Well, if I write about the war and religion, people follow up and challenge me, which is part of the point of blogging, but it interferes with finishing the hermeneutics essay.
Jonathon the more-than-full-witted yesterday (or two days ago, in Australia; I don’t understand how that works) asked me to explain how I interpret the story of Jesus’ encounter with the centurion (Luke 7:1-10, but also Matthew 8:5-13 and, in a different version, John 4:46-53). This is meat and drink to me, but I have to resist the temptation to write a miniature treatise on the subject.
I think Matthew (my personal favorite gospel, the one on which I’m slowly working up a book manuscript) construes the story mostly as an amazing healing story. It serves Matthew’s interests that the story concerns a Gentile soldier; one of Matthew’ characteristic emphases involves highlighting the way that Gentiles (who would think it?) are capable of faith that overshadows the faith of Matthew’ main rivals, the Pharisees. The Pharisees were remarkable for their piety and devotion to the Holy One of Israel; Matthew’s Jesus demands that his followers show even greater devotion, and Matthew illustrates this with the story of the centurion whose faith exceeds even what Jesus has encountered in Israel. The soldier’s identity as a Roman officer heightens the improbability of Jesus’ healing his slaveboy, but doesn’t register with Matthew (I think) as a commentary on the value of the man’s profession. If anything, Matthew tacitly supports the view that the man’s being a centurion was presumptively problematic for anyone who identified with Jesus. And although Jesus doesn’t condemn the man’s profession, the Matthean Jesus specifically commands non-violence, non-resistance to evildoers, and compliance with the demands that the hostile military make upon you, and he was crucified with the collaboration of Roman authorities and their military officers — so I suspect that Matthew’s version of Jesus would have had no room for participation in prosecuting a military campaign.
Luke is a different story, and I’m not as well-versed in Luken theology as in Matthean. Luke seems to present Gentile identity as more “normal” than Matthew does, and in his Gospel John the Baptist (mildly) instructs soldiers to forswear violent extortion, but not to hang up their swords. Luke also shows us Jesus advising his disciples to arm themselves (“Let anyone who doesn’t have a sword sell a cloak and buy one,” 22:36) and acknowledging that the two swords they bring out are enough (the interpretation of this very ellpitical expression is highly controverted, but one can quite plausibly construe this as Jesus’ approval of sword ownership). Still, with all that said, the Lukan Jesus is also an advocate of non-violence, still a victim of Roman injustice, still silent on anything like permission to use coercive violence (when the disciples try to fend off the arresting officers in Gethesemane, Jesus tells them to stop).
And the Johannine version of the story suggests that it’s possible to narrate the occasion as a miraculous healing without any explicit attention to the man’s military profession.
All that inclines me to think that Jesus’ example obliges us to extend the same loving, healing ministry to soldiers that we show to anyone else; Jesus shows no self-righteous stand-offishness relative to this man (quite the opposite of the way he treats the Gentile woman whose daughter needed healing). By the same token, though, Jesus’ ministry and teaching suggest no room for disciples to justify acts of military violence against others. Again, the dominant Christian position on this permits military violence under highly restrictive conditions (conditions that the Bush administration seems neither to understand nor even to wish to understand) — but that permission falls clearly under the category of “things it’s wrong to do, although we understand why you’re doing it, and we interpret this not as deliberate refractory self-indulgent blood lust, but as the actions of a disciple whose life is fundamentally non-violent, whose conscience obliges him or her to cooperate with the theologically-grounded wisdom of the head of state.” A soldier may be forgiven for participation in a “just” war, but that still leaves military service in the same category of as a heap of other transgressions — not as a positive good.
Posted by AKMA at February 25, 2003 09:59 PM | TrackBackThank you! When I wrote that I was curious about "how AKMA -- or anyone with Christian convictions -- would interpret the exchange between Christ and the Roman centurion" I was hoping for an explanation like this.
I quoted Luke 7: 1-10 in my post because that's the gospel that Keegan referred to in A History of War. Interesting that he chose the gospel that appears to show the greatest tolerance for bearing arms.
Your exegesis prompts another question related to your stated preference for Matthew's gospel. Initially I assumed that it's your favorite because of the way Christ's life and work is filtered through Matthew's particular consciousness. Then it occurred to me to ask if it was always your favorite and, more particularly, whether your opinions of the various gospels changed after you were able to read them in Greek rather than English. I recall a discussion in religious studies class in high school about which language the gospels were originally written in and a quick Google search indicates some ambiguity as to whether that language was Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, or Latin.
I ask this since I assume my own tastes in Japanese literature will shift when I begin to read the original Japanese rather than an English translation.
Posted by: Jonathon Delacour at February 27, 2003 09:06 PMThis is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you've created some space in the Heap, it's yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don't need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won't be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you're done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.
Posted by: Helegor at January 13, 2004 10:04 AMThis is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you've created some space in the Heap, it's yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don't need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won't be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you're done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.
Posted by: Polidore at January 13, 2004 10:05 AMInside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.
Posted by: Emanuel at January 13, 2004 10:05 AM