Will Sampson this morning:
There is an article in this morning’s NY Times entitled, Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat. My immediate response (a phrase I have been uttering a lot lately) – what did you think was gonna’ happen?
My thoughts exactly. This is so right on. Many people (Mostly church folk, but also international relations folks) were saying as much (that we can end up creating MORE terrorists as a result) when all this hysteria first began. And we know WHO has been exploiting this to the hilt. Words cannot express my disdain and disgust with these people.
Someone once said, “The violent entice their neighbors, and lead them in a way that is not good.” (ref). I fear for the world our nation is creating. Driven by anger at the September 11 attacks, we were ready to lynch anyone who even appeared to have something to do with that awful day. As a nation we were led astray by evil people with unconfirmed motives. One could speculate that the President was trying to settle an old score, or that the Bush Administration was beholden to the Carlyle Group and Halliburton. Truth is, we don’t know. What we do know is that America has made a grave mistake, and pretending this is not so will only serve to exacerbate the situation.
Source: willzhead
The part I bolded above also needs to be said. These motives and efforts are EVIL. They are evil in the most ultimate sense. They are motives, actions, and aims completely apart from God, and ANTI-CHRIST. Ascribing all these grand nationalistic justifications only adds to the deception that all this represents. And the churches who support it, shame.�
Hey Jay,
Thanks for that. Yeah, I decided a while back that NAMING just what this stuff amounts to (ie EVIL) is SOMETIMES going to be the result (or needs to be) of discernment. I somehow feel that little of this is done — that next to NO time is spent by bodies of Christ in looking at the political picture in the U.S. and drawing the line between nationalism and worship of God and discipleship. And , if I hear you rightly concerning the problem of power, this is much to blame for this inability of many American churches to step outside this “thrill” of having some say in the political/moral climate of this country, as the Religious Right seems to boast. Frankly, I think they’re being played by the Bush administration — and it’s beginning to get recognized by the Right’s leadership. But others simply continue to sell out and capitualte completely , refusing to grant any credence to the mounting evidence of greed and corruption and outright devious deception.
I usually make an effort to separate my assesments about evil from the “Satanist” , “devil and pitchfork” kind of imagery and try to acknowledge that there are complicated structures (Principalities and powers etc) that coalesce together into a force for EVIL; that which works against the purposes of God (having to do with reconsiliation and redemption) by advocating for a legitimizing of “cultural forces of desire” (that last phrase is from a book I’m now reading, The Great Giveaway by David Fitch, who I became acquainted with via the blog The Church and Postmodern Culture This book is all about how the evangelical church (and it could apply to many mainliners as well) has “given away” the formation structures that need to present in the church to the culture’s ways, to “big business”, to “Consumer capitalism”, etc.
I have recently ramped up my expresisons of disgust about the political after reading that I begun during the summer about some of the means used to justify the Bush administration’s “neocon-fuleled dream” about being the ultimate power, and another book about the history of the Pentagon and the ways in which they have justified their various “projects” since 1941.
I was doing a lot of that during the 2004 election season, and then began a strong re-ortientation toward ecclesiology and what it means to be church (Hauerwas and Radical Orhtodoxy and the like, and The Church of the Saviour, the latter of which has been a very strong formative influence on my sensibilities about church and what the body of Christ is called to be.
I know this quite the long response, but it just kept coming. Thanks for your observaitons about the allure of power
Dale
Uh . . . don’t hold anything back, okay? 🙂
I think the scriptures have a lot to say about discerning the spirits and our relationships with false teachers. It’s amazing that those churches that seem so into scriptural authority and mandate seem so unable to recognize the problems with power.