My perspective on war has been changing. It’s perhaps not all that surprising, given the 24/7 real-time news coverage of the current conflict in Iraq and my addiction to it. My guess is that a lot of us who are watching the news coverage are changing in one way or another. What is surprising – to me, anyway – is the way in which my views are changing.
 
I have always been more or less a pacifist. I grew up with the war in Vietnam, being one of the last in my generation to actually get a draft card (which I still have tucked away somewhere). I was taught at a very early age that the people we were fighting didn’t necessarily dislike us. War was not personal; it was driven by national issues and the individuals we were fighting might have been our friends under different circumstances. I loved the Doonesbury comic strip back then (remember when Doonesbury was actually clever and funny? Or is this just my imagination?), when one of the characters, B.D., I think it was, sat out the war with a North Vietnamese soldier named Phred.
 
The Vietnam War ended, the draft faded away, and I remained fairly opposed to war. As I studied the Bible more and more, the more I was convinced that pacifism – turning the other cheek and loving your enemy – was the only true Christian way. Even though God was certainly a God of war in the Old Testament, that was back when there was a clear delineation between God’s people and “the others;” however, the Church is now established all over the world and is not aligned with any one country or governmental style. In fact, there are Christians all over the world. So in a nutshell, for Christians to participate in war would be to divide the universal Church.
 
Then came Desert Storm, by appearance a war with honorable motives. Like most of America, I cheered at the rescue of Kuwait. However, I was aware of this obvious disconnect in my thinking, and discovered that somehow along the way I had been sucked into the realm of the “Christian Conservatives” and had traded my Biblical agenda for that of the Religious Right (if you still don’t know, they aren’t the same).
 
I continued to read and study, and I began to recognize that the liberal vs. conservative debate was a red herring – a distraction from the true issues of the Gospel. The conservatives idolized being “right” (in both senses of the word) while liberals idolized loving your neighbor, often to the exclusion of the other. However, it seemed to me that the Gospel had very different definitions of both being right and loving your neighbor than what I usually heard expressed. Putting these concepts in their proper setting seemed to render the liberal-conservative issues at best irrelevant.
 
As I was thinking through these issues the U.S. became involved in Kosovo, and I drifted back to more of an anti-war stance. Of course, the issues were not at all clear for as with many of these cultural conflicts, there really were no “good guys;” the only real issue appeared to be who was currently trying to ethnically cleanse the other.
 
Back to the Present
 
Now here we are, involved in probably the most hotly debated war since Vietnam. I will state for the record that I was for the most part uncomfortable with the current administration’s seemingly aggressive attitude and our government’s inability to obtain UN support for our actions. I never was, and am still not, a flag-waver, holding to a doctrine of “my country, right or wrong.” As a Christian, I believe our primary commitment is to the Gospel, not to a political agenda. And, for the record, it is my belief that there is no political agenda which coincides with the Gospel, except perhaps in minor degrees.
 
This is not to say that we don’t have some obligation to our communities and country, for we clearly do; we just need to be able to delineate that obligation from commitment to our faith. As Jesus implied when he said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s,” we should be aware of the difference, and know which commitment is driving which. 
 
It had been my hope, as was the hope of most, that war could have in some way been averted. However, here we are in the middle of a very real war, with real casualties, real prisoners of war, and real soldiers missing in action. I am still addicted to the real-time cable news, checking in several times a day for the latest updates. It’s an amazing time; we, the people safe at home in America, are seeing for the first time in history what war really looks like, hearing the opinions of soldiers in the field and those of the imbedded reporters, as well as the opinions of the Iraqi people.
 
And – perhaps in part due to the real-time nature of the news, and largely in spite of the slants of the media – I find my opinion on war is changing once again.
 
I don’t really understand why, except that my commitment to the Gospel is somehow involved. Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom of God included some violent images, not the least of which was His very brutal, bloody death on a cross. Along with thoughts of loving your neighbor was, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34), not that He was saying that his followers should go start wars. But Jesus also said this: “greater love has no man, than he should lay down his life for his friend.”
 
That’s the passage that strikes me the hardest as I listen to the interviews and news reports; that, and the belief that there are things worth dying for, and things worth fighting for. (Fighting, of course, is an altogether different issue than dying.) All human life is incredibly valuable. Even for the Christian, whose hope and destiny is eternal life after death, our earthly, physical lives are more precious than anything else we possess. Therefore, there is no greater way we can show our love, than by giving our lives for others.
 
I don’t believe that all people are called to go to war, or that someone called to fight today will be called to fight tomorrow. There is, after all, a time for everything (turn, turn, turn). I think military service is a matter of conscience and must come from our personal commitments and understanding; for this reason, I don’t think I could support mandatory military service. But, as the Kingdom of Heaven “is suffering violence,” I think one day we may all be called to fight for something, whether intellectual, spiritual or physical; the only real difference is in how it is worked out.
 
So, as I watch MSNBC, CNN, Fox, (along with a little LOTR, The Matrix & a few Mel Gibson movies as diversions) I know that war is a necessary part of life on this Earth, at this time. There are, perhaps, “just” wars as well as unjust wars, and sometimes people will disagree as to which is which. This, too, appears to be a matter of conscience. My conscience at this point is telling me that this war is necessary – and perhaps is only a physical manifestation of something that is going on in a different realm (I am truly not implying anything specific here). Who knows where or what the real battle is.
 
It is, of course, my wish that my family and I live lives of peace, rather than lives of war and conflict. As Tolkien wrote, “so do all who live in such times [sic].” 
 
I’m still surprised and sometimes confused at the current state of my still-evolving thinking. I am, however, starting to understand what it means to fight for what you believe in, whatever that will mean. Today, if I were to answer the question, “war, what’s it good for?” I would have to reply that I don’t really know, except that it’s not “absolutely nuthin” (say it again); I believe, at this point anyway, war is an unfortunate, detestable but necessary part of life.