The Tragic Nature of Life in a Fallen World: Reflections on the Dangers of Pacifism to One's Own Soul

If we try to think of life in this world as either tragedy or as comedy, we will never be able to capture its true essence completely. Christians are the most pessimistic of all men and Christians are the most hopeful of all men - to play off Luther's famous statement of paradox. Only a worldview that includes both extreme pessimism and extreme hope can possibly do justice to the nature of Biblical revelation.

When serious Christians try to figure out whether it is right to engage in violence in response to moral evil, a strong current of contemporary thinking tends to assume that if we surrender to the pessimism of using force to destroy the evildoer that we thereby abandon Christian hope. So this tendency of thought - call it Neo-Anabaptism or Liberal Pacifism or the Evangelical Left or whatever - concludes that there is a conflict between resorting to violence and putting our faith in God. This creates a horrible dilemma: believe and let evil work its will or abandon faith. No wonder so many decide to act justly and forfeit their faith.

For years I myself struggled with this dilemma. Can I be a Christian if being a Christian means that I can never resort to force, even to punish evildoers who wish to attack innocent men, women and children? It was a question of trying to summon enough heroic virtue to be able to do what seemed morally counter-intuitive because of an inflexible rule that must be upheld even at the cost of death. I see many others struggling with this burden and I am convinced that it leads to one of two outcomes: either the loss of faith in God or the loss of faith in goodness.

If one remains passive in the face of great evil, one loses one's ability to believe in the goodness of this world. Paradoxically, one can only believe in the goodness of the world if one is ready to fight evil. No one is talking about glorifying violence or war for the sake of war. But in certain instances, when one confronts true moral evil one must be willing to use force to resist it and protect the innocent. Otherwise, I think one tends to lose one's appreciation for the reality of goodness and begins to view all of life as grey and all actions as morally equivalent. To slip into moral relativism in order to retain one's belief in God is too high a price to pay because moral relativism inevitably, and in short order, distorts and ruins one's concept of God. To be a moral relativist is to cease to believe in the One, True God anyway.

I am convinced now that liberal pacifism - the belief that Christians are called to be non-violent in all situations and to try to convince others to be non-violent in all situations as well - is corrosive of faith and morality. I suppose I have gone to the opposite extreme and some will assume that, since the truth always lies in the middle that I must be wrong. But the problem is that truth does not always lie in the middle of every dilemma; sometimes one extreme is right. But how is pacifism corrosive of faith?

I think we see it in the left-wing attitude toward the Arab-Israeli conflict and also in the liberal multiculturalism that regards all cultures as equally good and therefore shrinks from imposing Christian cultural norms even when they are right and from defending them when they are under attack. There is an unwillingness to confront serious moral evil lest it lead to unbridgeable divisions and this spawns a false moral equivalence, which justifies evil behavior by equating opposition to evil with evil itself.

In the case of Israel, there is a tendency to equate Israeli military defensive actions to try and nullify the attackers' capacity to inflict violence on Israeli civilians with the firing of rockets into Israeli towns. Pacifists call on Israel to refrain from reacting to attacks on its population but pacifism not only is unable to stop the Arabs from attacking Israeli civilians, it also equates such attacks with Israeli attacks in retaliation, thus losing its ability to distinguish between good and evil.

What this leads to eventually is a moral relativism that pleads "can't we all just get along" but really means "let the most determined and the most hate-filled get their way rather than using force to stop them." I am convinced that this kind of pacifism is soul-destroying and faith-destroying because it forces a person to choose between decency and the right, on the one hand, and Christian faith, on the other.

This kind of pacifism tries to pretend that life is a comedy and that eventually everything will work out and we will be able to build the kingdom of God. Different people come to realize that this is a fairy tale devised by the human imagination as it struggles to avoid accepting the reality of moral evil at different points in their lives. When I realized it, I was blessed to do so in the company of St. Augustine, a man who was deeply hopeful precisely in the midst of his pessimism. He understood that it is precisely at our point of deepest need and greatest hopelessness that God's grace encounters the fallen sinner. Those who believe life is a comedy and who are actively engaged in building a Utopia have no need of what the Bible means by grace. They want Divine help, to be sure, but that is not quite the same thing as wanting grace.

The liberal pacifist believes that there is a solution to every problem; but what if some problems are insoluble? What if life really is tragic? What if some moral evil will not yield to reason's pleas? What if there is no good and perfect choice in a given situation? What if God allows us to experience hopelessness - does that mean there is no God or that God's grace is sufficient even in hopeless situations?

Life is a comedy for the Christian, but not life in this world. In this world, we face true moral evil that is as intractable as it is unavoidable. Some of this evil is within ourselves. And we can no more escape it by Utopian schemes than we can flap our wings and fly to the moon. The question is not whether we can figure out a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict - maybe there is none - but the question is, rather, will we love the good, hate evil and trust God no matter what happens?

How Should Christians React to the Killing of bin Laden?

I think the statement released by our Canadian Prime Minister had the most appropriate response to the killing of bin Laden when it spoke of taking "sober satisfaction" in the event.

Why?

To answer that question, we must consider who killed him and why.

Osama bin Laden was killed by the US government on the orders of the Chief Magistrate of the United States, the President, as just punishment for his horrendous war crime on 9/11 and many other acts of murder, terror and mayhem. It is true that the killing was not done by the police, but this was a strike against a terrorist organization that had declared war against the US. So it was done by Special Forces operating under the authority of the constitutionally defined Commander-in-Chief and it was moral, legal and appropriate, in my opinion.

In Romans 13 Paul teaches that God has given the State the sword to use to punish the evildoer and to reward the good. In this action, the State wielded the State in accordance with its Divinely mandated duty and punished the evildoer.

Christians cannot criticize the State doing what the Bible says is its job. Neither pacifist nor just-war Christians can criticize the rulers for ruling justly and doing exactly what God ordains that they should do.

What pacifist and just-war Christians can legitimately and necessarily disagree about is whether or not they as Christians ought to be (1) giving advice to the State on matters of killing, (2) serving as agents of the State in authorizing killing or (3) being soldiers in war and actually doing the killing. Pacifists must logically disqualify themselves from all three roles or else they become complicit in killing, which pacifism teaches them they must not do under any conditions. A pacifist disobeys God and misconstrues Scripture when he advises the State to become pacifist in disobedience to the mandate given to the State by God and described in Romans 13. But a pacifist who believes all killing is wrong cannot advise the State to kill. Therefore, since a pacifist can neither advise in favor of or against killing, he has nothing whatsoever to say on the matter to the State.

The just-war Christian, on the other hand, can consistently act in all three roles mentioned above because he believes (along with Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin) in some sort of two-kingdoms doctrine in which the Church and the State are two different institutions with different roles and responsibilities in a fallen world between the the first and second comings of Christ. A Christian participates in both the Church and the State in this life because we are part of both kingdoms. God reigns over the Church through Jesus Christ, the head of the body, directly. God reigns over the fallen creation indirectly through rulers and governments that He raises up and pulls down according to His inscrutable Providence throughout history. We can neither engage in a flight of gnostic escapism nor try to turn society into a theocracy ruled over by the Church if we wish to be orthodox Christians.

Therefore, a Christian, from the just war perspective rejects both Theocracy and Separatism. Theocracy (church ruling over the state) and Separatism (church withdrawn into an alternative polity disengaged from secular society as with the Amish) are two sides of the same coin. Both see only one kingdom, not two, and have opposite reactions to how to deal with that fact. The Theocrat strives to make the world subordinate to the church; the Separatist strives to separate the church from the world. Both, however, agree that the Christian cannot live in Babylon without either ruling it or withdrawing from it.

As Christians, we do no wish the Church to take over the role of dispensing worldly justice by means of the sword (violence). But we do want the secular State to dispense justice. Obama was not acting as a church member when he ordered the killing of bin Laden. He was acting as the head of a secular nation state. A pacifist says that no Christian should be an agent of such a State and that is fine to say that, but the pacifist veers into the territory of theocracy when he condemns the State for punishing the evildoer by means of the sword. Obama could personally love bin Laden and desire his conversion to Christ and salvation from sin, but that does not mean that he should refrain from exercising judgment on him as a head of state attacked by the terrorists on 9/11.

Under other circumstances, I would wish to witness to bin Laden and try to lead him to Christ. But if I had been one of those Navy Seals, I would not have had that opportunity. No one deserves endless time to repent of his sins and no one deserves to escape responsibility for committing murder. God knows our hearts and assigns to us a limited number of days on this earth. Bin Laden brought this upon himself as surely as someone who jumps off a tall building brings death upon himself. That was his choice as a free moral being. He is now reaping the consequences of his moral choices - as we all must.

Pacifist who criticize the killing of bin Laden are rejecting Scripture and, at least implicitly, Divine authority. They have fallen into what I term "Liberal Pacifism," which is a characteristic of Liberal Protestantism. It is a heresy that is rooted in a Romantic, Utopian notion of human nature and specifically the perfectability of man. It owes much to J. J. Rousseau, Walter Rauschenbush and John Dewey and little to Augustine, Thomas, Luther and Calvin.

I am glad bin Laden is dead because, as President Obama put it so simply yet profoundly, justice has been done.