Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

Often this is done by equating combat deaths with Jesus’ nonviolent sacrifice of love. At the Courthouse in Andrew County, Missouri, where my father served as judge, a new war monument was dedicated on Memorial Day, 2017. It included this inscription: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. John 15:15.” The obvious implication is that Jesus’ death at the hands of the Roman Empire is somehow similar to the death of American soldiers who are killed while prosecuting war. It’s true that both deaths are sacrificial, but the nature of these sacrificial deaths is quite different. The failure to see the clear difference between Jesus sacrificing his life while forgiving his enemies on the cross and the sacrifice of a soldier slain while waging war on a battlefield is an indication of the degree to which a commitment to militarism has obscured the implications of the gospel. But when waging war is regarded as a religious sacrifice, such confusions abound.