree that if it were not for Christians all across Europe banning together to form the "Holy League" and defeating the Ottoman Empire (Muslims) during the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 & the Battle of Vienna 1683 Christianity and the west as we know it today would cease to exist.
I'd give the large majority of human beings (Christian or not) the benefit of the doubt that their first choice is always to live in peace as best they can rather then to physically fight or go to war. It's easy to talk tough when your far from the battle field. And its just as easy to talk like your some peace maker when the battle is yet to kick in your front door.
If a criminal is walking around the neighborhood kicking in doors and murdering innocent families, how you gonna stop him? Eventually this criminal arrives at your door step and kicks in the door, BAM! There's the criminal facing you and your family. Are you gonna sit there and pray? Or you gonna say a prayer and also physically defend your family? I think we know what most any descent family member would do, and could anyone blame this family member as wrong for defending the family?
Now take the above scenario and apply it to a whole army of men coming to kick in the door. You gonna need a whole army of men to stop them from kicking in the door? This is war. Its pretty simple when it happens.
The bible is riddled with war. Christian history is riddled with war. Wars a terrible thing! But until Jesus comes again and nature is restored to complete union in the grace of Christ; expect many wars to come and you can bet not even the worst has yet to be seen! Pray! Pray! Pray! But you best be prudent enough to know when the time has come to stand up and fight physically, because the time is coming.
"Would we Christians still exist without our armies?"
DeleteIt certainly would. History teaches us that early Christianity, without any army and by being persecuted, spread and thrived.
Would it be different? Certainly. Maybe even better.
Regarding your example with the criminals, to me it sounds like this. Pick X as your favorite sin, may be lust, gluttony, greed, envy, whatever. You say: if life put you in the circumstances in which you are so close to doing X, e.g. by lustful partner, the opportunity to eat too much, to steal, what you would do? Of course you would sin, that's just how human beings are done, in fact we are called sinner. To not sin is hard, and require practice and preparation, and lots of effort to not come close to the circumstances the cause us to sin.
So, for your example, yes, I would try to physically protect my family. But I don't prepare for it by having semiautomatic weapons at hand in my house. Instead, I try to work with the city to avoid these circumstances to happen. The same is for the nation: instead of just going to war, it should study why our "enemies" consider us so. It does not take big effort to realize that they do so, because we already went to war in their country, and destroyed their loved one. Revenge calls revenge, and at the end one don't even remember how it started. So pray, pray and pray, and lobby your congressman for peace.