Beating the Cross into a Sword: The Modern Reversal of the Gospel

A literal marker of the distance between the religion of the New Testament and the religious nationalism that passes for Christianity is to be found on war monuments bearing the words, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15: 13). This was a popular verse for WWI monuments, the bloodiest and most senseless war of the century, fought primarily between “Christian” nations. The implication is that the dead soldier fulfilled Jesus words, that they too sacrificed their life for their friends. In fact, all that Jesus did can now be attributed to the dead soldier: he took up a cross of sacrifice, laid down his life in love, so that we might have freedom. We remember and honor him, memorializing his death. In Japan, at Yasukuni Shrine, the war dead, along with war criminals, are literally venerated or worshiped. Though Americans might feel uncomfortable “worshipping” the war dead, in songs like the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” every element of war is baptized, so that the whole movement of war is made holy.

The Lord’s wrath and truth march on through the power of the sword which bears his glory. The fires of an army encampment are an altar built to ensure his “fiery Gospel” will be “writ in burnished rows of steel” and this is equated with the work of Christ on the cross, “crushing the serpent with his heel.” This violence is equated with the glory of God and more or less worshiped in the refrain, “Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!” Throughout the marching of the troops is directly identified with “God marching on.” Christ “died to make men holy,” and this should spur on the troops, so “let us die to make men free.” Finally, the honor of killing in war is directly deified as “He (God) is honor to the brave.”

The soldier going out to kill, to lay down someone else’s life so he can return home, is equated with Jesus laying down his life. Freedom requiring the slaughter of the enemy is equated with freedom from sin, death, and violence. The memorializing or remembrance, as with the Lord’s Supper, is the equivalent of an act of worship, but now there is a reifying or memorializing of killing and death. Where Jesus’ death was aimed at defeating death, this remembrance makes death itself the means to freedom. In “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” war is equated with God. His truth, His Gospel, His wrath let loose on the enemy and his mercy shown to the victor, takes each element of war and Christianizes it. It is not just the slippage of a few words but the religion is rendered equivocal. The original meaning is lost as the cross is turned into a sword (literally, at the U. S. Air Force Academy Chapel) and violence is made redemptive. The question is, what happened to bring about this undoing and reversal of the faith?

The Constantinian shift, which I traced last week (here), is not explanation enough, as there is no period prior to the Reformation, other than the crusades, in which this direct equivalence between war and Christianity is so firmly drawn out. Even with the rise of Constantine and the development of just war theory, killing, even in war, called for penance, though the level of guilt was presumed to be something less than outright murder. Clergy were banned from killing or bearing the sword and those who had fought in a war, including the prince who might have declared it, were required, subsequent to the fighting, to do penance. Killing was considered evil, even in a just war, and in turn nonviolence was the standard equated with a committed Christian spirituality. While just war permitted the prince and his soldiers, usually mercenaries or professional soldiers to fight on a limited scale, this would still require penance and came with a fundamental guilt. Knights and mercenaries understood, through the sermons they heard and through the imagery on church portals depicting grinning devils dragging the violent into hell, that they were living in a perpetual state of sin. The increase in the monastic orders in the Middle Ages is attributed in large part  to knightly guilt.[1] The church remained normatively pacifist, though concessions were made for rulers and soldiers engaged in war, but it was recognized this was not the rule but the exception. Just as many or more (monastics, priests, penitents) were committed to a life of nonviolence.

It was only with the Reformation and its notion of works righteousness that nonviolence was no longer considered normative. As John Howard Yoder puts it, “The Reformation said that all the penitential stuff and all the monastic stuff had to go, because those constitute works righteousness. Such practices get in the way of salvation by faith.”[2] Special acts, which emphasized the normative nature of Christian nonviolence such as penance, confession, pilgrimage, or committing one’s entire life to being a monk or priest, were considered counterproductive to the Protestant message of justification by faith. In getting rid of these visible signs which indicated the fuller, peaceable way of the Gospel, Protestantism rid itself of any vestige of nonviolence.

It had once been universally understood that priests, monks, monasteries, churches, cemeteries, and even libraries were not to be pillaged. There were holy days, such as Good Friday, in which all fighting would cease. With the Reformation the primary focus was no longer on a real-world enactment of the way of Jesus, or even on a remnant of symbolism of an alternative peaceable order, as primacy was given to internal faith in God’s grace. One cannot do anything to be saved, and so the emphasis in Catholicism on holy times or holy places was traded for faith alone. All are priests and every profession is divinely ordained, a sphere unto itself, so that even the remaining small islands of nonviolence preserved in Catholicism vanished.[3]

Where the Medieval prince had once been nominally subject to the church, Luther presumed that the affairs of state were not to be interfered with by bishops and priests. The bishops should stick to the sacraments and the princes should run the country and there is no overlap of religious authority in civil accountability. Christians, as set forth in Reformed, Lutheran, and Anglican creeds, may fight in just wars – which simultaneously give a religious imprimatur to a notion acknowledged in Catholicism but never formally endorsed or instantiated as part of the faith. Christians may now serve Christ as civil magistrates, as businessmen, or as soldiers engaged in war, as the economy, the civil government and the church, were declared autonomous realms, each accountable directly to God. The priesthood of all believers would come to mean that every profession constituted its own kind of holy office with its own set of values and goals. The businessman who earned a profit, or the statesman who rendered justice, or the soldier who served in a just war, were each given the due sign of God’s blessing in terms of their field of service.

According to the Augsburg Confession (penned by Melanchthon for Lutherans), “Christians may without sin occupy civil offices or serve as princes and judges, render decisions and pass sentence according to imperial and other existing laws, punish evildoers with the sword, engage in just wars, serve as soldiers, buy and sell, take required oaths, possess property, be married, etc. Condemned here are the Anabaptists who teach that none of the things indicated above is Christian” (Augsburg Confession, article XVI, 1530). Note that to be Lutheran is to be against, according to the creedal formula, the peace of the Anabaptists. As the creed of the Church of England states it, “It is lawful for Christian men, at the commaundement of the Magistrate, to weare weapons, and serue in the warres” (Thirty-nine articles of the Church of England, English Edition of 1571, article XXXVII.) Or, according to the Westminster Confession, “It is lawful for Christians to accept and execute the office of a magistrate when called thereunto; . . . they may lawfully, now under the New Testament, wage war upon just and necessary occasion” (Westminster Confession, article XXIII/ II, 1646).[4] Thus, one can “read a fiery gospel writ” not in humble self-sacrifice but with “burnish’d rows of steel.”

In the three major Protestant traditions, for the first time, just war and participating in violence takes on creedal status. To be Lutheran, Anglican, or of the British free church or Puritan and Presbyterian or Reformed tradition, means one is officially committed to just war and state violence. Prior to the Reformation, the church, popes, and bishops, and a broadly shared Christian sensibility had tended to curb war, which resulted in many instances of conflicts being arbitrated. The theory of just war functioning as a restraint, as it had done in the Middle Ages, has ceased as national leaders will be the final arbiters of the justice and necessity of war. Now the only real deterrent and mitigating factor in war will tend to be pragmatic possibility.

Nationalism and capitalism are both a product of the Reformation in that the nation and the economy, like the church, constitute their own realm of morality and internal accountability. A businessman may amend Gordon Gecko to say, “Greed for God is good.” As Yoder describes it, too much moral scrupulosity is a bad thing. “Christians can do whatever they need to do,” according to the realm in which they serve. Whether it is politics or business or engaging in killing in legitimate wars, one’s morality needs to be fit for the realm of service. “Don’t be picky about living morally; after all, we are all sinners! What really matters is the message of salvation by grace.” Sin is inevitable and the message of the new religion is to live by grace. To do so is to recognize one need not suffer guilt, though incapable of doing the good and avoiding the evil. “The whole idea of morality is not meant to exercise restraint. That is an un-Protestant idea. Morality is for positive guidance, to give us a good conscience and motivation.” [5]

The Christian religion, rather than prohibiting or curbing violence as it had done for its first 1500 years, can now assuage any possibility of guilt as the violence of war is now justified as service to Christ. The stage is set for the total wars of the 20th century, in which there is no overriding consideration to pope or church. This opens the possibility for obliteration of civilian populations and no end to the limits of destruction, both of which are accommodated by new weapons of mass destruction which can meet this new theological vision.[6]

____________________________________________

Sign up for our next class with PBI starting Monday March 8th and running through April 30th: THE 301 Living in the Kingdom of God: A study of peaceful Christian traditions in light of the Constantinian shift with a view towards eschatology.  https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings  

Note: We have been having some trouble with Emails going into spam folders or being rejected (Yahoo mail in particular). If you don’t receive your notification Emails, please get in touch and we’ll try to help you out!  https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/contact


[1] The New Yorker Book review – “Holy Smoke: What were the Crusades really about?” December 6, 2004

[2] John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution (p. 119). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[3] Yoder, 120

[4] John H. Leith, ed. Creeds of the Churches: A Reader in Christian Doctrine from the Bible to the Present, 3rd ed. (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), 72– 73, 280, 220 respectively.  Quoted in Yoder, 23

[5] Yoder, 124-125.

[6] As I have described it elsewhere (here) in regard to the dropping of the Atomic bombs on Japan, there is a form of the faith in the West that seems to require that it enact violence. An all-Christian bomber crew from an all-Christian administration guilty of vaporizing, incinerating, annihilating tens of thousands of innocent civilians, including a disproportionately large number of Japanese Christians, and choosing a/the Church for ground zero, shows up the meaninglessness of this form of religion. Of course, the Christian faith as it was practiced by these men seems not to have figured into the decision. Christianity did not cause Truman the Baptist, Byrnes the Catholic and one of Truman’s closest advisors, or Charles Sweeney (pilot of Bock’s Car) a devout Catholic, or any of the long list of Christian advisors and actors to pause or refuse. Truman reported sleeping soundly and never having a second thought. The faith simply served, it seems, to ease the consciences of its adherents. Though the image of Christian slaughtering Christian in genocidal proportions, as in Nagasaki, forever exposed the emptiness of the predominant form of the Western religion, it was precisely their faith that blinded many to this conclusion.

Revelation as the Exposure and Defeat of a Violent Concept of God

Scripture records a progressive revelation of God culminating in Christ which ends up pitting an obscure earlier understanding, with its own tradition and cultic development, against the fulness and truth of Christ. My argument (here) was that Christ bore this difference in his death. My argument below is that this development of two competing concepts of God, coming to a final conflict in Christ, is what constitutes revelation and that to miss this point is to miss the word of the cross and the nature of inspiration.

The two biblical uses of “God breathed” illustrate the point that God’s life or breath animates human-kind (Gen. 2:7) and stands behind biblical inspiration (2 Tim. 3:16) in a similar way. In both instances the human impinges upon, is allowed to act upon, the divine gift.  The human bearer of the divine breath or image is capable of obscuring that image in a way that the rest of creation cannot. That is, the rest of God’s creation bears his fingerprint but it is only humans, those who directly bear his image, that are empowered to erase it. They might erase the image within themselves as individuals, corporately as part of societies, or as part of their religion. This is brought home most starkly by the cross in the one who was “the exact representation of his nature” (Heb. 1:3) who was tortured to death in an attempted annihilation. I presume that there is no divine breath that is not marked by this deadly human impetus to erasure. If the person of Christ, God incarnate, is acted upon by evil men, how can there be any word that does not bear the mark of this encounter. If the God breathed revelation in Christ bears the human attempt at erasure (murder, violence, deicide) in his flesh, is Scripture miraculously protected where the Word was not?

There are occasions, such as when his hometown synagogue tried to assassinate him, that Jesus “passed through their midst” (Lk. 4:30) unharmed. He had the ability to escape, but we cannot see how he did it and the mode of his passing is such that it leaves no trace. He might have carried out his entire ministry, passing through their midst and “going on His way” so that he slips through their hands and minds. But the implication is that his ministry and teaching would have passed, as he did on this occasion, undetected through their midst. Apparently, a word that is untouched by human hands will also not touch upon the human mind. The revelation occurs when they get their hands on him. The height of revelation occurs when humanity acts upon him and shapes the Word to the contours of the cross. Far from the cross silencing or erasing revelation, the Gospel message is this “word of the cross.” But the cross is revelation because the message pertains to what they would do to him. Their murderous intent is the condition that is exposed as what always acts upon revelation but it is only in Christ that the Word exposes and defeats these conditions.

We might call the cross an accommodation of the message to those who have received it, and incarnation certainly indicates God willingly submitted himself to the human condition, but the cross ends the shadowy form of revelation which preceded it, as Hebrews describes it. Perhaps as Novation put it (c. 200-258), God has allowed himself to be fitted to a “mediocre” state of belief so that in Israel he was understood “not as God was but as the people were able to understand.” It is not, Novatian concluded, a problem with God but with human limitations: “God, therefore, is not mediocre, but the people’s understanding is mediocre; God is not limited, but the intellectual capacity of the people’s mind is limited.”[1] Perhaps we could agree with Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329-390), that God allowed aspects of fallen understanding to get mixed in with his self-revelation, as they could not have otherwise received it. Like a wise physician he blended flavorful juice with the nasty-tasting medicine so they could stomach it. As they were able to endure more, he gradually peeled away their fallen beliefs so as to reveal more and more truth about himself. As Gregory notes, God first “cut off the idol” though he “left the sacrifices,” and then we learn in the latter prophets that he doesn’t approve of animal sacrifices. He allowed for sacrifices and even stooped to a level of spiritual immaturity which pictures him as enjoying the great smell (Gen. 8: 21; Exod. 29: 18, 25; Lev. 1: 9, 13; 2: 9; 4: 31) but which he clearly reveals he never enjoyed or wanted (Psalm 50:8; Hosea 6:6; Psalm 51:16; Psalm 40:6–8; Isaiah 1:11–31; Jeremiah 7:21–23; Hebrews 10:4–10).[2] In Christ, while there is still a form of subordination to the human condition, there is a revelation of the whole truth without the former admixture or impurity.

With Christ, the accommodation has given way to conflict between God and Israel’s conception of God. While God in Christ is addressing the human understanding, he is also challenging it as it has never before been challenged. Now God is commanding all men everywhere to repent, as he is finished with overlooking the times of ignorance. The cross marks the contradiction and difference with this former time as it is now being challenged. It is a challenge to every aspect of human understanding. It pits the human power of death against the divine power of life and it pits a human conception of God against God incarnate. Jesus will die because of the threat he poses to the Jewish Temple, the Jewish Nation, the Jewish religion, and the Jewish conception of God. And of course, the Jews are simply the best of humankind, so that Roman, Babylonian, American, or the universal is represented in what is Jewish.

The cross, then, reveals divine communication in an odd sort of dialogue, a reciprocal give-and-take, in which human agency is given free reign and Christ is willing to bear this sin. The sin, in this instance, is a form of thought, a state of mind, a belief system, or simply the symbolic order in which meaning is attached to violence and death. The violent symbolic order and religion (the Jewish religion which is the prototype of human religion) conceives of God in its own image, so that the worship of this God requires sacrifice and it results in killing God in the flesh.

This misrecognition of God is one that Israel’s Scriptures describes as slowly evolving. God has accommodated their desire for a king, their desire for polygamy and divorce, their desire for sacrifice, and even their desire to take the promised land violently. Indicators are that he planned for a slow movement in which he would remove the population by angel power (Ex. 33:2), by his own divine means (Ex. 34:11; Lev. 18:24), or by a gradual expansion of borders (Ex. 34:24). The land itself would spew out its inhabitants due to their own moral wickedness (Lev. 18:25) but also due to a hornet infestation (Ex. 23:28). But for God’s nonviolent means to be realized, patience would be required: “I will not drive them out before you in a single year, that the land may not become desolate and the beasts of the field become too numerous for you. I will drive them out before you little by little, until you become fruitful and take possession of the land” (Ex. 23:29-30). The picture is of a gradual migration, in which one people moves off the land while another occupies it.  

Throughout Israel’s Scriptures there is a tension between God’s original ideal and the actual execution of the plan. It is not always clear that God has accommodated as much as he has been made to accommodate.  For example, there is a clear record of his warning against having a king and the curses that will be bound to follow. Nonetheless, he accommodated their desire for a warrior king and then succumbed to their notion of a warrior God. All of these accommodations are codified into the law, so that what was “allowed” becomes what was legal. But contained in Israel’s Scriptures is also the evidence of God’s true desire.  Yahweh concludes, you were mistaken: “you thought I was just like you” (Ps 50: 21). The end result is that they do not know or recognize God: “An ox knows its owner, And a donkey its master’s manger, But Israel does not know, My people do not understand” (Is. 1:3).

Would it be too much to suggest Israel made a mistake fostered by their religion and recorded and challenged by their Scriptures?  Though, modern conservatives believe the Bible is a progressive revelation and even a revelation which passed through human vessels, it imagines this involves no errors or misconceptions (that it was inerrant). To save the Bible from error the trade-off is an illogical flattening out into something worse than Novatian’s mediocrity. Without the possibility for the sort of critique, which the Bible allows itself, no distinction can be made within the various prophetic traditions and portrayals of God. The result is to ignore the counter-prophets who maintain God never desired key elements codified in the Law, which cumulatively serve to misrepresent him. In order to accommodate the notion of an inerrant Bible, rather than the Bible accommodating human failing, the trade-off is to fit belief in a violent God to the person and work of Christ. Thus, doctrines like penal substitution or divine satisfaction not only hold that Christ satisfies God’s need for violence (to restore his honor or to assuage his anger), but historically mark the reshaping of atonement to fit Constantinian nationalism and the just war tradition, in which God is turned into something like a tribal deity.

 As Jeremiah describes the false prophets and priests, “They have healed the brokenness of My people superficially, Saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ But there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14). This false peace is promoted by the prophets who imagine God’s blessing is achieved through wars for national interest and they inaugurate and sanctify a nationalism which goes on into the Maccabees and to the various parties which challenged Jesus. The Sadducees would collaborate, the Zealots would rebel, the priests and Pharisees would appease, but they agree upon the need for the violent sacrifice of Jesus that the nation might survive. Jesus refusal to wage war for national independence and his revolutionary non-violent peace, in turn succumbs in large measure, in Constantinianism to the lie which put him on the cross.

Between the Edict of Milan (C. E. 313) which established toleration for Christianity within the Roman Empire and Augustine’s master work, The City of God (circa 410), which argues that Christianity is responsible for Rome’s success, the church became identified with the Holy Roman Empire. No longer is Jesus teaching conjoined, as it had been for three centuries, with the obedient nonviolent, anti-sacrificial, line of the true prophets but it is made to serve national interests through cultic means (Jesus as one more sacrifice) which, according to the true prophets, had corrupted Israel’s religion. As John Howard Yoder puts it, “The church does not preach ethics, judgment, repentance, separation from the world; it dispenses sacraments and holds society together.”[3] It is no longer a matter of discerning the will of God in a corrupt society, as now all of society is Christian (i.e., all are baptized) and the most that one need be concerned with is personal sin and attaining the lesser evil. Augustine imagined the Roman church was the millennial kingdom and that the conquest of the world had been achieved and all that was left was a clean-up campaign. As a result, the Roman state as God’s agent in the war on evil is set (by the beginning of the new millennium in 1096, the first crusade), not to preserve peace (the purpose of kings, I Tim. 2), but to wage war for faith and Empire against the heathens.[4]

Just as Jesus enemies would have annihilated him on the cross, the symbol of the cross in the Crusades, in The Thirty Years’ War and in the multiple “Christian” state wars, comes to represent the demonic force which killed him rather than his defeat of this power of death. Rather than the cross depicting God’s willingness to bear violence, it is now justification for the state to pronounce God-like judgments on its enemies. The state can now enact its own hell in exterminating all it deems to be evil. As a result, we continually hover on the brink of world annihilation as a theologically inspired nationalism, a reenactment of Jewish nationalism, mistakes the Father of Christ for the father of the nation state.

Is there the possibility that this violent image of God is mistaken and we know that it is mistaken due to the Word of the cross? Isn’t the message of the cross precisely the Word encountering and overcoming this death dealing human condition?


[1] Novatian, De Trinitate, 6, cited in Gregory Boyd, Cross Vision (Kindle Location 1563). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Gregory of Nazianzus, “Fifth Oration: On the Holy Spirit,” in Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, trans. P. Schaff and H. Wace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, n.d.), 326. Cited from Boyd, (Kindle Locations 1564-1565).

[3] John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Kindle Locations 3312-3317). Herald Pr. Kindle Edition.

[4] Yoder, (Kindle Locations 3322-3326)