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DUAL CITIZENSHIP #2
SOLDIERS WITHOUT GUNS
It may be the ultimate juxtaposing of moral values. A young man named James Oliver was hunkered down in a rice paddy in the Mekong Delta, bullets whizzing by, mortars exploding, bodies everywhere. Oliver was a Specialist Five who happened to be serving his country as a medic. Actually, it wasn’t really a case of “just happened.” As a member of my own Seventh-day Adventist Church family, this young soldier had embraced the noncombatant moral position that is quite common in our faith tradition. He loved his country; he wanted to serve; he was willing to defend its values. But with the carnage and blood and agony that comes with every war, he felt it was spiritually preferable to carry bandages instead of guns, to restore life instead of having to take it. In fact, for years the U.S. Army had provided a classification – 1-A-O – for people just like James. The official description was “conscientious objector,” but he and others preferred, loving their country as they did, “conscientious cooperator.” Serving but not bearing arms.
But now, on this bloody, terrifying afternoon, he was pinned down by Viet Cong enemy fire. The rescue choppers were slow in coming, and right near him were wounded GIs. And up in a tree, in plain view, was a young VC sniper. This soldier with a gun was just picking off American kids. One bleeding soldier waiting to be airlifted out was a sitting duck; Oliver watched in horror as the sniper took aim and finished him off.
From where Oliver was hiding, he could see it in slow motion. But he was a conscientious objector. He didn’t carry a gun. He was registered as an American noncombatant. And because of those conflicting levels of loyalty – God, country, church, friendship, self-survival – human lives were being weighed in the balance. Like I say, Specialist Five James Oliver didn’t have a gun; all he had were bandages and vials of morphine and a red cross on his helmet. But there in the oozing-red mud just outside the village of Kontum were the plentiful weapons of the dead. A fully loaded M16 was literally at his feet.
What would you have done? Turn the other cheek? Allow your fellow American to be slaughtered?
I can tell you what this young Christian did. He picked up the M16, took aim the best he could, and knocked the sniper out of his perch with one shot. “There wasn’t anything else I could do,” he later told an Army reporter. “I hope I don’t have to do it again, but if I must, I will.”
Back around Memorial Day 2002, there was an incredible cover article in my church’s official paper, the Adventist Review, entitled “All the Names Written There.” Associate editor Bill Knott is a gifted, godly writer, and he wrote about many of the Adventist kids who had died during the Vietnam conflict. At least 148 Americans just from our church had given their lives overseas. Something like 17 Bronze Stars had been given out. A quarter of those men were married, some for just weeks or months. One 33-year-old, a sergeant, was killed the very first day he was there in Vietnam. Fifty-two of these kids were medics, “soldiers without guns,” as many glowing newspaper articles described them. One of them, a highly decorated hero after the war, said with a smile: “One thing I’ve found is you never have to worry about Jesus jamming on you like an M16.”
But others . . . did indeed pick up guns and use them. They wrestled with the question in their own minds; they prayed; they asked God to guide them. Ever since 1972, the Adventist Church had officially given blessing, not just to the noncombatants, but also to those who decided they were pacifists, that they couldn’t participate in war in any way. The flip side of that was that the Church decided it also had to support those who did, according to conscience, decide they would bear arms, that they would actively defend America’s values and interests. At least 43 Adventists in the regular infantry, and another 17 Marines – all who died in battle – concluded that their only hope of surviving the war was to carry and use the weapons provided for them.
Our radio title for this week is a tough one: DUAL CITIZENSHIP. It seems like an appropriate topic to review, in the week following the Canadian and US patriotic holidays. When we wave the flag with the Maple Leaf, or the Stars and Stripes, we come face to face with an eternal question: can a Christian truly be in these two competing kingdoms simultaneously? God’s man and Uncle Sam’s man too?
Every Christian in the world knows that if they open up their Bible and turn to the Sermon on the Mount, and read Matthew 5:44, Jesus’ message is crystal clear:
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.”
Some manuscripts add:
“Bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you.”
Now, that is a non-negotiable. Christians can debate and discuss the concept of a “just war” and whether or not it’s appropriate to bear arms. But the person who is a disciple of Jesus Christ simply has no choice but to love his or her enemy. You may be on the battlefield and, like Sgt. Oliver, have to face a terrible dilemma: your friend – whom you love – is bleeding in the killing field, and your enemy – whom you also love – is a sniper in a tree. And in this sad, wretched world of warfare and fallen values, you may have to actually get that enemy you love in your sights and shoot him dead . . . for the greater good. And it falls to the Christian soldier to pray about that and then make a decision. The rest of us stand back and respect him and support him. But the citizen of that Better Land must love both his friends and his enemies.
Romans 12:17 warns – and again, this is in the Bill of Rights for all God’s people:
“Do not repay anyone evil for evil.”
No taking revenge. No delighting in the fall of even your enemy – military or otherwise. No rejoicing in the misfortunes of others, even when they deserve it. Citizens of America can do that; citizens of heaven cannot. Citizens of both have to follow the principles of heaven first.
It was interesting that, when the war in Iraq first broke out in the Spring of 2003, Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, wrote to the President of the United States, issuing this statement:
“We believe that your stated policies concerning Saddam Hussein . . . are prudent and fall well within the time-honored criteria of just war theory.”
But there were two sides to that sword-and-shield. At least 60 other prominent Christian leaders, many of them representing sizable constituents, wrote to America’s Commander-in-Chief, asking him not to invade Hussein’s kingdom, despotic and terrorized as it surely was. Even with the documented crimes and atrocities of Hussein, and his sons Qusay and Uday, the sins of the infamous Baath Party, they didn’t feel that it was justified to fly over Baghdad and drop bombs that were going to kill innocent civilians, women, children, babies.
An internet position paper was posted just recently by Dr. Samuele Bacchiocchi, who has quite a few subscribers to his study treatises. And he posed the very fair question: Can war ever be called “just”?
“The fact is,” he writes, “that all wars are intrinsically evil, because they stem from selfishness and pride. They reflect our fallen, rebellious human nature, which affects international as well as interpersonal relationships.”
He then quotes from James chapter 4, in the Jerusalem Bible version:
“Where do these wars and battles within yourselves first start? Isn’t it precisely in the desires fighting within yourselves? You want something and you haven’t got it; so you are prepared to kill. You have an ambition you can’t satisfy, so you fight to get your way by force.”
But then Dr. Bachiocchi continues in this rather long essay to take his readers through many Bible verses that do lend support to the idea that a person can be a Christian and sometimes a warrior at the same time. That there are times when God calls on nations to restrain evil by using force. We allow our policemen to carry guns for a good reason, and sometimes the same principle applies to needing to use a few MK-84 Bunker Buster bombs and the 101st Airborne Division.
Well, friend, we’ll spend this week prayerfully thinking about what it means on our own battlefields, where a flag may pull in a different direction than the Bible. Or where a 1040 tax form seems like an unnecessary burden for a man or woman who’s already paid a “tax bill” in church the previous Sabbath or Sunday morning. We certainly do live in, as Chuck Colson once put it, Kingdoms in Conflict. But, as many brave Christians have recently proved in the dusty outskirts of Baghdad, sometimes the best citizens Up There are among the most courageous down here as well.
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