Kethuvim

I must say that I wasn't raised a pacifist.  I didn't spend my childhood days sitting in drum circles with adults, taking in the faint smell of peyote in the air.  I grew up in a fully Christian (whatever that means), ultra right-wing Republican home (thanks to W, that home is not so Republican anymore).  Politics wasn't discussed much in my home, but I do have very vivid memories of the beginning of the Gulf War.  I remember sitting the home of my aunt and uncle on Sunday night after church and talking about the war with them.  My uncle said, "We're kicking butt and taking names."  I remember feeling a huge swell of patriotic pride at those words and thinking, "Yeah, darn right.  Don't mess with the U.S.A."  In fact, I would say that this swell of pride marked the first 25-ish years of my existence.  When a war would come along, I would get this sense of America being the world's police force for good.  I never once remember questioning why a war was being fought, or whether there was another way, I just accepted that if the President of the United States saw fit to annihilate a bunch of people, then there was probably a good (and Christian) reason for doing so.  

When 9/11 happened, I was a senior in college and I remember sitting on the couch in my house watching the news and balling my eyes out.  I remember my dad calling to ask if I was okay, and I remember sobbing that I was scared.  I didn't know what to do with evil that huge (I've since realized that this kind of crap happens all over the world on a fairly regular basis, but no one in America cares unless it affects us).  When we invaded Afghanistan I remember feeling that familiar sense of pride.  I remember seeing footage of the bombers and thinking, "It's okay now Brad, everything is going to be alright."  Something had to be done as a response to 9/11, so I just figured that blowing up people who were indirectly responsible for blowing up our people seemed reasonable.

A shift began taking place when we invaded Iraq however.  Shortly after the invasion, it became clear that our reason for going to war (WMDs) was faulty and stuff started sliding downhill quickly.  I started wondering if we really had a good reason to invade, or whether there was such a thing as a good reason to invade a country.  Afghanistan was one thing, but this was another.  That was retaliation, Iraq couldn't be pigeon-holed so easily.  This is where I became less pro-war and more of a believer in just war.  My thinking shifted from war for any reason to war for some reason.  In my mind, there needed to be a perfectly good reason for attacking a country (Pearl Harbor and 9/11 for instance), before we proceeded to do so.  

My next shift occurred when when I started studying the culture behind the Bible's writings.  I started realizing that the Bible wasn't written for me, it was written for a particular people in a particular time and place.  This changed everything.  I stopped reading the Bible from a 21st century American perspective and started reading it from the perspective of the ancients in which it was originally penned.  Stuff like "Blessed are the peacemakers" started making more sense when I realized that Jesus was speaking to poor peasants living under the brutal and violent Roman Empire.  I started reading the sayings of Jesus in a whole different light.  I will write more on this in a later post.  

Long story short, I want all of you to know that my change in thinking was a long process.  As you will see in coming posts, I find a pro-war mindset very difficult to justify using the New Testament.  I do, however, understand the desire to justify it using the Old Testament.  In the next post, I will take a look at the Old Testament versus the New and how the Christian is to reconcile the two.