Women in Leadership and Why I am again Glad to be an Anabaptist

(I suggest you read the interview before you read my scattered thoughts) Here is a fascinating interview from CNN. I was reminded again of how delighted I am to be an Anabaptist, particularly one who believes in women literally having their heads covered, when Dr. Jones was put in a corner on the issue of the covering and also war and the government. I felt that Janet Parshall should have been a little more definite in stating that women and men are equal in value and importance, they simply have role differences. The example of women not being an afterthought of creation was good. I think that God made woman later than everything else to give Adam time to learn how handicapped and incapable he was without woman.

This interview does clearly highlight how flawed it is to believe that we can just read the Bible and know what is right. Everyone views Scripture through a lens. I believe that Jesus needs to be our lens for interpreting Scripture. He was the fulness of God revealed. It is through this complete revelation of God that we can understand all the rest of Scripture. I did like Dr. Jones’ point that the Scripture and the will not be inconsistent with each other because they are both of God. Jesus is the Logos, the source of all good and truth. He is the Word.

Larry King Live

Should Women Be Pastors?

Aired June 14, 2000 – 9:00 p.m. ET THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

LARRY KING, HOST: Tonight, a Baptist battle over whether women should be pastors. Joining us from Greenville, South Carolina, Dr. Bob Jones III, president of Bob Jones University; from Nashville, the Reverend Raye Nell Dyer, president of Baptist Women in Ministry; with me in New York, radio talk show short Janet Parshall of “Janet Parshall’s America,” and the Reverend Stan Hastey, executive director of the Alliance of Baptists. It’s all next on LARRY KING LIVE.

Leo Tolstoy Edits My Blog Post

In a previous post I declared my belief that the church should not use the weapon of coercion. I said that while the good can be accomplished with coercion and the sword, it is an evil tool. The state causes good to happen but uses an evil or flawed tool. I said that the weapon of the church is the only way to truly accomplish good with a good weapon.

While I do not retract this, I have been led into a slightly different understanding or perspective on this issue by some of the statements in Leo Tolstoy’s wonderful novel The Resurrection. In it he asks what right men have to imprison and punish others when they themselves are evil. While the evilness of the common prison guard in Tolstoy’s country and time may have been more corrupt than in ours, our society has similar situations. While the prison guards of our day may not themselves visit prostitutes or steal money, some of them would visit a strip club or sue someone to get money regardless of that person’s guilt, and even more of them would consider these things to be okay. The guards hold little moral superiority over those they guard. The same with the judges, policemen, and politicians. While these people may not have committed actions that the law deems evil, they are evil like all are who have not been transformed into the image of Christ.

Tolstoy goes on to say that love and forgiveness are the way that Christians act. Here is where he brings a twist to my previous thinking. It is not purely because the weapon is evil that the church does not use coercion and the sword. Rather, because the church is made up of people who are like Christ, the church does what Christ did/does. The church simply acts out of who they are and offers forgiveness and love. They do not reject the sword only because it is evil, but because it is discordant with the nature of who they now are.

Bringing Justice: an excuse for self-preservation

There are many Christians who believe that one can be just and loving in carrying out violence against another human being. They believe it is possible to love someone and kill them yet kill them for a just cause. They believe that there are things so unjust, that the righteous are fully correct in carrying out punishment.

While I can theoretically imagine how this is possible, I have at least one major problem with it. I firmly believe that Christians are to be like Jesus. Christians are to go about life on earth in full adherence to the teachings, principles, and purposes of Jesus life. (This is more fully laid out in my Mennofesto.)

My major problem with Christians who want to kill, albeit for a cause they feel is just, is that this requires an attitude antithetical to that of Christ. Christ clearly demonstrated and taught self denial. Over and over He taught that we should submit to the abuse of others (not return evil for evil, turn the other cheek, not sue). We should not protect our own interests (lend if someone asks, go the extra mile, spread the Gospel). His death was an act of complete abandonment of Himself. He abandoned self preservation and gave complete commitment to the plan of God.

Try as I might, I still find that those Christians who want to kill and use other weapons of this world to bring justice are doing it to a greater or lesser degree for their own preservation or the preservation of their true god, their nation. (And beyond this, Jesus does not call the Church to bring justice through violence, but to bring reconciliation through repentance.) Jesus calls us to surrender ourselves and our bodies completely to Him and Him alone. We are to fully deny the impulse to preserve our bodies, comfortable lives, hobbies, or nation and instead work to build the Kingdom of God. We must sacrifice ourselves for the Kingdom of God and the world. We must love God with all of ourselves and our neighbors with the love that God gives back. We must abandon ourselves to God.

Profound Statement from a Computer

“Strange game. The only winning move is not to play.” – stated after simulating hundreds of war games in the movie WarGames (1983), written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes

A Friend’s Wonderful Summary

A friend sent me a paper he read as a commencement address at a local Mennonite high school. He told me that it was very satisfying because it was the big picture view of all the things he has been referencing and trying to say to the graduates for the last four years. It is a masterful piece and it is available for reading here or for download as a pdf here.

A Facinating Look at Military Desensitization

More articles are available from the same place as the following: http://www.killology.com/publications.htm

Aggression and Violence”

By Dave Grossman
Oxford Press, 2000

To understand the nature of aggression and violence on the battlefield, it must first be recognized that most participants in close combat are literally “frightened out of their wits.” Once the bullets start flying, most combatants stop thinking with the forebrain (that portion of the brain that makes us human) and start thinking with the midbrain (the primitive portion of our brain, which is indistinguishable from that of an animal).

In conflict situations, this primitive, midbrain processing can be observed in the existence of a powerful resistance to killing one’s own kind. Animals with antlers and horns slam together in a relatively harmless head-to-head fashion, and piranha fish fight their own kind with flicks of the tail, but against any other species these creatures unleash their horns and teeth without restraint. This is an essential survival mechanism that prevents a species from destroying itself during territorial and mating rituals.

One major modern revelation in the field of military psychology is the observation that such resistance to killing one’s own species is also a key factor in human combat.

A Statement by Early Christian Bishop Cyprian: Violence in an evil world

“He suggests that Donatus (the friend to whom he is writing) transport himself in imagination to a high mountain and look down with compassion upon the evil world. ‘Consider the roads blocked by robbers, the seas beset with pirates, and wars scattered all over the earth. The whole world is wet with mutual blood; and murder, which is a crime if done by an individual, is called a virtue when it is committed in war! Freedom from punishment is claimed for the wicked deeds of war, not on the plea that they are guiltless, but because the cruelty is carried out on a grand scale.’” Quoted from The Way of Peace by J.C. Wenger

Was Hitler Bad Enough to Kill?

A friend and I were recently discussing a Christian response to evil in the world. We discussed what to do with very evil people like Hitler. My friend, to a certain degree playing the devil’s advocate, suggested that since Hitler was so evil, people were justified in trying to kill him. In fact, may people who have studied his life believe that he was demon possessed. As I understand Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the little I have read of him, this is the line that he took. Hitler was so evil that it was for the common good of everyone if he was killed. He was the common thread that was holding the entire evil machine of the Third Reich together. If he was removed the evil would stop.

I counter: Neither Jesus or the apostles ever worked to assassinate Caesar or destroy the Colosseum even though horrible evil happened there. The Romans watched people kill each other or be eaten by animals for entertainment. They did it not out of hate and racial discrimination, but for pleasure. They left babies out on garbage dumps to die, divorce and immorality were rampant, and there was every kind of hideous and deviant behavior you can imagine. Still, Jesus and the early Christians did not try to kill anyone or even gain government power to stop the wrong doing.

To put the Hitler killing scenario into modern terms, Hitler was actively killing Jews for approximately three years. In this time he killed just slightly more Jews that America alone aborts babies in the same amount of time. Not only this, but America has been aborting babies for over twenty years. If we as Christians are justified in killing Hitler, then I would say that we are equally justified in killing abortion doctors.

And where do we draw the numerical line. If someone kills 1 million Jews in three years, are they still justified in being killed? How about 50 people a year? Should we take them out? If you step onto the boat of the one bringing justice, you become faced with the fact that a lot more people are really terrible. And if you look at yourself and are honest, you will realize like the Pharisees who wanted to stone the adulterous woman and the Israeli spy who mournfully testified against a Nazi war criminal, that I am just as evil inside.

Here are a few abortion statistics to remind you again of the need for the redemption of individual hearts in this world:

WORLDWIDE

Number of abortions per year: Approximately 46 Million
Number of abortions per day: Approximately 126,000

Where abortions occur:
78% of all abortions are obtained in developing countries and 22% occur in developed countries.

Legality of abortion:
About 26 million women obtain legal abortions each year, while an additional 20 million abortions are obtained in countries where it is restricted or prohibited by law.

Abortion averages:
Worldwide, the lifetime average is about 1 abortion per woman.

© Copyright 1999-2000, The Alan Guttmacher Institute. (www.agi-usa.org)

UNITED STATES

Number of abortions per year: 1.37 Million (1996)
Number of abortions per day: Approximately 3,700

http://www.abortionno.org/Resources/fastfacts.html

The Power of the Storyteller

When hearing a story, we consider events which hinder or harm the bad guy as being good. If they happen to the good guy, they are bad. If they happen to the bad guy, we think it is the work of Providence. If they happen to the good guy, we attribute it to the chances of fate or the devil. Many times the goodness of the event itself ends up being a mute point. What really matters is who the event happened to. The author of a story can formulate the readers perception of an event by causing it to happen to a certain character and have it be done by a certain other character. He can encourage the approval of a certain event or action simply by justifying it by using it to beat up the bad guy.

Personal Nonresistance=Death to Self

Anabaptists frequently talk about nonresistance and how that is to influence our interaction with our democratic society. We consider how we are to be impacting society and how to use change the world, not by force and coercion, but by love. We talk about the war in Iraq and abortion and the poor and other very relevant and important areas and try to decide how we as members of the Kingdom of God are to respond, how we are to bring our weapon of love into the fray.

I have recently been considering a more personal and more painful aspect of nonresistance, me and my relationships with people. How do I come across to them? Am I filled with love? Do they experience a complete lack of selfish resistance from me? When I share my beliefs, do they see them not as me pushing my agenda, but the Word of God lovingly communicated through me? Does my nonresistance extend into my personal life? Am I completely dead to myself and my pride so that I feel no compulsion or need to defend myself?