Mark's Notebook


	I never came upon any of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking. - Albert Einstein

Today's anti-war clergy should ponder their predecessors

Boston Globe

Wednesday 26 January 2005, 2:35 pm
Keywords: Christian Topics , News Articles

By Richard N. Ostling, Associated Press

Joseph Loconte of the conservative Heritage Foundation sees a parallel between clergy who denounce military action against today's Islamic terrorists or tyrants, and their predecessors who opposed America's entry into World War II.

Loconte collects writings by clergy doves and hawks from 1938-1941 in "The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm" (Rowman & Littlefield).

Loconte's heroes include the "neo-orthodox" Karl Barth (1886-1968), a refugee from Nazi Germany who was generally considered Europe's leading Protestant theologian, and "Christian realist" Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), widely seen as America's top Protestant theologian.

Barth opposed pacifism because the New Testament depicts the state as God's instrument to control evil and promote social peace (Romans 13:1-5, 1 Timothy 2:1-3). Since appeasement had failed, he wrote, Christians shouldn't just fight Hitler as a "necessary evil" but "approve it as a righteous war, which God does not simply allow but which he commands us to wage."

Niebuhr was especially interesting because he was a one-time pacifist and had to quit his longtime political home, the Socialist Party, after it decided American "imperialism" was so bad that no important principle was involved in challenging Hitler.

To Niebuhr, naive liberals saw no right or duty to defend their own civilization which he acknowledged was morally flawed to prevent "worse alternatives." In the Bible, he wrote, "human evil is recognized as a much more stubborn fact than is realized in some modern versions of the Christian faith" that obscure what Scripture says about fostering justice.

http://www.boston.com/dailynews/024/living/Today_s_anti_war_clergy_should:.shtml