According to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Prime Minister, George Bush said to him, ‘God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.’ (As reported in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, 25th July, 2006.)

Currently, just about any night on TV news we hear someone – the President of Iran, a leader of Hezbollah (an Arabic word meaning ‘Party of God’), a Rabbi from Jerusalem – claiming God is on their side in political, military or terrorist conflict. The ‘others’, the enemy i.e. ‘those who don’t have God on their side’, are either evil or agents of the Devil, or the Great Satan.

Our voices may not be heard beyond the walls of our living rooms, but if we are to practise some kind of Christian spiritual maturity The Issues reckons we should yell back at these people:
Look, leave poor God out of this! Give God a break! If you want to kill people because you want their land (or yours back) then say ‘I am going to kill you because I want that land’. Or if you want oil, or regime change plus democracy, or to get back at people who’ve killed some of your people, then say so, up front – ‘I am going to kill you because I want your oil, or because you are standing in the way of democracy, or because your mob killed some of my mob.’ But for God’s sake leave God out of it!

If those who kill and maim in the name of God could actually hear our protests they wouldn’t change, because ‘God’ is simply their rationalisation for what they want to do, frequently justifying their killing as being in their national interest, thus construing the universal God of the nations as God of their own nation.

Human beings know, universally, that it is wrong to kill others (see St Paul on ‘conscience’ in Romans 1-2). So, in order to make it OK for us to kill we need a reason, a justification (to ourselves more even than to others) that in these ‘exceptional circumstances’ wrong is right. And what better reason could human imagination devise than ‘God’!

Just think how powerful the argument seems! It goes, though never put into actual words, something like this – I am bombing, shooting, stabbing, torturing you in the name and power of the Creator of the universe, the Source of all things visible and invisible, the One who declares good from evil. You are evil and my acts are the judgement of God upon you.

In our millions, East and West, North and South, Muslim, Christian, Jew, etc we go along with this justification. We are so tribal and non-transcendental in our thinking and emotions that we suppress the obvious viz. the ‘cancelling out’ contradiction of different sides to a conflict claiming that they kill in the power and name of God.

The great C.S. Lewis partly faced this dilemma – and it’s hard to discover a contemporary Christian thinker who does – in his 1952 book Mere Christianity. In imagination, he pondered the circumstances in World War 1 of two Christians, one German, one English (himself), each believing they were acting rightly, killing each other simultaneously. Lewis resolved the dilemma by imagining that instantaneously they would each find themselves in heaven, where there would be mutual forgiveness and the realisation that it is the destiny of the soul, not the body that really matters.

But Lewis totally failed to resolve the contradiction where each believes he kills with God on his side. By transporting the dilemma into the next life, Lewis took a cheap way out. Today it is radical Muslim suicide bombers who use similar reasoning – about the instantaneous transportation of the soul to heaven – to justify slaughter and who, likewise, totally fail to address the contradiction that their enemies also believe God and right are on their side.

Evangelical Christian, President George W Bush’s reported claim to act in the name of God seems hardly to have caused a ripple in the Western media (but what about the Arabic speaking media?). Even the huge American Evangelical media has kept silent about the spiritual and theological dilemma Bush’s reported comments raise.

But if George Bush had said the following – and from the point of view of orthodox Trinitarian Christian belief it amounts to the same thing doesn’t it – would evangelical and other Christian voices remain silent? – ‘Jesus Christ told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then Jesus Christ instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.’

Very few Christians, including Evangelical Christians, would accept that Jesus could have spoken to George Bush in this way. It completely contradicts the non-violent picture of Jesus presented to us in the Gospels. It is impossible to imagine this Jesus on the side of any killer.

‘God’, is a word that has become an ideological tool in the verbal armoury of killers on each and every side of human conflict. Jesus is a name killers will not use because voluntarily ‘going like a lamb to the slaughter’ of crucifixion he was victim, not victimiser. And, as universally agreed, he was an innocent victim.

Jesus’ murder was a human sacrifice on the altar of human sin, not to satisfy a wrathful, vengeful, killer God (as the currently popular Catholic and Protestant penal theory of the atonement says) but to reveal the violence at the core of every human heart. For the first time in human history, it became possible to clearly see that God was on the side of the victims, not the victimisers. If we would follow Jesus then we, too, must take up the cross of the victim and not the sword of the victimiser, whether aggressor or avenger.

Market Place – A Newspaper for Australian Anglicans

August 2006