We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
The Lion, the Witch and the War
sandy Poore via Compfight
Red Letter Christians featured some of Greg’s thoughts in their recent article entitled The Lion, the Witch and the War. The author of the article talks about the C.S. Lewis story and the subtle ways that it reflects his bias and has encouraged Christians to embrace a wrong-headed view of war. Really excellent.
From the article:
One of the biggest stumbling blocks in following the teachings of Jesus is our tendency to do whatever we want, and to then convince ourselves that Jesus supports our agenda. This is especially true when it comes to His peace teachings. I’ve talked to church leaders who really want to speak the truth about peace but are afraid of repercussions from people in their congregations who are either in the military or related to someone in the military. There are a couple of things I’ve learned from thinking through this issue. The first is that we can love and respect people without agreeing with all of the choices they make. Many Christians do join the military, or support going to war, but I believe that there are much more Jesus-focused paths that we can take. The second is that none of us is perfect at following Jesus but we do need to be honest with ourselves about what He taught. He is the Prince of Peace and His teachings on this topic are incredibly clear, so if for some reason we don’t want to follow Him in all situations, let’s just admit that and not pretend that He didn’t actually say what He said.
Category: General
Tags: C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia, Peace, Peacemaking, Red Letter Christians, War
Related Reading
Praying for Peace During Political Hostility
Jesus calls his disciples to be “peacemakers” (Mt 5:9). During this season of political animosity, we have a great opportunity to practice being disciples by offering an alternative way of interacting with each other. One primary way we do this is by using the unique authority we have to affect the world through prayer to…
Lighten Up: Osheta the Narniac
You may not be aware of this, but Greg is a MennoNerd. What is a MennoNerd, you ask? According to their website, “MennoNerds is a network of Anabaptist bloggers, tweeps, Facebookers, and Google plussians (just made that word up) from around the Internet.” They recently started a series of fun video blog conversations and they’ve been…
The Challenge of Malala to the Church
http://youtu.be/f506lCk6Tos I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but it’s Malala Yousafzai appearing on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. At the age of 14 Malala was shot in the face at point blank range by the Taliban while riding to school on a bus, all because she wouldn’t stop speaking up for the right of…
Where are the Blessed Peacemakers?
Religion Dispatches Magazine posted an article recently on embracing non-violence in the Christian tradition. In it, Elizabeth Drescher argues that the violent imagery in Paul’s writing accounts for a great deal of the violent posturing going on in churches today, but she also argues that these images have been misapplied and misunderstood. She challenges us…
Anabaptist Response to the Attacks in Paris and Beirut
https://youtube.com/watch?v=paUtIl-oRpM&feature=youtu.be Our friend Bruxy Cavey, the pastor at The Meeting House in Toronto shares some thoughts on how to respond to the violence that is going on in the world. He writes: The Meeting House is a Historic Peace Church. In responding to terrorism, we don’t presume to tell governments what they should do, for…
Aslan Roars: The Atonement as Spiritual Warfare
Greg begins to unpack the Christus Victor view of the atonement by comparing it to the Chronicles of Narnia.