Just like the last post, these are just rough notes taken at the Amidst the Powers Conference. I hope to reflect on them later. Here’s the twitter feed if you are interested.
Stanley Hauerwas at #ep09
War is a moral practice.
By no means am I saying it is a good thing.
(Rightly suggests that such powers are perversions …)
If war is not just, what is it? Let’s call it slaughter.
For many war is a great profit…
Everyone professes that war is horrible but we continue to have war.
Sometimes we must be willing to go to war, it’s when you know you are in the midst of a power.
We cannot get rid of war because it has captured the habits of our imagination.
When was the last time you went to see a movie about peace?
War is a power that inhabits our lives making it impossible to imagine a world without war.
What would the pacifists do if they got a world in which they wanted?
Pacifisms and non-violence are inadequate positions in the Christian life.
Peace is a deeper reality than violence but if it’s true, we need to locate the peaceful practices in our lives.
William James : if it is to be abolished we need to find a moral equivalent to war
His position is inadequate. There are virtues of war …
The Christian unease of war is liturgical.
War is the alternative church. (TG – I wish he would have spoken more about this).
If Christians are serious, we are the alternative to war.
Christians believe that the cross is the end of sacrifice.
The enduring attraction to war is this – it can give us what we long for purpose meaning for living.
Trivia dominates our conversation and airways, war is a great elixir.
It gives us a reason to be honorable.
“One bloody death – Christ – must be accompanied by others like it.”
Southerners were so desperate to kill, they even did it in WW1 for the Yankees.
If you want to know what being controlled by a power looks like, it’s revealed in this statement, “I now belong to the flag”.
The more sacrifice is made, the more sacrifices that must be made – that is the moral logic of war.
It also requires that we sacrifice our normal desire to kill.
Grossman noted that some soldiers have more intimacy with each other after killing than they do with their wives.
Killing is more intimate than sex.
War is about killing others …
The language of war helps us deny what war is really about and helps us make it morally palpable
Soldiers need to be re-entered into society. They need to be told they did the right thing (the practice of doing the right thing)
Return to some kind of normality.
Veterans seldom want to talk about war.
No sacrifice is more dramatic than the sacrifice of those being sent to war.
That is the sacrifice of asking them to kill. Even more, those who have killed being asked to return to normalcy.
If you want to know why modern, industrialized Christianity is declining, it’s not because of Darwinism, the rise of science, it’s because we don’t die for what we believe.
The Christian alternative to war is worship.
Christians called to non-violent not because it’s a strategy to end wars but instead we are called to be non-violent because we cannot imagine being anything other and that may make the world more violent.
We were not created to kill one another, we were created to commune with each other.
Even when we kill in a just war, our bodies rebel.
Those who kill being reconciled with those that they killed.
The sacrifices of war are no longer necessary.
Christians must be free of killing from where the powers rely
Because of the cross of Christ, war was abolished.
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