Ron Way:
Hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of Author Talk and Rising Light Media, where we interview some of the most fascinating religious and spiritual authors in the entire world. That's the case today. Today, our guest is Nick Megoran. Nick is an honorary chaplain and lecturer in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University in England. His undergraduate and post-graduate studies were conducted at Durham in Cambridge England. He also studied in Denmark and what is that, Kyrgyzstan?
Megoran:
It's Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, yeah.
Ron Way:
In Central Asia, thank you very much for the help.
He has researched war, violence and peace around the world for decades and now, brings his thoughts to us with a brand new book called War-like Christians in an Age of Violence. He subtitles his book The Evangelical Case Against War for the Gospel of Peace. Welcome to AuthorTalk, Nick. I know that it's evening where you are right now, thus I want to pass on a special thank you for taking time from your family to talk about your book entitled, Warlike Christians in an Age of Violence.
Megoran:
Thank you, Ron. It's a pleasure to be on your show.
Ron Way:
Let's jump right in. Warlike Christians. I think you nailed the problem and the conundrum right away in the preface of your book. Jesus not only taught his followers to love their enemies, but he also practiced what he preached and commanded his followers to adopt his example. Yet for over two millennia, the church has taught that there is something called “a just war.” I'm a retired naval officer, Nick, so you have to realize I struggled with this problem the entire time that I was in the military. When did Jesus' teaching change? In the early days? How? When? Can you walk us slowly through the history of this teaching of “turning the other cheek,” and how it was morphed into being acceptable in the eyes of God?
Megoran:
So, the early church for centuries resolutely held to New Testament gospel of peace. There's an important document for example on church order in the third century and it listed soldiering alongside brothel-keeping, gladiatorial gaming, idol-making, astrology and prostitution as professions that were forbidden to those who were seeking church membership. The man who wanted to become a soldier was to be rejected for he has despised God, it concludes.
This changed when the church, as I would see it, sold out on holiness to gain political influence by cozying up to the state in what historians call Christendom (talking third, fourth centuries). The effect of this was disastrous for the world and the church. My concern in writing the book was to reflect that as a result, many people today reject Christianity because they can point to the role it's had in Crusades and wars and torture and the like down through the ages.
That's for many people one of the greatest obstacles to the gospel, and one of the greatest shames on the church. But at each stage in church history, one of the things I look at in the book, particularly in periods of great revival and reformation, when the scriptures have been rediscovered, Christian movements and thinkers have arisen who've returned to their New Testament model of gospel peace. One of the things I try and do in the book is to argue that today these people and movements are not so much found in the West, but amongst the church that's facing the violence of Islamic State or Boko Haram or other such groups in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Ron Way:
Go back to the first and second century time period. Do we find anything about this in the gospel writings, or in later writings that came along in the second or third century, before we have Rome usurping the religion with Emperor Constantine? Is there a chain of activities here that you see it changed or it just all of a sudden, when Constantine made it the official religion of Rome, that it became part of the Roman domination?
Megoran:
It's a gradual change, but Constantine is often held as that moment. You do see a gradual change, but in the New Testament writers, the gospel passages, say that the letters and epistles, they are reinforcing very much this idea of gospel peace. Peter writes in his epistle that when Jesus was on the cross praying for his enemies, blessing his enemies, he gave an example that we should follow is the words that Peter uses.
This was taken by the early church, and one of the characters I look at, and the historians look at in the book is Robert Fox Lane. He wrote a book called Pagans and Christians. He asked how it was that the Roman Empire so quickly became Christianized, obviously without the use of force. He argues that the gospel spoke to the weak points of Roman culture, in an age that glorified inequality, that glorified violence. The Christian communities of ordinary men and women who shared their possessions, who refused to kill, who loved their enemies, this was such a radical challenge to the Roman world that this was appealing, and the gospel spread like wildfire.
You find other cases like this, many examples in the early church of church leaders exalting their followers to love their enemies and be like Jesus. You find many examples of people who were martyred for refusing to join the military because they are Christians. You slowly see some change occurring, but it is really with the co-option of Christianity as the state religion. This changes, because in the early centuries, to be a Christian was a social disadvantage. If you were a Christian and you couldn't join guilds that were often built around idol worship, you couldn't join the military, you couldn't get social advancement, then with Constantine's change, if you weren't formally a Christian, then you couldn't get social advances, so everyone signs-up but it starts to mean a lot less. As Jerome said, as the church increased in power, so it decreased in holiness.
Ron Way:
Ah, so we became human, and humans became political, and political became power and wealth. So, we corrupted ourselves.
Megoran:
Yeah, I think that's the case. You can, I've been asked, interestingly next week to give an interview for an Islamic radio station. They're quite interested in the book. One of the questions they want to ask me about is about the Crusades.
One of the crusaders famously said, "We came here to serve God and the king but also to get rich." To be a Christian soldier was a way of, as people understood it, serving God, but it was also a way of advancing oneself socially and gaining land and gaining wealth. Yes, and of course what happened was that the, that it becomes, the idea that Christians shouldn't fight, the idea that Christians should love their enemies, then became not something that's expected of all Christians but only the minority.
You have a priestly class that emerges, and the priests eventually are not to marry. This is a slightly later development. They are not to have wealth. They are not to take part in war. So, holiness, an ideal holiness becomes the preserve of a priestly class, whereas the ordinary Christian has a very, has a much lower level of holiness that can be expected of him. I see that as disastrous for the church. I believe in the priesthood of all believers, that all Christians are called to follow the high standards and teaching that the New Testament sets out.
When we do that, then the church is very effective in its holiness and it presents a challenge to society, but when we don't do that, when we say we have a few super spiritual Christians, who can hold that early standard that's set up by Christ and the apostles, that the rest of us couldn't you know, we don't quite need to aim for that standard, then you have problems in the church and the church becomes far less effective as a spiritual force.
Ron Way:
You know I'm going off script here, but the thought occurs to me, as more and more Christianity becomes the Catholic Church or the universal church at that time, the more that you find that a person can go to a priest and be forgiven for virtually any sin, with the wave of the hand and the confession. So, you didn't have to really worry about emulating Jesus, did you? I mean you could do whatever you wanted and still make it into heaven.
Megoran:
I'm not sure. I'm not an expert on Roman Catholic traditions of absolution, so I couldn't speak to that. The one thing I do look at in the book, is this tradition that existed in medieval Europe, that even if someone had killed someone in a war, they had to take, commit acts of penance, afterwards. If you follow in the news that last week the French President Macron said he was going to lend the Bayeux Tapestry to England next year.
The Bayeux Tapestry was a tapestry created to mark the Battle of Hastings in 1066. What we see there, after that battle, is that anyone who took part in that war was regarded as having committed a sin. If you were a soldier and you killed someone, you had to do a number of years of penance. If you were simply a pot washer or a cook, you had to undertake certain acts of penance. Even in the Medieval period, participation in warfare was still seen as sinful, allowable but sinful and it's with the Crusades that these traditions of penance disappear.
One of the things I trace in the book, in the chapters on church history, is this; although the church adopted just-war theory, it remained uncomfortable with it, for many, many centuries. There have always been groups of people at different moments who've arisen to challenge that whole idea.
Ron Way:
Right. Well, but there are many books, I mean hundreds that take the opposite tack on this issue of Christians participating in war. How does your book differ from numerous other Christian books? What makes yours stand out as different and where do you get the authority to do that if they are supposedly authorities too?
Megoran:
Firstly, it's from my background. I am not a theologian. I am a student of world politics and I've studied war and conflict and the carnage that this causes in different parts of the world. I visited Christians in some of these conflict zones and sought to learn from them. Many of the books one finds on Christianity and war, their main sources are other books on war. There's a more practical element there, which comes from my background as a political scientist, but it's also different to other books in that it is thoroughly evangelical. It insists on scripture as the only rule of faith in obedience, in the words of the famous Westminster Confession.
It's grounded in the Reformation doctrines of grace. It places justification by faith at the heart of its reasoning and it assumes, thirdly, that the Holy Spirit is dynamically and miraculously at work in the world's war zones. This enables Christians to make a distinctive contribution to peace making that nobody else could work, could make.
As I said, it's also different in its use of evidence. I not only visited some extraordinary people around the world in the course of writing this, but I mined Christian histories and biographies, set in conflict zones around the world, for remarkable and inspiring examples of what Christian peace making could look like as an alternative response to war. While I hope in this book, there will be much for the serious student of ethics to reflect on, it's not written for an academic audience. It's written for ordinary church goers, preachers, ordinary members of churches and there's a lot in there to inspire challenge. It's practical theology.
Ron Way:
Does the Old Testament, Nick, should it have any part in a religious consciousness today? If so, doesn't the Old Testament support the argument that Christians can take part in just wars? I mean, now I know the simple answer to that is Jesus changed all that (the old law) and vengeance no longer applies for Christians, but it has a deeper, more nuanced meaning than that, I think. Could you just touch base on the Old Testament and how we should look at that?
Megoran:
Of course. Yeah, there is a whole chapter in the book questioning, doesn't the Old Testament support Christian participation in warfare? I argue that it doesn't.
Ron Way:
Really?
Megoran:
Yeah, because in the Old Testament the laws of war were not there to help any country judge what a just war might be. They existed only for Israel and its condition as a territorial state at that certain time in history. I think the purpose of war in the Old Testament was not about justice or self-defense. The purpose of war was to produce faith by their conduct.
You remember these various stories that, in the Old Testament, which I look at, where God's people are to go into battle without chariots, without weapons. They go into battle with the priests leading and praying. Intentional military weakness, which produces faith in God, so the battle and the victory would be God's, not theirs. So, it's, warfare in the Old Testament was about producing faith and its outcome was holiness.
In the laws of war in the book of Deuteronomy, God's people are told that they are to destroy the cities completely inside the Promised Land, in order that they wouldn't be drawn to idolatry. But when they make war on cities outside the Promised Land, they are to offer them terms of peace and surrender and that these cities can work for them. It's explained that this is so that the cities inside the Promised Land didn't pollute God's people by their idolatry.
The purpose of war in the Old Testament was to produce holiness, and its outcome was to produce faith. These were parts of the general law, which as Hebrews says, was only a shadow of the good things to come, that will be found in Christ. With the death and resurrection of Christ, the laws on war when the way of the temple worship and animal sacrifices and the Levitical dietary and clothing regulations because in the New Testament, with the death and resurrection of Jesus, the holiness of God's church is not protected by being separate from the world. We live within the world, and our holiness is infectious. The Holy Spirit living within us allows us to protect ourselves.
To use the Old Testament to justify Christian violence today, it not only runs roughshod over any sound exegetical tradition, particularly an evangelical tradition, which I come from, but it is to prefer the law to the gospel. It is in effect, to deny the life and death and resurrection and ongoing ministry of Christ. I think there's not case in which we can use the Old Testament to justify war today.
Ron Way:
If we had more time, this is a fascinating book folks. Again, I mention to you, having served over 20 years in the US Navy, I struggled with this all the time, because ...
Megoran:
I'm sure.
Ron Way:
It's a conundrum you have to face as a military person with your own conscience. I also would probably ... If we had more time, we don't, but if we had more time, I'd go back because I find that the Old Testament in those battles where you say they're holy wars, where God supposedly tells them to kill every human being including the women, the children, massacre them. Take the women as your own. Kill the children or take them as slaves, is utterly repugnant. That reminds me of ISIS.
I'm going to ask you, in your book, you stand in opposition to the millions of Christians who think that while they support peacemaking in general, in extreme cases war is needed, i.e. to stop tyrants like Hitler from massacring millions of Jews. How do you argue against this? Do you think that the Jews deserved the gas chamber, or should we not step in and aid our fellow man? Being ready to sacrifice one's life for another is the highest calling of love, isn't it?
Megoran:
This is a difficult question, and it's addressed at length in the book. I've got two whole chapters on what about Hitler questions. It's difficult, not because the answer's hard but because in American and British popular film culture, World War II has taken on an extraordinary identity story. It's a feel-good war of goodies versus baddies. I grew up playing toy soldiers with the British and the Germans and watching those films.
In reality, the Second World War was a clash of imperial powers for global dominance, where morals played second fiddle. For example, the US and the UK, we closely supported the Soviet Union, even though Stalin had invaded Poland in 1939, and even though Stalin had murdered between 25,000-30,000 priests and millions of more of his own people, Christians. Millions of more people than Hitler killed.
Both of them invaded, both the Soviet Union and Germany invaded Poland in 1939, but Britain only went to war with Hitler rather than Stalin, and we supplied huge numbers of forces to Stalin. Why? Because Hitler threatened the global dominance of Britain and America, more than did Stalin. You find that the churches in all belligerent countries, in Japan and in Italy and in Germany and in Finland on the Axis side, as well as in Britain and the USA and Russia and France on the Allied side, all of these churches proclaimed that God was on their side.
If they had condemned the war and refused to let their members fight, the Second World War could never have taken place. That they didn't, was a failure of discipleship of the first order. World War II, I argue was one of the greatest disasters in Christian history and it led many in the non-Western world to reject our faith in horror. Christian ethics, I argue should be based on holy scripture, not on Hollywood.
I have a particular section on the case of the Jews. In retrospect, the Second World War is often justified in terms of defending the Jews, but that wasn't at the time. The US and British administrations kept back information from our publics, about what was happening to the Jewish people. There were numerous cases where American and British soldiers, forces, could have rescued large numbers of Jews, but they didn't. Even though we rescued large numbers of partisans from the continent who could help our war effort. There were pleas put out to the Americans and the British. Can you bomb these railway lines, carrying people to Auschwitz. We didn't do that even though we were bombing German munitions factories very nearby.
There were pleas, could we leaflet the Jewish populations to warn them that people, that they're being taken to the gas chambers, and they should try and flee. We didn't do that. There were many cases, many pleas that Jewish groups made to the Allies, to Britain and America to give money to enable Jewish people to buy seats on boats, which were, planes from Portugal to the US throughout the war, to help people bribe their way and buy tickets. We didn't give them that money.
In fact, one scholar, whose work I discuss in length argues that Britain and America purposely abandoned the Jews in the Second World War. It's a myth that the Second World War was fought to rescue the Jews. It's a myth that it was fought, good versus evil. It was fought by Britain and America, in order that we would defend our global position from Hitler, and we did that by allying with someone, who one might argue is even worse than Hitler, Stalin. It's a controversial position but one I address.
Ron Way:
Well, and I can understand what you're saying. That's a political decision of people. I'm going to move it fast forward because we're quickly running out of time and I apologize. Folks, you're just going to have to buy the book because as you can see, this is, it's controversial from what you've been thinking probably, but it makes you think what the world is all about. To think through your conscience and see what should be.
What would you suggest we do about ISIS because in your book you say that you believe that for instance, in Germany, a nexus there, that people should have stood up for Christians and been willing to be shot by Nazis. They would have dissuaded the Nazis from butchering the Jews. Do you really think that all the women in those areas controlled by ISIS at the height of its power... I know we've kind of decimated them now, but at the height of their power a year or two ago, if the women would have all stood together that that would have changed the minds of the mullahs in control and they would have stopped the brutality? Or do you think that they would have killed enough women or Christians or Kurd's or whatever that the survivors would have rapidly complied?
Megoran:
See in the case of Hitler, just going back briefly, the book looks at numerous examples of successful Christian non-violence, non-violent resistance to Hitler. Hard as an individual, but when the church is a collective, that it can do things.
Now, clearly the case of ISIS is different. One of the endorsers of the book is John Enyinnaya he’s the head of the Nigerian Baptist Theological Seminary. He's an extraordinary man. He's a man whose congregations are facing daily death at the hands of Boko Haram and he gave a talk recently and I heard him and interviewed him after it. He said the temptation is to use violence, but as Christians, we don't do that. We're to love our enemies.
He gave examples of Boko Haram people who'd seen Christians accepting martyrdom but refusing to hate their enemies, but to bless their enemies, just as Christ had done on the cross. These members of Boko Haram who realized, how God used this to convince them, and they turned from their violence. They turned from Islam and came to faith in Jesus. That is not something that you or I sitting comfortably in the West can tell others to do. One of the examples I repeatedly use are from real live people today in Africa who are facing this type of violence and giving a very different answer to the one that we expect to give.
Ron Way:
Nick, is there any lasting thoughts that you want to leave with our audience this evening before we quit?
Megoran:
Yes. I'm not offering in this book a fail-safe way of overcoming war. One of the things I argue is the faithful Christian response to war is also martyrdom. In Revelation 12:12 it says, talking about God's people, "They overcome the evil one by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony and they did not love their lives to shrink from death." A challenge that might face some believers is whether to be faithful to Jesus Christ or whether to accept martyrdom and I believe the biblical testimony is that accepting martyrdom, rather than killing our enemies is an authentic Christian response to violence. In that sense too, it is a very different type of book.
Ron Way:
Nick, is there any last thoughts that you want to leave with our audience this evening?
Megoran:
There is one chapter I think that's missing in this book. It's what about Christians who are soldiers. You mentioned, Ron, that you have a background in the Navy. For a future edition of the book, I would love to spend extensive amounts of time with fellow believers who love the Lord and serve him faithfully and have come to a different conclusion than me, that one can serve in the military and be an authentic follower of Jesus. I want to spend time listening to them and engaging with them. That's what's missing from the book and if any of your listeners read the book, I would love to hear their thoughts and their personal experiences on that.
Ron Way:
Well that would be great Nick. Thank you very much. I think it would be a worthwhile addition to that future edition. Nick Megoran brings his thoughts to us with this new book called Warlike Christians in an Age of Violence. He subtitles his book, The Evangelical Case Against War for the Gospel of Peace. Nick, I want to thank you so much for being on AuthorTalk and Rising Life Media, and taking your time out of the evening for you and your family. Thank you again for being with me tonight. I wish you only the best with your book.
Megoran:
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be on your show.
Ron Way:
Folks, that's it for this week. Until next time, this is your host Ron Way. As always, I remain, faithfully yours.