Category Archives: War

SLAUGHTERING CANAANITES

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I imagine you have had someone raise the question about God slaughtering the Canaanites.  Perhaps you have also struggled with it.

Usually, it is mentioned as one of the hardest things to accept about God.  I am not going to downplay how difficult it is to “make sense” of the slaughtering of the Canaanites, but I find something rather ironic, even some might say comical, about this particular objection.  

When someone mentions this objection as the thing to resolve before they will accept the Bible, I want them to look at my much longer list of problematic truths in Scripture!  Frankly, the Bible is littered with reminding me of my sin.  I don’t like that a bit, but there it is like gravity.  Am I going to leap from my spiritual twenty foot building and find reality on the ground?  Or am I going to trust that God being God is about things very different from me?

HITLER’S CROSS

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Hitler's Cross: How the Cross Was Used to Promote the Nazi Agenda - By: Erwin Lutzer<br />

Lutzer, the longtime pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, has made an important contribution to our understanding of Nazi Germany.

Hitler’s Cross is a troubling account of how moral decay and timidity results in disaster. And the disaster, as was the case in Nazi Germany, is usually far more reaching than we could ever imagine.

I appreciated this book very much except for the author’s desire to tie Nazi ideology to a certain view of end times. For those who don’t hold to dispensational theology, they might be tempted to write the author off, and thus would sadly miss an important book.

THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD

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it was a dark and stormy night“The pen is mightier than the sword” was coined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in for his play Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy, 1839:

True, This! –
Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanters wand! – itself a nothing! –
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyse the Caesars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless! – Take away the sword –
States can be saved without it!

Bulwer-Lytton may have coined the phrase but he was preceded by several others who expressed essentially the same idea:

George Whetstone, in Heptameron of Civil Discourses, 1582, wrote “The dashe of a Pen, is more greevous than the counterbuse of a Launce.”

In Hamlet, 1602, Shakespeare gave Rosencrantz the line “… many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills and dare scarce come thither.”

Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621 includes “From this it is clear how much more cruel the pen may be than the sword.”

Thomas Jefferson sent a letter to Thomas Paine in 1796, in which he wrote: “Go on doing with your pen what in other times was done with the sword.”

HT: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword.html

MOORE REFLECTIONS ON WAR

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This past Sunday evening I was catching up with my dad.  It turned out both of us had seen a little bit of the annual show PBS does to honor the military.  My dad is a life-long conservative.  He and my mom were very involved in trying to get Barry Goldwater elected.  Even though I was young at the time, I still recall them going off  to a dinner party/fundraiser for Goldwater at the Camelback resort.

In any case, my dad who served as an officer in the Navy during WWII is sick of war.  And so am I.  Both of us had to turn off the PBS special not because we don’t want to honor the soldiers, but because we don’t want to honor war.  And the former many times seems to bleed effortlessly over into the latter.  War is hell.  Those three words are pregnant with meaning.  Interestingly, it seems the ruthless William Tecumseh Sherman is responsible for coming up with the saying.  Here is one version of the quote.  It comes from an address Sherman gave in 1879 to the Michigan Military Academy:

“I’ve been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It’s entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here.
Suppress it! You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is Hell!” (per Wikiquote)

It seems another General living about a century after Sherman ought to be considered more in these discussions.  I speak of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Eisenhower raised concerns that the amount of money and power involved in making war greatly colors our judgment.  

Yes, some wars seem unavoidable.  And yes, some seem to fit various moral criteria, but are we too quick to pick up arms when other means have not been properly considered?  I think it is safe to answer in the affirmative.

 

UKRAINE

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My computer diagnostics tells me there is traffic to this site from the Ukraine.  Whether this is spam or legitimate readers, is impossible to know.  If it is the latter, I would love to hear what your perspective is on what is going on in the Ukraine.