Thoughts from our Brothers in the Military Part 5
Tuesday, October 9th, 2007From another non-comissioned officer …
C.S. Lewis has a lot to say about serving in war as a believer in his book The Weight of Glory in the chapters Learning in War time and Why I am not a Pacifist. Like Lewis believed about WWII, I believe our cause to be righteous and even further, I believe it’s our nation’s duty to at least attempt to help a less fortunate nation – even when it’s tough. It’s unfortunate though, this modern war in Iraq will likely not have the same outcome as WWII, because people in America (and Iraq ) aren’t united to the cause of good as Americans were in WWII.
I think if the greater good would come from the decision to go to war, then war (although tragic) is justified. I think it rational to say that peace under (or Islam) would in no way be better than a war preventing his (its) rule (terror). But “To call it useless because it did not also cure slums and unemployment is like coming up to a man who just succeeded in defending himself from a man-eating tiger and saying ‘It’s no good old chap. This hasn’t really cured your rheumatism!’” (p. 74).
I think Lewis’s strongest point about war is made in on page 75ff though. To summarize, he said good countries should do good things for other countries. But no single country has resources to do good things for all countries in need. In the process of helping A, it neglects B. So it therefore makes sense that the good country should choose to help the country who is a benefactor and neglect the one who has no special claim on it. However sometimes “it involves helping A by actually doing some degree of to B” because B is threatening A.
Also consider the following excerpt:
The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are. I think the suppression of a higher religion by a lower, or even a higher secular culture by a lower, a much greater evil. Nor am I greatly moved by the fact that many of the individuals we strike down in war are . That seems, in a way, to make war not worse but better. All men die, and most men miserably. That two soldiers on opposites sides, each believing his own country to be in the right, each at the moment when his selfishness in most in abeyance and his will to sacrifice in the ascendant, should kill [each] other in plain battle seems to me by no means one of the most terrible things in this very terrible world (p. 77-78).
I would take it even further and say that when women and children die resulting from collateral damage war, (although unjust), it is not the worse evil that could have happen to them. Their own countrymen could be doing far more damage to them in life, than the attacking country has done in them unintentionally. (This I know to be the case from experience in Afghanistan and Iraq .)
Finally, I believe even in a corrupt society there can be righteous individuals in that society’s military who do good things wherever they’re sent. (Wasn’t this the case with Cornelius, officer in the Roman Empire from Acts 10.) Additionally, When soldiers, working for a corrupt establishment, asked Jesus how they should live, (Luke 3:14) he did not instruct them to defect. He told them not to treat people poorly and be satisfied with their pay.
There may be a lot of corrupt decision makers involved in the process of this war, but in no way do I see those decisions inhibiting the righteous work of individuals among the foreign nation we’re in. Furthermore I believe the ultimate attempt was for us to help Iraq , not harm it.
There’s still a lot of good work to be done in the Kingdom through the military. In the military people go to countries where missionaries do not. Also the duties for which military members perform can be, from the individual standpoint, used for good or evil. “All our merely natural activities will be accepted if they are offered to God, even the humblest, and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not” (p. 54).
The only thing I would say is that it would not be good for a soldier to serve his country like God is to be served. About WWII, Lewis explained to his readers they shouldn’t allow the war “to absorb our whole attention, because it is a finite object and therefore intrinsically unfitted to support the whole attention of the human soul” (p. 52). And also, “A man may have to die for his country, but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or party, or class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most empathetically belong to God: himself” (p. 53).
Now, I know this war is very different from WWII, and what we were fighting for then was a lot different – but that doesn’t mean everything in WWII was good natured. There was corrupt stuff that went on then too. As believers in the military we have to be responsible for our individual decisions, and let God judge those above us for their decisions with the army their using. The only way a soldier should disobey an officer over him is if the command involved doing something God explicitly forbids. Otherwise, the command of Romans 13 to be obedient to your government is in play.
Britt, on the Luke 6 argument, consider this as well:
According to C.S. Lewis when Christ spoke these words recorded in Luke, there was a specific application for them his audience would not have missed.
Does anyone suppose our Lord’s hearers understood him to mean that if a homicidal maniac , attempting to a third party, tried to knock me out of the way, I must stand aside and let him get his victim? I at any rate think it impossible they could have so understood him. I think it equally impossible that they supposed him to mean that the best way of brining up a child was to let it hit its parents whenever it was in a temper, or, when it had grabbed the jam, to give it the honey also. I think the meaning of the words was perfectly clear – “Insofar as you are simply an angry man who has been hurt, mortify your anger and do not hit back” (p. 86).
He goes on further to say that if a person were in an official position, like a parent, or a court judge, or a soldier, “your duties may be very different because [there] may be then other motives than egotistic retaliation for hitting back” (p. 86).
Peace.