Living In the City of God

Moses and Abraham Lincoln

“And Moses sent them to war, a thousand of every tribe…” – Numbers 31.6

“I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and
leave you only with the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom” – Abraham Lincoln’s letter to Lydia Bixby, who lost five sons in the Civil War

There are parts of the Old Testament that might be renamed “the art of war”, the battles, the tactics, the heroes, and the numbered of conquered are so great. The modern world has not changed much. You can not pick up a newspaper or turn on a television without being aware that war and the threat of war are part of our daily lives. But, as Christians, what does it mean that we participate in the killing of our fellow man, or, at the very least that we stand by and do nothing as the killing escalates.

Several of the most important figures in the Bible were great warriors. Moses and David could raise armies and defeat enemies as well as any generals in chronicled history. In Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, Deuteronomy, Judges, Joshua, Samuel and Kings the term “war” is mentioned almost a hundred times. Oddly, in the New Testament, the word war appears less than twenty times, and half of these are in The Revelation to John.

The Bible is clearly one book and one canon, but the covenant of the Christian faith is no covenant at all without the New Testament following the Old. And, while the Old Testament is a book of war, the New Testament is not.

In the history of the Western World, war is an honorable profession. Count the number of generals who became President. Many historians would chose Churchill and Lincoln as the two great political figures among the English speaking people, at least over the last two hundred years. If it had not been for the wars that defined them, this level of regard would be unlikely. To a large extent, the history of the major Western countries is defined by the wars that they fought and either won or lost.

But, there is no call to earthly wars in the New Testament.

Lincoln was a consummate wordsmith. In his letter to Lydia Bixby, he writes with care that her sacrifice has been laid “upon the altar of freedom”. That phrase moves us, as citizens of free nations and as Christians to the heart of the matter, because we have both the altar of our Christianity and the altar of freedom. We have our duty to Christ and our duty to the principles that men should live free from tyranny. But, they may well not be the same duty.

There is a value in reading some of the central documents that form the basis of democracy. The Declaration of Independence makes the point that it is the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God that are evoked as justification of the rights of man. The Magna Carta begins by saying that it is to “the honour of God” that we will have a “better ordering of our kingdom”. To read these documents, and many others, it is clear that their authors believed that the human institutions, created for noble reasons, were being created because this is the way God would want it to be. God would want man to be free. According to their authors, God would want man to be happy, and he would want man to prosper. There is certainly plenty of support for this in the Bible. Even Paul makes the point that “he was free born” – Acts 22.28

Everything appears to be reconciled then. God wants us to be free. Our own governments are based on our freedom. The points of view seemed reconciled. That is until the freedom is threatened.

We are left with this conflict, at the very least. Are the call to the altar of God and the call to the altar of freedom the same thing, or, are there circumstances, like a war to protect our freedom, in which we must take the lives of others, where the loyalties to the two imperatives cannot be honored without conflict?

Thomas Aquinas makes a case for what has become known as a “just war” in his Summa Theologicae. An entire set of rules for entering a “just war” (Jus ad bellum) has been put in place over the years as well as rules for conducting the war (Jus in bello). But, through the lens of Christian theology, we should still be concerned with how this series of justifications works, because it is based on judgments made by men, judgments that are subject to both warping and broad interpretation.

The rule for engaging in a “just war” could be spelled out ad infinitum. They include criteria such as whether the war is declared by the proper authorities and whether it is the only resort after all others have been exhausted. However, these are existential and relative justifications made by men on both sides of a war.

Abraham Lincoln gave the one of the best summations of the issue in his Second Inaugural Address. Speaking of the two sides in the conflict he said “both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the others.” And later in the address, “The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.” Lincoln had just been the primary agent of waging the most bloody war in the history of the United States, and yet he clearly sensed the irony of invoking God as an ally in war. It is a tragic irony that would have been lost on many wartime leaders.

But, Lincoln does provide us a path to an answer about the dilemma between the altar of freedom and the altar of God. “The Almighty has his own purposes”. Lincoln appears to have understood that taking sides in war did not appear to be among them.

There may be good reason that war is mentioned so infrequently in the New Testament outside Revelation. Would a God who sent his Son into the world to die for mere mortals and to act as their advocate have an interest in the justification for men’s wars? “We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous…”1 John 2.1 It would appear not.
The war for the souls of men is not a war to be fought on the earthly battlefield where men slaughter each other based on the judgments of other men. “…yet if thou kill, thou art become a transgressor of the law.” - James 2.11

The fighting of war, and the altar of freedom are in men’s domain. The judgments about going to war and the decision to kill belong to man. The altar of freedom and the altar of God are not the same thing. It is left to His mercy to look upon our conduct in war as well as peace as He examines the fabric of our lives.

Living In the City of God


The Apocalypse and Quantum Physics

“…but the rest of the dead lived not again until a thousand years were finished” –
Revelations 20.5

“Relativity teaches us the connection between different descriptions of one
and the same reality” – Albert Einstein


One of the profound questions for a Christian, and perhaps any person with or without faith, is “how shall I be judged?” How will my life be weighed? Who will be the judge? What will be the consequences?

These questions are tied up with the mysteries of death and dying, the conduct of our lives, and the nature of salvation.

There are some in Christian theology who support the doctrine of apocatastasis, a Greek word used in certain contexts to describe the reunion of all of God’s creatures, good or evil. This sort of universal salvation may give great comfort to those who believe it, and they might argue that there is even some precedent for it in the Gospel. “And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all-in-all.” - 1 Cor. 15:28

The debate about this has raged in the Church for centuries. “Universal salvation” was preached in the Eastern Church by St Gregory and St Augustine spoke against it. More recently, many theologians have argued that Dietrich Bonhoffer’s concept of “cheap grace” raised the debate again in the middle of the last century. “Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross..”, Bonhoffer wrote These words touched off a firestorm of argument that still goes on regarding whether there is any act that can bring man into the state of grace necessary for salvation.

So, there are two questions that arise out of the Christian theological tradition. How will I be judged, and, when will I be judged. Taking Revelations literally, there will be a time in the future when God will come to judge all people, the living and the dead, and grant them either eternal salvation or damnation. The timing of this event is complicated by the fact there there was a school of thought in the Church that believed that the events in this section of the Bible actually took place in the 1st Century AD (Preterism) So, the issue of when this judgment will take place has been open to interpretation for many centuries.

Since we are mortal and our lives are short, both in comparison to the span of history and immeasrably short in terms of eternity, the issue of our judgement “at the end of days” is almost certainly with us at all times, whether we are concious of it or not. This is fueled by the news of death and dying that is a constant.. What happened to those who died in a hurricane, a tsunami, or a plane accident? What happened to the man down the street who died? Some famous person written about in the obituaries? A loved one? Death is, literally, all around us, but most of us force it from our concious minds to whatever extent we can, to keep from dealing with what is truly the central issue of our lives. How will we be judged?

Catastrophies, especially those with many deaths, open our thoughts and hearts to two of the great mysteries. The first has to do with death and judgement, and the second with the question of why, if God is good, do the innocent often die before their “time”? The recent tsunami in Asia where 250,000 people perished riveted the whole world on these questions.

Until the 20th Century, it was generally assumed for hundreds and hundreds of years that time was linear. There were mystics and sects that thought otherwise, and even some Eastern religions like Buddhism, Jainism and Hidduism that philosophically viewed time as something other than one day after another. But, in our Western view, minute followed minute and hour followed hour. We aged from birth, over a number of years, to death. We could count our age in years. Anniversaries became an integral part of our culture. Rememberances were based on the years that had passed since an event, like WW II, had ended.

But, quantum physics, and, more recently, the highly complex world of string theory being advanced by scientists and mathematicians have demonstrated that time is truly relative. And, unlike some philosophical or religious view of time, string theory has the benefit of being grounded in hard science and basic research, and is in many ways the godchild of Albert Einstein..

For those of us who have questions about judgement day and the timing of peoples’ deaths, it opens a facinating door.

What if God’s judgment of humanity is not at some time in the distant future? What if it is on-going and part of our everyday lives? What if accidents and catatrophes great and small are part of a judgment process that goes on throughout eternity? If time is not strictly linear, who is to say when the End of Days will be? Perhaps for some of humanity it is in the past, and for some the present.

These are extremely complex questions, but, given the two issues of theology here, judgement and suffering of the innocent, the question becomes whether modern science and the Bible speak to one another in any way that helps give us a glimpse at answers?

So, let us look at both and see if there are valuable intersections that give us insight into these questions that face every human being at one time or another.

Judgment

“Seeing that all things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the Heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat” - 2 Peter 3.11-12

“I am clean without transgression, I am innocent; neither is there iniquity in me” – Job 33.9

Judgment appears unexpectedly. This is true for Job and for us. Job appears to have done little if anything to deserve God’s judgment, and yet for a time, he loses everything. Why is Job chosen, singled out by God? If he is indeed righteous, why does he suffer? According to 2 Peter, God will appear suddenly to judge us as well, but at least we have been given the preparation that the New Testament affords us, and advocacy of Christ who died and was resurrected. Job has neither.

Let us return for a moment to the concept that time itself is relative. The terms “past”, “present”, and “future” have a meaning to us as a human framework to mark time, but even our own science tells us that time moves at different paces under different circumstances. Most of us have heard the example of the two twins that is used to explain relativity.. The first twin is put in a spaceship and travels at close to light speed. The second stays on earth. After a twenty-year round trip, the traveling twin has aged only that amount of time, but his counterpart on earth has aged 46 years because he stayed in the inertial time frame, the place that was not moving as fast through time.

There is no reason to believe that God is governed by such rules, but it does open the possibility that events, such as final judgment, do not have to be governed by a linear time framework that begins with the birth of the Universe and ends with the Apocalypse. We may, even by our own scientific standards, live in a world where final judgment could go on every moment.

This concept is both liberating and frightening. Who would not be affected by the anxiety of believing that all people will be judged at one time, and, perhaps, in comparison to one another based on their thoughts and deeds, at a single point in the future? As Paul says in 2 Corinthians, we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, but in the timeless vantage point of eternity, how can men say when that might be? If our own science tells us time in is flux, why would we believe that the eternal world of God must be held to a stricter, more human measure of calendars and clocks.

So, whether we are slaves to our own science, or believe that God’s eternity does not run by a clock, we can at least accept the notion that Christ’s judgment of us may occur at any “time”, and the End of Days may be part of our everyday life. This leaves us with the issue of how we are judged, the issue of Bonhoffer and St. Gregory. Are all men saved by Christ’s sacrifice, or only those who have faith or good works? It is a subject that has been at the heart of the Christian debate about salvation for almost two thousand years, and there is clearly no ready answer.

But, there may be a hint within the puzzle of the suffering of the innocents. When 250,000 people were killed in the recent tsunami, we can be almost certain that young children and devout Christians were among them. They did not have live long lives, and whatever happiness they had as mortals was taken from them. But, were their deaths ruled by our finite view of death, or did they return to Eternity, and by the judgment of Christ, a life with him forever?

As humans, we cannot look into their hearts, and we cannot see their innocence or guilt. We cannot see if they could lament as Job did that he was righteous and wronged. That is for God and not us. As they passed from this world to the next, perhaps Christ’s judgment went with them. Perhaps the innocents received their reward, then, and not “until a thousand years were finished”. The Father of all does not wear the shackles of time and He is not burdened by a perspective of whether we are good or evil that is a part of the human view of man’s condition.. His judgment belongs to a realm which is neither restricted by the passing of the hours or the sound of the gavel.

Douglas A. McIntyre graduated from Harvard with a degree in the Comparative Study of World Religions.