What is the ultimate solution? For nations, war. For Boelter’s brand of pro-life, assassination. For Boelter’s punishment, the death penalty. For the House of Commons, assistance in dying. For Iceland, the ‘elimination’ of Down Syndrome.
Left and right, north and south, nation and citizen, all have their culturally approved death solutions. It’s how we get things done when we really need to get things done. Who can resist the powerful pull of the ultimate solution of death?
The God of life. And, I pray, the people who confess faith in the God of life.
Maker of heaven and earth.
He rose again on the third day.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.
And I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.
“Hope finds in Christ not only a consolation in suffering, but also the protest of the divine promise against suffering. If Paul calls death the ‘last enemy’ (1 Cor. 15:26), then the opposite is also true: that the risen Christ, and with him the resurrection hope, must be declared to be the enemy of death and of a world that puts up with death.”Moltmann, Theology of Hope.
“Puts up with death,” is not quite strong enough. Not only do we put up with it, we believe in it—put our trust in it. The diabolical creed is our remaining confession when nihilism is our remaining religion. It is what we are left with after the 10 Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed have stopped working—outlived their usefulness. The devil has a catechism too and is effectively catechizing multitudes in the ways of killing. The rejection of the church’s creed does not leave one creed-less. The Supreme Ruler of Iran has a creed. Secular humanists and the Voluntary Euthanasia Society have their own creed. Vance Boelter has a perverted creed.
We believe in death to relieve suffering.
We believe in death to delete enemies.
We believe in death to remove obstacles to our agenda.
The church is to live as a contradiction in a world that puts up with death1. Our weapons are not of the flesh (2 Corinthians 10.4). God-of-life people don’t respond to killing with killing2. Bomb me—bomb you. Assassination—death penalty. God-of-life people are turn-the-other-cheek people. Principles of non-violence people. “Father forgive them, they know not what they do” people. We forgive in a world of grievance. We plant in a scorched earth. We choose solidarity with the voiceless—the powerless. We throw parties for the moms and their kids at His Nesting Place. Our faith has bloomed into the most dangerous contradiction to a world that puts their faith in death: hope. All because we follow Jesus, who was killed, but has been raised. He didn’t overcome death by killing, and neither shall we.
Again from Moltmann, “Faith takes up this contradiction and thus becomes itself a contradiction to the world of death. That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but it itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.” Theology of Hope.
Stanley Hauerwas at Biola, “I’d say, in 100 years, if Christians are people identified as those who do not kill their children or their elderly, we would have been doing something right.”
Amen; let it be so.
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