“There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is all hell.”
William Tecumseh Sherman
I heard far more about General Sherman when I lived in Georgia than I ever did in Michigan. This shouldn’t be surprising given Sherman’s record of razing a path to Atlanta. Nor is it surprising that Sherman’s name would be rendered there with such bile. Just as it was common to hear a call to rise up as befitting one’s station as a southern white man, that a call to take up arms against one’s neighbors would be foundational to identity.
The suggestion that war is hell offers a thoughtful counter to the drivel we so often associate with glory, patriotism, identity, culture — the very sense of moral-making that engenders our lives. We build this strange sense of heroes and villains, forces of good versus the forces of evil, even one’s sense of righteous commitment to one’s geographical location and basic ethnic makeup around binary idolatries and a refusal to appreciate the human dignity of other people.
Sherman is no more hero than he is a villain. What separates him from, say, Robert E. Lee, other than association, is that at least he acknowledged that all war is villainous. He never pretended he was the righteous man. He knew there is no virtue to be found there.
twisting evil into good
There is a fascinating moral comparison, then, to the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose understanding of moral complexity revealed the lie at the root of nationalism and the moral absolutes of binary thinking. One could not wage war for peace or choose to do nothing and call it peaceful in the end. But let’s not get this twisted — Bonhoeffer saw all violence as fundamentally evil. The problem is that the binary existence in which we call war good or just is evil, too.
Bonhoeffer trusted, not in the certainty of human actions as an absolute good or bad, but in God’s mercy that he saw no other way forward than to experience the hell around him. And, while many would seek to use this to absolve their own relative evil acts, using Eric Metaxias’ flawed biography of Bonhoeffer to endorse violence as a right, Bonhoeffer’s example reveals the opposite: that evil is never good and we dare not celebrate it, even as a “necessary evil.”
It is humility that Bonhoeffer offers us. Not hubris. Or certainty. Humility before the nature of God. Humility when it comes to our own preparation for life and in participating in this human experience.
blessed are the peacemakers
We are approaching two years of a retaliatory ethnic cleansing in Gaza. There is little wonder why such barbarous acts would be described in defensive terms. This, friends, is the language of virtue and honor. Of cultural defense and certainty of righteousness. But as we see in scripture and the eyewitness of warrior alike — war is hell. It isn’t the playground of the righteous or the method of the faithful. It is the home of the anti-christ. Where the children of God intend to kill each other.
In Jesus’s most famous sermon, he describes several unlikely virtues as beatitudes: poverty of spirit, mourning, meekness, a hunger and thirst for righteousness, etc. Among them, and most telling, I contend, is the seventh listed. He says
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
This is not blessed are the warmakers or blessed are those who are dragged into war or blessed are those who make war as self-defense. There is no blessing in war. No sense of God there, either.
It is only in peace, in making peace, that we find the children. The lovers. And the godly.
starting new wars
Israel started a war with Iran. It did so with the calculation that the United States would back them up as they have the last two years. So predictable to continue labeling this all as self-defense. Destroying lives, and countless dollars better spent on food and clothing, medical supplies and education. Investments in people and the future. War, it seems, is a tax on the future.
Dropping bunker-busting bombs on Iran cannot bring peace any more than it can bring virtue and grace. The prayer circles the Secretary of Defense leads in the White House, the crusader tattoo on his chest: these reveal, not the abundance of his faith but the shallowness of it.
No follower of Jesus can kill for peace any more than they can exploit for prosperity — and be on the side of Jesus. For he is with the poor and the marginalized, the hungry and the wounded. He is present among the dead, the bloodied, and starved. God isn’t on the side of the powerful. The bombers and the strikers.
There is no good here, save where good is being done. Those who step in the breach, who make peace and wage reconciliation. Who reject war and all the enticements to paint it as virtuous, good, right.
seeking good news
The good pastor reminds us of the good:
‘Look for the helpers.’
Fred Rogers
And where to find it.
Emperors paint a cross on a warship and name a bomb “holy”. They can’t christen violence without distorting faith and truth. We must take note! The empire seeks to define our reality. But it doesn’t become faithful because they pray. It doesn’t become true because they label it. The paint doesn’t make it true when the living of it reveals the life.
So when all is evil and wrong, find what is good. Seek where people do good. Loving, feeding, freeing. Where joy is. Hope is. This is life! See past those who destroy and find where life is springing forth, shooting up through the earth, ready soon to bloom.