I have been derelict in my agreement I made in joining the Christian Peace Bloggers blogring (lower right, near the bottom of the sidebar). 

It’s been difficult for me to know how to blog this. (It’s been more difficult lately,  to blog in general,  but this subject seems to promise a challenge that I am hesitant of late to undertake.  The problem is,  I have become so convinced that the locale for such movements needs to be in the church (not that I think that national movements are inappropriate;  just that one should not have to “go out” to ecumenical movements in order to raise a voice against war.  It ought to be a basic theological response.

When I think of people such as Al Mohler ,  who ,  to my knowledge has NEVER publicly commented on the war AT ALL,  as if it doesn’t exist,  which for me,  only testifies to how irrelevant his “theological” concerns are.  Perhaps that in itself is a step “up” from the proud support given to the Bush administration and its war lent by Richard Land.  But both of these represent for me two basic heresies of the Southern Baptist church leadership: that of propositionalism;  that “theology” boils down to argument and proofs and Bible-idolatry,  lifting a propositional set of “positions on the Bible” to a level above Christ himself,  and nationalistic idolatry, conflating allegiance to God and country. 

But I find myself mostly ashamed of the cowardice of churches,  and the placing of “pro-war” positions as “just another opinion” that we need to be careful not to “offend”. It’s not that the war is all there is to talk about.  That certainly is not the case.  But it should be rather upsetting,  and a topic on which many people should feel free to come and unveil their deepest troublings stirred up by this tragedy , instigated by greed, hubris,  and corruption.  And it has been enabled by the failure of the church to be a community of formation;  a living body of reconciliation that all too often subjects its voice to what will make it “more influential”.