Re: [asa] Creation Care Magazine

Quoting David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com>:

> Ok, I realize this has gotten very off-topic for the list, so I'll make this
> my last.... Just to fill in where I'm coming from on all this, I find a
> "just peacemaking" perspective as advocated by Glen Stassen to be helpful in
> sorting out how we individually and collectively live out a Christian
> ethic. Just peacemaking seeks to fill a gap between classical "just war"
> and anabaptist-pacifist theories. For more, see here:
> http://www.fuller.edu/sot/faculty/stassen/cp_content/homepage/homepage.htm
>
I don't think this is so off-topic, David. Care for creation also involves care
for each other (enemies included). And thanks for at least seeking/defending
possible alternatives to the whole "right-to-bear-arms" attitude juggernaut.
(As an anabaptist, I am encouraged to hear that others are struggling with this
as well.)

As I've heard commented before: If only Jesus had had the good samaritan arrive
*before* the bandits had finished their dirty work, then we could have seen what
he would have our good samaritan do! The Bible makes it too easy for us to
arrive at whichever conclusion we want on this since there is plenty to back the
anabaptist position, but then detractors will always find comfort in the fact
that Jesus didn't tell the centurion to get another job. Nor, for that matter,
did he advocate a military resistance to Rome (much to the disappointment, and
despite the ever-ready encouragement, of some of his closest followers.) Nor
did he tell slave owners to free their slaves; He just wasn't a "top-down"
"let's change the institutions" kind of guy. But to call that an endorsement of
those instituions is, I think you would all agree, a stretch.

What we don't know, though, is how Jesus would have had Christians live in a
democracy that purports to be "we the people". Nor do we have any context from
the Bible for what Christianity is to be like when it becomes a large
institution weilding influence on democratic governments. Instead it was all in
the context of a small, persecuted "rag-tag" that lives in the midst of a
hostile society. (I mean, *really* hostile, not the "hostility" that we
Christians like to imagine we are suffering today when legislation tells us we
shouldn't do this or that in public areas.) But, for better or worse, the
Bible doesn't spell it out for us, what we're to do when the Emporers like
Constatine come along.

All I know, though, is that He wouldn't (didn't) see this life as the ultimate
existence to protect at all costs (let alone to perpetrate evil on others in
order to fight evil.) We Christians, of all people, ought to at least have a
handle on that. --Not that I wouldn't fall and behave like everybody else when
I or my family is actually threatened, but I at least have and recognize the
calling to a higher eternal standard. And it comes from the Bible, not the
U.S. constitution.

--Merv

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Received on Fri Dec 28 12:59:04 2007