Several weeks ago I was pleased to welcome John Krenson as a columnist to One Hand Clapping (now an inapt blog name, I suppose). John is a close friend, a field-grade officer in the Tennessee Army National Guard, and Afghanistan veteran and a permanent ordained deacon of the Roman Catholic Church.

He is also the author of the book, Crossfire, released earlier this month.

“This story is really about two wars,” John explains. The tension between Christian discipleship and the secular duties of military service has been a matter of painful, often vitriolic debate among Christians for many centuries. Many Christians deny that there really could be such a thing as “just war,” that war even for apparently just reasons can have no basis in Christian faith. Others respond that that the Scriptures teach clearly that Christians are to work for justice among the nations and that sometimes aggression by nations can only, even if regretfully, be met with force; that being so, even faithful Christians may take up the sword.

I know of no one who has struggled with this issue in heart, soul or mind more seriously or with greater sensitivity that John Krenson. Were John a military chaplain, the tension he describes so eloquently would be much lessened, even vanished. But John serves his country armed with weapons of death even while he serves his Church and the Prince of Peace. To say that the tension between these two offices caused him little concern is completely to mistake John’s moral character and to be blind to the real and enduring struggle of his soul.

“Duty, honor, country,” is the Army officer’s credo and moral compass. To read John’s story is to be taken to greater, more valuable understandings of how duty can be painful and sometimes unclear, how honor can be retained even in the fog of war and how country can be ably served even by a faithful man of Christian devotion.

John’s story is universal but also unique – universal because he shares in his soul the long tradition of Christian unease with the blunt instruments of politico-military policy, unique because his struggle is specifically that of a patriotic American who has pledged allegiance both to flag of country and the Kingdom of God.

Our nation and the Church are fortunate to be served by John Krenson. This book needs to be read by every thinking American, especially by those who struggle with the tensions between Christian faith and patriotism to country.

Work with me here. Am I understanding this correctly?

Pope Benedict gives a speech in his native Germany in which he states that “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul,” and in which he ‘quoted from a 14th- and 15th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus in his speech yesterday.”

“The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war,” the pope said. “He said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’ ”

“The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable,” Benedict said.

“Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul,” he said.

As may be expected, this inflames the fabled “Muslim street” (but what doesn’t these days?). Muslims clerics and leaders of Islamic nation demanded apologies from the Pope. Fair enough. But then they loosed their people into the streets to riot. Oh, please face the fact that in almost every Muslim country in the world, no one riots or even demonstrates without prior government approval or instigation. There are exceptions, such as (maybe) Turkey, but they are very few.

What are they protesting? Why, the Pope’s apparent accusation that Islam is a violent religion. How goes the protests? Well:

The Times Online reports:

AN ITALIAN nun was killed by gunmen at a children’s hospital in Somalia yesterday in an apparent revenge attack for the Pope’s speech about Islam last week.

Sister Leonella Sgorbati, 65, left, was shot four times in the back by two men at the entrance to the hospital in the capital, Mogadishu. Her bodyguard was also killed.

And a “radical Muslim group” (I’m beginning to wonder whether there is any other kind),

… threatened a suicide attack on the Vatican yesterday even as the Holy See said Pope Benedict regretted that some Muslims were offended by his comments about the role of violence in the spread of Islam.

And,

Two churches were set on fire in the West Bank on Sunday, a day after Muslims hurled firebombs and fired guns at four other West Bank churches and one in the Gaza Strip to protest the pope’s comments.

Australia’s Daily Telegraph reports as well:

** A hardline Somalian cleric called on Muslims to “hunt down” and kill the Pope.

** A bomb exploded in a church in Iraq… .

The paper also says the obvious:

THE hardline Muslims who took to burning churches this weekend in the wake of Pope Benedict’s remarks supposedly linking Islam to violence seem to have proved his point.

Now, to be “fair and balanced,” I should also point out that some Muslim leaders are calling for calm and cautioning about taking the Pope’s commentary as indicative of all Christians’ beliefs.

The leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood said the Islamic political movement’s relations with Christians should remain “good, civilized and cooperative.”

“While anger over the pope’s remarks was necessary, it shouldn’t last for long because while he is the head of the Catholic church in the world, many Europeans are not following it. So what he said won’t influence them,” Mohammed Mahdi Akef said.

Mohammed Habash, a legislator and head of the Islamic Studies Center in Damascus, Syria, cautioned against sectarian animosities and urged both Muslims and Christians to find ways to avoid conflicts.

“We understand the reasons for the (Muslim) anger, but we do not call for that and instead we call for calm and dialogue,” Habash said.

Good idea that. But we also need to understand that violence does not occupy the same theological space in Christianity as it does in Islam. Christianity has historically had to justify the use of violence even for just reasons, such as the maintenance of public order, punishment of criminals or making war. Violence just does not have a natural place inside the world view of the New Testament. It can be justified, but only uneasily, with great caution and no little difficulty. The times in history when Christian societies or Christian armies embraced violence as a means of propagating the faith are not held as exemplars today.

But in Islam, violence’s theological space is not uncomfortable at all. It is a natural fit. Conversion at the point of the sword was not a regrettably necessary means to expanding the caliphate because there was no other way, it was an inherently praiseworthy, indeed, desirable, means. And this is mainstream Muslim history, not “radical.” Warfare has never been denied by the main streams of Muslim theology to be other than an acceptable (though not always desirable) way to propagate their religion. If I am wrong, someone please provide cites to the contrary in a comment.

Pope Benedict in his speech reiterated what Catholics have said for a long time: there is no justification for the use of violence in the practice of religion. That part seems to have gone over the heads of the Muslims radicals (surprise) and most Muslim leaders. When prominent Sunni and Shia clerics around the world issue blanket condemnations of violence qua violence (not just terrorism) in the practice of Islam, then I’ll be more sympathetic to their protests.

All that being said, Pope Benedict’s brief aside in his speech was ill advised. Jules Crittenden explains why.

Update: “Against the Grain” has an excellent, continuing roundup. Examples:

Teófilo de Jesús (Vivificat) wonders where was the enlightened voice of Muslim protest when Ayman al Zawahiri and Adam Gadahn issued an “invitation to Islam“, denigrating the Christian faith as a “hollow shell of a religion, whose followers cling to an empty faith and a false conviction of their inevitable salvation”?

[Maryland-based] Syrian blogger Ammar Abdulhamid gets it:

Have all leaders, religious and political, in the so-called Muslim World, become illiterate all of a sudden? Or are they intent on using every little opportunity that presents itself to prove in deed what they continue to deny in words, namely: that Islamic civilization and culture are dead, and that Muslims are adamant on continuing their head-long descent into barbarity?

See also this interview with emeritus theologian Adel-Theodore Khoury (Frankfurter Allgemeine Sept. 17, 2006), whose book Pope Benedict cited in his Regensburg lecture.

Update: Cliff May:

Back in 1942 [Ruhollah ] Khomeini wrote: “[T]hose who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. … Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors!”

Khomeini went on to become the infamous Ayatollah Khomeini, who ruled Iran after Shah Mohammed Reza Palavi was deposed in 1979.

Update: William Rees-Mogg writes in the Times Online,

Yet nowadays Islam is the only major religion in which violence is a serious doctrinal issue. It is true that tribalised Roman Catholics and Protestants in Ireland have only recently stopped killing each other and vengeful Sikhs assassinated Indira Gandhi in India, but neither the Catholic nor the Protestant churches believe in terror; nor do the Sikhs.

A significant proportion of the Islamic community does believe that suicide bombers are martyrs carrying out a religious duty. …

See my multi-part essay, The Forever Jihad.

Guess who’s coming to dinner?

In 1997 I was a seminary student at Vanderbilt Divinity School. I took a course that fall on pastoral care relating to death and dying. That was the fall that Oregon voters went to the polls on a referendum allowing doctors of the state to assist their patients in committing suicide. We were assigned a paper on the subject.

I wrote my paper in the form of a dialog between me and Larry King (hey, why not?) In light of the Netherlands euthanasia laws being in the news again, and that the Supreme Court is hearing a case about the Oregon law (which passed the referendum in ‘97), I have posted my paper in PDF form.

Niall Ferguson writes of Volataire’s reaction to the Lisbon earthquake on 1755 that killed thousands:

“What will the preachers say?” asked Voltaire and he went on to express the hope that mankind might learn a lesson from the indiscriminate cruelty of the earthquake. It ought, he wrote, “to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike”.

That, unfortunately, was wishful thinking. On the contrary, the most common human response to a natural disaster is to reaffirm rather than to repudiate religious faith. Religion, after all, has its prehistoric origins in man’s desire to discern some purposeful agency in the workings of nature. …

In much the same way, religious and secular commentators alike have rushed to attach moral significance to the destruction of New Orleans. …

The reality is, of course, that natural disasters have no moral significance.

Well, not quite. Disatser have not moral significance inherent in themselves, true - and that’s what Niall is saying. But I can’t leave it quite at that, because disasters have consequences, and they are mostly moral consequences, which I preached about from one angle yesterday.

05-09-04 Pentecost 16A Psalm 119

Much to my delight, Monday morning’s dawn light showed that the streets of New Orleans’ French Quarter were wet from rain but not immersed. There had been some wind damage to buildings as Katrina moved across the Quarter, but no one died and the damage was fairly light. The commentators on TV seemed to agree that New Orleans, a city that sits below sea level, situated between the sea, the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, had “dodged the bullet.”

It was Monday afternoon that water from Lake Pontchartrain began flowing over the top of a seawall that sat atop a levee along a canal at 17th Street. The water eroded the earthen levee as it fell on the city side and so removed the base of the seawall. The wall collapsed and within a short time, the rushing water opened a gap hundreds of feet wide. By Tuesday morning another breach had developed and four-fifths of the city was flooded many feet deep.

We are told there were 100,000 people still in the city. They had no electrical power, no transportation and little food or drinkable water. On Tuesday people started to break in to grocery stores to get food and water. But not only grocery stores. Looters broke into liquor stores, gun stores, department stores, electronics stores and every other kind of store. Cars were stolen or stripped. Gunfire was heard across the city.

Reuters news service reported,

Violence broke out in pockets of New Orleans among the wandering crowds grown hungry, thirsty and desperate to escape the flooded city and 90-degree temperatures.

Boat rescues were delayed because of the danger and police rescuers shifted their focus to fighting looting and other crime that gripped the city.

[T]he evacuation was suspended after reports that someone fired at a military helicopter sent to ferry out survivors.

Another wire report said,

Managers at a nursing home were prepared to cope with the power outages and had enough food for days, but then the looting began. The home’s bus driver was forced to surrender the vehicle to carjackers.

Bands of people drove by the nursing home, shouting to residents, “Get out!” Eighty residents, most of them in wheelchairs, were being evacuated to other nursing homes in the state.

“We had enough food for 10 days,” said Peggy Hoffman, the home’s executive director. “Now we’ll have to equip our department heads with guns and teach them how to shoot.”

The earthen levees weren’t the only ones that gave way in this catastrophe. Many persons’ moral levees collapsed as well. Not everyone’s did; there were amazing acts of heroism and selfless service by ordinary people faced with extraordinary circumstances. One man reported Sunday,

I just had a very frank conversation with the administrator of Jefferson Healthcare, (where my mother-in-law is trapped). … As it stands, my wife’s mother will be riding out Katrina in a one-story bulding, with a broken pelvis, requiring a serious regimen of prescription medication.

I really wanted to get angry about this conversation. However, once I realized that, should my wife lose her mother, Mr. Ray would also be dead, I found it impossible to be upset. I thanked him for his service and his commitment and said that he’d be in our prayers. There are people in that facility that make less in a year than a lot of people make in a week … but they’re staying with the patients to which they’ve made a commitment.

Then there was Cynthia Shephard, who “left the safety of her room at the W Hotel in order to rescue flood refugees stranded along the Interstate.” She rescued 10 people in her Ford pickup.

“Between draws on her cigarette, Shephard explained her motives: “They needed it. It’s crowded out there. Law enforcement is too busy. I can’t get a straight answer. So I took it on myself. And I’m in a truck, so I should utilize it.”

Hospital nurses and doctors stayed through the storm to care for patients. Hundreds of police officers whose own homes had been destroyed worked around the clock, hoping their own families were getting by. Hotel staffs stayed on the job because the city’s many tourists had no way to leave. Perhaps the media will see fit to report those stories in more detail some year. But among the millions of Americans personally untouched by the disaster there was a sense of unbelief at the scenes repetitively shown on TV. Historian Lee Harris wrote of one such man he encountered in a sandwich shop.

He was perhaps twenty or twenty-one at the most, but you could tell by looking at him that the footage of the looters had genuinely outraged and perplexed him. When he saw people carting out an endless stream of stereos and TV’s and assorted groceries from the businesses that they had broken into, he kept saying, with obvious disdain: “Will you look at that? It’s unbelievable!” Then he would glance around at his co-worker and at me, as if asking us to vocalize our support for his moral indignation.

But there was nothing unnatural about the violence in New Orleans. If a wide-scale catastrophe struck Nashville we would see the same scenes here. No one who knows what the Bible teaches about human nature should be the slightest bit surprised at the evil people do when the moral levees of their own consciences and of society have broken, allowing the flood waters of violence, selfishness and disregard for others to drown their souls.

The question is not why many people walked into the heart of darkness, but why so many remained children of the light. It is perhaps a mistake to over-generalize from hundreds of miles away, but perhaps some verses from Psalm 119 offer illumination:

1 Happy are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the LORD. 2 Happy are those who keep his decrees, who seek him with their whole heart, 3 who also do no wrong, but walk in his ways. 4 You have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently. 5 O that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes! 6 Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments.

33 Teach me, O LORD, the way of your statutes, and I will observe it to the end. 34 Give me understanding, that I may keep your law and observe it with my whole heart. 35 Lead me in the path of your commandments, for I delight in it. 36 Turn my heart to your decrees, and not to selfish gain. 37 Turn my eyes from looking at vanities; give me life in your ways. 38 Confirm to your servant your promise, which is for those who fear you. 39 Turn away the disgrace that I dread, for your ordinances are good. 40 See, I have longed for your precepts; in your righteousness give me life.

As disciples of Jesus Christ we are called - no, commanded - to be ruled by law leavened with love, not wrath. We are commanded to be transformed in our inward being so that we willingly heed and obey the moral commandments of God.

It was no crime for the hungry, thirsty or naked to take food and water and clothing from stores; Louisiana law even allows for it when the governor has declared a state of emergency, according to news reports. There is, however, a thin levee between taking things for support of life and outright looting, as experience this week sadly shows.

One of the things that churches should do is train the moral sense of it members. The God who created us also demands a high level of morality in us. The Ten Commandments do not say that a little murder is okay, a little adultery is permissible, a little thievery is allowable. Instead they instruct: No murder. No adultery. No stealing. There’s no wriggle room.

Our continuing challenge as Christians is to follow the moral commandments of God’s law without becoming legalists imprisoned by moralism rather than freed by morality. Rules are brittle; alone they make poor levees. When stressed from exceptional circumstances, rule-bound people are often the first to find their base eroded and their moral will overflowed. Rules alone oppress rather than liberate, stunt the spirit rather than grow it. Rules are imposed from the outside. Under stress, their restraints too easily break.

Love, though, comes from within. The silken covenants of love are not as easily broken as the iron chains of law. But love without rules leads to licentiousness. We can justify anything by claiming “our hearts are in the right place.” Rules bring the reign of reason into the impulses of the heart. Rules can serve as a lens to focus the impulses of love and bring needed discipline to love’s fleeting nature. Love provides desire, but rules provide a will.

Only one moral levee can withstand the category five challenges we may encounter and hold back the churning seas of chaos from flowing over us. We need a solid bed of the rules of God topped by a strong wall of love.

You know the commandments, wrote Paul:

“You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

There is law, and there is love; they are two sides of our moral levee.

Update: Timothy Garton Ash makes essentially the same case in The Guardian, but without a religious context.

Comment

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It always lies below

A hurricane produces anarchy. Decivilisation is not as far away as we like to think

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday September 8, 2005
The Guardian

Before our attention wanders on to the next headline story, let’s learn Katrina’s big lesson. This is not about the incompetence of the Bush administration, the scandalous neglect of poor black people in America, or our unpreparedness for major natural disasters - though all of those apply. Katrina’s big lesson is that the crust of civilisation on which we tread is always wafer thin. One tremor, and you’ve fallen through, scratching and gouging for your life like a wild dog.

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You think the looting, rape and armed terror that emerged within hours in New Orleans would never happen in nice, civilised Europe? Think again. It happened here, all over our continent only 60 years ago. Read the memoirs of Holocaust and gulag survivors, Norman Lewis’s account of Naples in 1944, or the recently republished anonymous diary of a German woman in Berlin in 1945. It happened again in Bosnia just 10 years ago. And that wasn’t even the force majeure of a natural disaster. Europe’s were man-made hurricanes.

The basic point is the same: remove the elementary staples of organised, civilised life - food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security - and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all. Some people, some of the time, behave with heroic solidarity; most people, most of the time, engage in a ruthless fight for individual and genetic survival. A few become temporary angels, most revert to being apes.

Read the whole thing.

“Spare us This Disaster Drivel,” by Gerard Baker, Jan. 6, 2005.