Larison on Un-Christian Delusions
Daniel Larison, here, takes to task Michael Novak and First Things, and their neocon-servative lunacy found here. The subject at hand is Novak's plea for a proposed pre-emptive strike on Iran. Daniel notes:
It is bad enough that Novak invokes Niebuhr (!) in support of this mad call for unprovoked, unnecessary war, but when he says that the “most dreadful war of all time is just ahead of us, is already well begun” we can safely say that he has lost all touch with reality. WWII remains the most dreadful war of all time, and nothing on the horizon even remotely compares to the loss of life and destruction that occurred in that war. So there is nothing realistic at all about Novak’s “Christian realism,” and neither is there anything Christian about it if that word is to have any connection to the teachings of Our Lord.
There is no justification for destroying what peace exists to satisfy our irrational fears of a deterrable and containable threat. There is no conceivable justification for initiating hostilities to attempt to stop the potential future acquisition of a weapon that the other state is very unlikely to use against us or our allies. To start a war for such a reason would be a crime against God and man.
The message is quite clear: if you treasure the sacred places where God revealed Himself, you will endorse my monstrous proposal, and otherwise you probably don’t really care about these places or the revelation itself. The proposal is horrible, and the manipulation being employed to advance the proposal is simply despicable.
As usual, I find myself in total agreement with Mr. Larison. The comments are of interest, as well, including the observations of David Lindsay, who writes:
Why does Zionism play so well among many (not all) Evangelicals? It is not usually because they subscribe to Dispensationalism....No, it is because they either do not know, or do not want to know, about Levantine Christianity, much as they either do not know, or do not want to know, about the Sub-Apostolic Fathers. They do not wish to be confronted with entirely matter-of-fact descriptions of all things “Romish” existing during the lifetimes of the Apostles and providing the context that the New Testament text presupposes. Nor do they wish to be confronted with the entirely matter-of-fact existence of communities of that kind which have been present continuously for two thousand years, right there in the Bible Lands.
Christian communities that go all the way back to the Day of Pentecost are problematic enough in themselves for them....Evangelical theology is increasingly looking beyond the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its earlier and more cerebral roots, and thus to a place within the older, broader and deeper Tradition. Approaches to the Middle East are starting to reflect this shift....But most churchgoers, and indeed most clergy, are not academic theologians. So, for the most part, the attitude continues to be essentially the same as that which has since the nineteenth century maintained the completely made-up Garden Tomb because those who invented it did not like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and did not want people to know about it.