From the Salmon

I’ve been waiting for Christianity Today to post Miroslav Volf’s article “The Church’s Great Malfunctions” from their most recent issue so that I could offer an excerpt and link to the full article. I’m getting the feeling that they aren’t going to publish it online, so here’s one part of the article that I found particularly interesting:

A Serbian soldier rides on a tank and triumphantly flashes three fingers into the air — a symbol of the most holy Trinity, a sign that he belongs to a group that believes rightly about God. Clearly, his faith, in some sense, gives legitimacy to his triumphant ride on that killing machine. He’s not alone in draping the wild-eyed god of war or the fierce goddess of nationalism with the legitimizing mantle of religious faith. Some of his Croatian enemies did the same, as have many Americans who eagerly merged the Cross and the flag. They follow in the footsteps of many Christians over the centuries who’ve left behind them a trail of blood and tears.

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So why have Christians, who embrace a peaceable fath, often been so violent? There are three main reasons, and they roughly correspond to the three reasons for faith’s idleness.

First, a thin faith. Too many Christians embrace the ends mandated by their faith (for instance, maintaining the sanctity of unborn life or just social arrangements), but not the means by which faith demands that these ends be reached (persuasion rather than violence). The cure for religiously induced violence is not less faith but more faith — faith in its full scope, faith enacted with integrity and courage by its holy men and women, faith pondered responsibly by its great theologians.

Second, seemingly irrelevant faith. Can a faith born 2,000 years ago tell us anything useful about democratic governance, running a modern corporation, or defending a nation from terrorists? Sensing a tension, we use faith merely to bless what we think is right to do. It takes hard intellectual and spiritual work to learn to understand and live faith authentically under changed circumstances. This work cannot be placed only on the shoulders of theologians; it must be an endeavor in which faithful people from all walks of life are engaged, and study of a variety of disciplines must be involved.

Finally, unwillingness to walk the narrow path. Often “impractical” slides into “overly demanding.” Someone has violated us or our community; we feel the urge for revenge — and we set aside the explicit command to love our enemies, to be benevolent and beneficent toward them. Or we believe that our culture is going down a perilous road; we want to change its self-destructive course — and we forget that the ends that Christian faith holds high do not justify setting aside its strictures about the appropriate means.

And so we’re back at the question of character. In addition to applying an authentically understood faith to various spheres of life, we need properly formed persons who resist misusing faith in oppressive ways. For the Christian faith produces devastating results when it devolves into a mere personal or cultural resource for people whose lives, like the life of that Serbian soldier, may be guided by anything but that faith.