“…men fail so often to repent their real sins that the occasional repentance of an imaginary sin might appear almost desirable.”
This short essay of Lewis’ references young British students and the contemporary trend to take responsibility for World War II. Looking back on it, this was just the beginning of the Allies trying to “repent” of their part in the bloodshed; my own history classes in college taught that it was the “unfair” treatment of Germany in World War I which bankrupted the country and made it “desperate” enough to turn to Hitler and the Nazi party for survival.
War is bad.
I’m well aware this is possibly the three-word
understatement of the year. I’m also
well aware of my own ignorance when it comes to the horrors of war. No matter
how many books I read or movies I watch, it’s still all fiction compared to the
in-person experience. So what I say next
will have to be taken only as a convoluted moralization on a subject I realize I’m
only vaguely informed about.
The thing about war is that it puts Christians in a tough
position. As a Christian, I’m supposed
to love my enemies, pray for those who persecute me. By this logic Christians should never go to
war. But what about against truly,
distinctly evil forces? The Bible says
to put on the “full armor of God,” and though this is a spiritual analogy (“We do not war against flesh and blood…”), what happens when the spiritual evil in
the world makes itself known in the physical realm? We can talk about darkness and sin and
shadows in a nebulous, wiffle-waffley way, but then there are Hitlers,
concentration camps, gulags, Roman circuses and crucifixions, kidnappings, ISIS,
shootings in every place from kindergartens to movie theaters. Evil isn’t just a smoky, insubstantial
presence. It’s real and it can hurt
us. And war is part of it.
But if Evil exists in a corporeal way, it follows Good
also does. Ephesians 2:10 says, “For we
are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared
beforehand that we should walk in them.” In becoming a believer, Christians don’t just accept God’s salvation;
they also accept a mission of doing good in the world.
The question Christians are faced with, then, is this: Do
we remain pacifists and peace-keepers and trust that God will stop the
evil-doers on His own, or could fighting a war against evil be part of the good
works He’s prepared for us?
This is the sort of conflict that young people were
facing during World War II, though I think it’s fair to assume this conflict
existed long before, and has lasted to the present day. One solution was for the young students to
blame their own country for being involved in this messy war, to apologize on
behalf of their entire nation, and generally feel guilty for things that were
not necessarily their decision.
Lewis doesn’t argue that “war is good”, but sidesteps
that issue to point out the real problem that this sort of “solution” creates:
“The
first and fatal charm of national repentance is…the encouragement it gives us
to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of
bewailing—but, first, of denouncing—the conduct of others.”
The central problem for these students was that they were
apologizing for things that were not their responsibility. They had judged that their government had
made the wrong call to declare war, that it had sinned in deciding in this violent
course of action, and because they doubted that the government would be
conscientious enough to regret this decision, they were going around and
apologizing on the government’s behalf. Meanwhile,
as they went around apologizing for others, their own sins were going unaddressed.
I don’t know what sins these were, so I’ll use myself as
a contemporary example: It would be easy for me to go around apologizing for
the curse of African slavery in America. A lot of people do. Not only is
this easy in the sense that obviously slavery is wrong and so it’s simple to
identify as sin and evil, but it’s easy for me because it doesn’t hit
home. I wasn’t alive during that time,
and I can’t even feel “genetically guilty” on behalf of ancestors, since most
of them didn’t immigrate until after the Civil War. It’s easy, because it’s far removed from the
real sin that exists in my heart.
It would be much harder for me to go around apologizing
for every wicked thought, cruelty and sarcasm and rudeness in words, laziness
at work, covetousness of others’ belongings, elitism and being judgmental according
to outward appearances. These are things
I know are integrated into my heart, soul, mind and personality. They are the things that I really have to
repent about. They are the things that
God has saved me from. And they are
things that I still struggle against every day, along with every other person
on this planet ever.
War is bad.
It’s even worse when we don’t know what war we are fighting.
*YouTube Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9iPHGyaWuE
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