THE BATTLE OF THE ELECT

During the Iraq war, US president Bush often wrongly appealed to the message of the Bible. Holy Scripture is neither bellicose nor does it preach the use of force

By Klaus Berger

[This article published in: DIE ZEIT 17/2003 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://zeus.zeit.de/text/2003/17/George_Bush. Klaus Berger is a professor of New Testament Theology at the University of Heidelberg.]




The war in Iraq involves a western ideology about a profane crusade – armed with the same pseudo-theology and the same misuse of the Bible as a thousand years ago. The die was cast with the classification of several countries as the “axis of evil.” This term was laughed at in Germany. That was a misunderstanding because of its bloody earnestness. Firstly, the judicial gesture and habit awaken deep resistance among those who obviously see themselves as the good and others as the evil. Worldviews collide here, not only self-assessments.

THE LANGUAGE OF “GOOD” AND “EVIL” INTENSIFIES INTOLERANCE

The rough and merciless division into “we” and “others” with opposite valuation is disturbing. That “others” are described as evil assumes that the speakers see themselves as “good.” This dualistic valuation wakens remembrances of the end-time battle between good and evil powers in Michael’s battle against Satan. The Bible portrays this struggle in military images but excludes people. According to the whole New Testament, an unconditional non-aggression is in effect for people to the end of time.

Everything else, every kind of absoluteness, is incompatible with the tone of “tolerant coexistence” that has developed as the general rule of life together in the civilized western world and beyond. For this fragile globality, every dualism that divides in black and white is painful and deadly. Dualism isolates the defender of this standpoint and disrupts the consensus society. In the protests against the Iraq war, the worldwide unity reaching from Indonesia and China to Mexico gained new form. As the most different interests merge here, the general post-modern tolerance cannot replace either culture or standpoints. Absolute classifications, particularly of the moral kind, are at most absurd.

The rhetoric of “good” and “evil” ascribed to living persons appears to us as hollow and borne out of blind conceitedness and the archaic consequences of ideologized intolerance, namely murder and manslaughter. The pathos of this rhetoric comes from inverted religious presumption or self-conceit. While its origin is undoubtedly Christian, this “new” ideological application certainly damages Christianity. The obvious deficiency in humility joined with readiness for violence raises enormous doubt about its genuineness and legitimacy.

Firstly, the origins of this way of looking at things can be represented in an unpolemical way. These origins extend far back in Christianity but rest on a serious misinterpretation. On one hand, Christian apocryphal apocalypses, that is consolidated writings about the end of times, Mohammed and Islam as the embodiment of the Anti-Christ, the absolute evil at the end of times, were seen shortly after the appearance of Islam. On the other hand and more importantly, the Christian groups that settled the new world adopted the consciousness of election from the radical English Reformation. As a group of the elect, these Christians had better institutions (law and constitution). What the law was once for the Jews as a basis for pride in elected existence became an extremely rigorous mission of constitution patriotism in militant Protestantism. The high esteem of the law and civil order in Calvinism contributed substantially to applying this order in a missionary way as the remedy for the world’s recovery.

The assumption about violent intervention in world history is also based on a common misinterpretation of the Revelation of John, chapter 20, since the crusades. After the thousand-year reign, Gog and Magog will threaten the holy city Jerusalem. Then the judgment will come after a “Battle of the Nations.” At the time of the crusades, the description of a thousand years was understood literally for Jerusalem’s rescue. However there is not a single word about Christian reinforcements in the siege of the godless hosts against Jerusalem. This was added in a grandiose misinterpretation at the beginning of the crusades. Thus the crusades arose. Right at the beginning of his term in office, president Ronald Reagan said we are the generation “on whom the battle with Gog and Magog depends.” A strict division of good and evil appears with an understanding of history oriented to the end of the world. The good see themselves as reinforcements of God’s judgment. The scene is the Middle East, above all Jerusalem. The good would bring the light of the true law to the world.

This is also a striking misinterpretation. All violence is prohibited to Christians of the Revelation of John. The general biblical declaration that all persons are sinners and that no one is just prohibits describing one group as “just” and others as evil. The parable of the wheat and the weeds in Matthew 13,24-30 admonishes enduring and not separating good and evil. Being evil is a danger for Christians, not for others, as the last petition of the Our Father shows (“Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil”).

The saying of Jesus that sounds militarist “I did not come to bring peace but the sword” (Matthew 10,34) is also a biblical verse misused since time immemorial. This can only be a summons to war when severed from every conceivable context within the gospels and Jesus’ message and the metaphorical interpretation of his words is not considered. In the gospels, the sentence means: “I did not come to promote harmony mania but conflict for the sake of the gospel. This conflict must be for the sake of the truth even if it destroys family ties and rope teams.”

NO POLITICIAN CAN CLAIM THE ROLE OF THE JUDGING GOD

President Bush also loves another saying of the gospels, the sentence about the necessary decision for the US or for the terrorists (speech of September 20, 2001). This sentence corresponds to Luke 11,23 and Matthew 12,30. However the president should remember this sentence also occurs in Cicero from the mouth of the losing party. Still the president is convinced he is fighting the decisive eschatological battle of “good against evil.” “We fight evil” (October 16, 2001).

The basic misinterpretation of some groups in the US is radically unbiblical. It is also incomprehensible how the Bible is slandered in Germany as bellicose and encouraging violence. A secularization of Christian ideas of judgment occurs in the American groups – as in the Crusades and parts of the English Reformation. Whoever cannot wait for God must take history in his own hands and become a self-styled court bailiff. Where God is not “the Lord,” his supposed elect assume the role of judge.

The religious thought systems are severed from God’s reality and uncoupled from the commands of humanity, the specific expression of God’s will in the Old and New Testament. In contrast, these elect are not concerned about doing God’s demanded will. Rather they arrogate a role that God or God’s angels exercise in the Bible. Whoever leases the role of the judging God takes over a religious system and competes with God in a very dubious way. In the whole Bible, God’s monopoly on force is in effect. What befits God alone, judging and separating, is not allowed people. Thus Jesus according to Luke 9 rebuked two disciples who wanted to send fire, thunder and lightning on a disobedient village. Jesus forbids this unconditionally, even if this village incomprehensibly did not accept him and his disciples.

The same groups from the US persistently refuse a “world judgment” in the sense of an international tribunal. The elect are themselves the judges. But whoever throws his weight around in this sense as world liberator must appear to others as a very awkward precursor of the Last Judgment. Therefore this worldview could be called a “crusading” perspective. That the pope fights for peace and has not joined Bush is connected on one hand with a distinctly biblical martyr theology and on the other hand with the fact that the idea of a violent court bailiff has been a mark of conservative Anglo-Saxon protestants for a half millennium. Even the ardent anti-communist Pius XII considered but vehemently rejected right away the idea of a crusade against Bolshevism.

The attempt to legitimate the use of force has an ideological character and betrays the principles of the New Testament. Judaism also understands its own elect as a way of suffering. Therefore the prayer of the rabbi is not an empty invention: Dear God, May we be less elect and suffer a little less.”