Such a good point (if I can say so myself, since I often take great pains to explain this to my conservative friends who consider me an “America hater” , since I will often express irritation with their almost liturgical language about “America” and the “freedoms for which the soldiers fought”. Almost sounds Messianic. Replace Jesus with the “men who died so that we might be free”.
All of this defense, all of this rhetoric presupposes that freedom is something that was taken, something that must be preserved by military intervention, something that one can attain by force. This argument for the Christian is fundamentally incorrect. Freedom comes from God, not from governments, freedom is a God-given right of all humanity not merely of those who have the biggest military forces. Freedom in this sense can be taken away, one can be thrown in prison, one can be persecuted, but that individual always remains free, it is the choices we make that allow us to be free despite our conditions. Within the human spirit, the mind, regardless of the conditions that one lives under, freedom is possible. The blood of the martyrs proclaims that freedom is the gift of God and not the invention of the state.
the Jesus Manifesto » Independence day sort of
This is never an easy thing to express. To call into question the “salvific” power of the death in war, and one becomes a “doubter” in the Constaninian schema. But this is not about the levelof bravery of soldiers. They are following orders, and while those orders are often suspect and even in oppositon to the vision of God’s shalom, the soldiers , many of them, go out with a “greater good” in mind, even though they may have a notion of the “greater good” formed in them by the same powers that send them into battle to die for them. I amreminded of a piece in one of the Chronicles of Narnia, the last one (The Last Battle) I believe. There Aslan confronts one of the soldiers from the army of darkness, and calls him Son, and the soldier confesses that he is really a child of Tash (the darkness). Aslan tells him that he would not have fought so hard and sought for so long if it were truly Tash that he sought to serve.
This says to me that the drive to “serve a cause graeter than one’s self” is rooted in the search for God. This search can get detoured by OTHER forces (like that of empires) , but the pull of community is strong, and the formative efforts of the empire are vast and deceptive, so that many turn to it , thinking they do God the service they are undertaking. In this commitment, they are brave. But they do the bidding of the empire , in the “name of God” (but the name is really that of the empire). And so the “greatest sacrafice” or “ultimate sacrafice” is the liturgical language used to sanctify the act of giving one’s life in war. To those whose allegiance is to Christ, however, this claim that this is the “ultimate sacrafice” is setting itself up as the challenge to the act of Christ in being God’s ultimate act of reconciliation. Christ himself is the ultimate sacrafice. The “freedom for which we fight” is altogether a different freedom from the freedom won in Christ. Whilly different. One is the ONE AND ONLY Freedom that is the only freedom. The “freedom” of which the nations speak is the altar at which they beckon us to come and give allegiance, which is a freedom inisginificant up against the the freedom of Christ, which is salvation. And not only different, but also often a false representation; an “idol” which one serves that enlists God in that which God has not envisioned for that nation (or for any community). It is still a CRUSADE, for which God is superimposed on the outlook of the powers that want us to see them and their cause as one and the same with God.
