What about Hitler? (The Christian Practice of Everyday Life)

W. Brimlow Robert

Description

Must Christians always turn the other cheek and resist violence? Is it ever justifiable for Christians to retaliate in the face of evil? Philosopher Robert Brimlow struggles with these questions in What about Hitler? The author skillfully integrates meditations on scriptural passages, personal reflections on his own challenges to live nonviolently, and a hard-hitting philosophical examination of pacifism and just-war doctrine. Both Christian pacifists and defenders of just-war theory will appreciate this book. In addition, What about Hitler? will appeal to those interested in Christian ethics and discipleship, including students, pastors, and laity.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian theology

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441202673
• Langue: English

Extrait

What about Hitler?
The Christian Practice of Everyday Life
David S. Cunningham and William T. Cavanaugh, series editors
This series seeks to present specifically Christian perspectives on some of the most prevalent contemporary practices of everyday life. It is intended for a broad audience-including clergy, interested laypeople, and students. The books in this series are motivated by the conviction that, in the contemporary context, Christians must actively demonstrate that their allegiance to the God of Jesus Christ always takes priority over secular structures that compete for our loyalty-including the state, the market, race, class, gender, and other functional idolatries. The books in this series will examine these competing allegiances as they play themselves out in particular day-to-day practices, and will provide concrete descriptions of how the Christian faith might play a more formative role in our everyday lives.
The Christian Practice of Everyday Life series is an initiative of The Ekklesia Project, an ecumenical gathering of pastors, theologians, and lay leaders committed to helping the church recall its status as the distinctive, real-world community dedicated to the priorities and practices of Jesus Christ and to the inbreaking Kingdom of God. (For more information on The Ekklesia Project, see < www.ekklesiaproject.org>.)
What about Hitler?
Wrestling with Jesus s Call to Nonviolence in an Evil World
THE CHRISTIAN PRACTICE OF EVERY DAY LIFE Series
Robert W. Brimlow
2006 by Robert W. Brimlow
Published by Brazos Press a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.brazospress.com
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-for example, electronic, photocopy, recording-without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brimlow, Robert W., 1954-
What about Hitler? : wrestling with Jesus s call to nonviolence in an evil world / Robert W. Brimlow.
p. cm. - (the Christian practice of everyday life) Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 10: 1-58743-065-7 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-58743-065-7 (pbk.)
1. Nonviolence-Religious aspects-Christianity. 2. Peace-Religious aspects-Christianity.
I. Title. II. Series.
BT736.6.B75 2006 241 .6242-dc22
2006004075
All Scripture is taken from THE NEW JERUSALEM BIBLE, copyright 1985 by Darton, Longman Todd, Ltd. and Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
This book is dedicated to four people. First, to all my J s: my wife, Joan, who sustained me through the writing; my son John, who checked my logic; and my son James, who reminded me that sometimes play is more important than writing. Second, to Robert Holmes who taught me much about peace, both academically and through his interactions with students and colleagues.
Contents
Preface
First Meditation Luke 4:5-13
1. Foundations of the Just War
Second Meditation 1 Samuel 8:4-9
2. The Just War in Contemporary Thought
Third Meditation Isaiah 6:1-10
3. The Good Wars
Fourth Meditation 1 Corinthians 5:9-13
4. Terror
Fifth Meditation Matthew 7:21-27
5. The Men behind the Hitler Question
Sixth Meditation 1 Corinthians 1:18-29
6. Success, Failure, and Hypocrisy
Seventh Meditation Luke 12:22-32
7. The Christian Response
Eighth Meditation Romans 7:14-25
8. Elaboration
Ninth Meditation 2 Corinthians 4:7-12; 5:14-18
9. Elaborating upon the Elaboration
Works Cited
Revelation does not deal with the mystery of God, but with the life of man. And it deals with the life of man as that which can and should be lived in the face of the mystery of God, and turning toward that mystery, even more, the life of man is so lived, when it is his true life.
-Martin Buber
Preface
This book has an interesting genesis. A number of years ago when I was a member of the Ekklesia Project, another member of that group sent an e-mail to a number of us asking, essentially, how Christian pacifists should respond to objections centering on fighting in World War II. I don t recall if the writer actually posed the question, Well, what about Hitler? but the effect was the same.
I had come to term it the Hitler question for a number of years prior to that e-mail. Whenever I would make an argument in favor of pacifism in my philosophy classes or when addressing an audience, inevitably someone would ask me the Hitler question. Invariably I would come up with some kind of answer, and invariably I would not be especially happy with it. There was always something about my response that was too facile or fundamentally inadequate, primarily because deep down I knew that, if I had the chance, I would probably have killed Hitler using any means possible.
I never considered it good form for a pacifist to admit such a thing, so I never did. But the apparent disconnect between what I believe and what I would do troubled me whenever I thought about it. So I didn t think about it much.
I read the responses to the e-mailed question with a lot of interest. They were all necessarily brief, and since they were written by folks who are much wiser than I, they contained fascinating nuggets that began to help me clarify my own thoughts. Something was missing, however, and I thought it was due to the brevity of the responses.
Early in 2001 I submitted a proposal for a book on this topic in which a number of theologians and other Christian thinkers would answer the Hitler question-how would Christian peacemaking respond to the kind of evil-doing that Hitler represents? The editors of the series thought the idea was a fine one, but they also thought that the book would be more interesting and effective if it were written by a single author. They asked me to revise the proposal accordingly.
I am afraid I was both flattered and panicky. I was flattered that they thought I could write this book, but I was panicky because I didn t know what to say. I was still painfully aware of my ambivalence and had been looking forward to editing the collection of essays as a rescue mission. I am not sure why, but I agreed to give it a shot, and by June of 2001 my revised proposal was accepted.
Then came September 11, 2001.
After September 11, what had been in my mind an abstract and rather remote problem for Christian pacifists suddenly became concrete and very present. Many of us counseled peace even as we shared in the grief, anger, and fear, but I do not know how well our voices were heard in the tumult of those days. My own experiences were less than pleasant in that I often evoked an angry response. The worst, however, was one venue where an audience of over a hundred people met my remarks with silence. For some reason, that reaction frightened me more than the anger. But over time, with prayer and thought, my ambivalence began to recede.
It is difficult to write a book on peacemaking during a time of war, when war appears to be the only answer. Suddenly, after that September, the book developed in me a sense of urgency and responsibility to which I am unaccustomed, being an academic. I wrote and discarded numerous drafts and further outlines until it dawned on me that it was beyond my capabilities to write the kind of book that would answer all objections or be the kind of book that anyone would find plausible. Fundamentally, what I have to say in the book is absurd, and once I admitted that to myself, the writing of it became a little bit easier.
That is an odd claim to put in a preface, especially by a philosopher who, ostensibly anyway, makes his living by being rational and convincing. Even if I have written this well, that is, clearly, adequately reasoned and expressed-which I am not sure I have-the best reaction I can hope for is that some readers will call it implausible and unrealistic. I understand fully, I think, just what those kinds of objections mean, precisely because they have arisen within me as well. This book has taken me an inordinate amount of time to write, precisely because I struggled throughout to make my claims and arguments rational, plausible, and realistic; to take full account of who we Christians are, while recognizing our position in this country and as actors in the world.
That is what I have been struggling with and what I continue to struggle with. The problem is, essentially and in the clearest terms I can think of, that our call to follow Christ-what the call to discipleship means in the concrete-is unrealistic, implausible, and absurd. Ultimately I come back to Soren Kierkegaard. The idea of what we are called to be is in part so distasteful and unnatural to us that it seems to me that through most of our history our theologians and philosophers have spent much of their time and effort explaining why Jesus could not have meant what he most clearly said. At the very least, this is true with regard to war and violence.
At the risk of putting it too negatively, part of what is entailed by our call to follow Jesus is that we are called away from violence. We are not called to be pacifists; we are called to be Christians, and part of what it means to be Christian is to be peacemakers. I will not develop the entire theology of this position in this book; but it is important for us to have the same starting point, so I will say a few words about this claim.
The gospel is full of teachings that counsel us to make peace by following Jesus, and there are numerous examples from the Lord s life that illustrate what those counsels mean. The problem is that those counsels and teachings and examples are very clear while, at the same time, they appear to be impossible. What makes them hard is not that they are too vague or so broadly expressed that they are open to a wide v