Abstract
Where was God in the trenches of the First World War? From Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy to Siegfried Sassoon, great minds have wrestled with the enigmas and ambiguities of what was effectively the first industrialised war in human history. But as we rapidly approach the centenary of the ‘war to end all wars’ we are probably no closer to understanding all that was involved.
Already the revisionists are busy. Already we are being told that the ‘liberal myth’ has distorted the ‘true’ record of events. Most combatants, we are reminded, actually survived the war, and the generals were not totally incompetent, blinded by aristocratic prejudice and xenophobia, lining up the squaddies as cannon fodder regardless of the cost. This was not about the elites of Europe squabbling over a few metres of squalid mud, but about patriotism and the proper defence of national interest. The anti-war liberals thus stand accused of laying down a smokescreen, to the neglect of the heroism of millions mobilised to defend king and country.
Those who have actually visited the battlefields of France and Belgium may, perhaps, pause to wonder. It was some years ago now, but I remember standing by the rows of neatly tended graves stretching as far as the eye can see in a semi-industrial backwater of modern France watching an elderly relative weep for the father she never knew. But as that post war generation itself passes away, the memorials at the Menin Gate and elsewhere testify powerfully to a tragedy it is almost impossible to imagine. It is all too easy to stand by the remains of the concrete machine gun posts on what is almost jokingly called ‘the ridge’ at Passchendale and imagine the German gunners sweeping away the Allied troops in front of them. No wonder so many hundreds of thousands left no identifiable remains to be buried, so they are now remembered as little more than a name on a list that goes on and on. Thus speaks the true testimony of war, however much the revisionists insist otherwise.
Both sides, of course, passionately believed God was on ‘their side’. As Archbishop Randall Davidson blessed the battleships of the Royal Navy, a young Karl Barth was scandalised by the signature of the great Adolf von Harnack on the Manifesto of the Ninety Three presented to the Kaiser by German academics. This ‘patriotic God’, for Barth, was nothing less than a contradiction of the gospel; and it pushed him towards the ‘theological bombshell’ of his Epistle to the Romans, then to the Church Dogmatics. It also led him to become one of the leading thinkers behind the Barmen Declaration opposing what he saw as the idolatrous rise of fascism in post war Germany. For him, war discloses only the violence of human sin; the gospel can never be conscripted into the service of the false god called patriotism. The God made known to us in Christ bids us love our enemies and resist the seductive power of evil. The role of the Church is not to bless those who promote aggression but to challenge them in the name of the crucified Lord.
The proper response of the Church to the reality of war is never easy to discern. John Yoder and many like him over the centuries have traced a heroic path of costly non-violence, as did many of the conscientious objectors in both World Wars. Their readiness to embrace the ridicule and anger of the majority stands as a witness to the moral cowardice of those of us who feel unable to speak out against a popular nationalist groundswell. But pacifism has its own ambiguities, as many Christians have discovered when they have been forced to choose between passive resistance and the brutality that sweeps such resistance aside. I have never had to face such a situation, thank God. But I am haunted by the sense that I could not stand by with a clear conscience and simply watch the genocide of the Holocaust or the other countless horrors of the past century. I honour Christian pacifists and salute them; but, alas, I cannot join them.
Matthew in his gospel this morning drives the point home. This world is nothing but a field of moral and spiritual ambiguity. Augustine famously muddies the waters when he reads this parable as a commentary on the Church split in the heat of the Donatist controversy. The Church, says Augustine, is like this field of wheat and tares, but it is for God to sort things out. In the meantime, the Church is a mixed bag of good and bad, not a home for moral purists.
He was, I think, entirely right in his conclusion, but wrong in his use of the parable. This is one of those carefully edited readings beloved of the Revised Common Lectionary, which assumes that most congregations cannot cope with the length of narrative Matthew actually presents. So the reading jumps over the parables of the mustard seed and the leaven, and blissfully ignores the enigmatic saying of Jesus on the purpose of parables – itself significantly changed from the (presumably) earlier version in Mark. So we are left with only a condensed version of the parable of the wheat and the tares. Yet even as it stands, the interpretation appended by Matthew makes it perfectly clear that this story is not directed at the Church at all. ‘The field’ says Matthew, ‘is the world’. This is a commentary not on the mixed clientele in church but on the wider secular context. The good seed consists of the ‘children of the kingdom’ who may or may not be Christians; and the weeds are the ‘children of the evil one’, again unspecified. It is almost as if Matthew is underlining the principle laid out in his Sermon on the Mount: judge not, and you will not be judged (Mt.7.1). Or perhaps, do not assume it is obvious who is doing God’s work: the pacifist or the military. God alone knows. In the meantime, we can only do what we can by the grace of God, and leave the final judgement to a God who is compassionate and merciful.
Nowhere is that eschatological drive clearer in the New Testament than in that moving passage from Romans 8. Paul knows all about wrestling with moral ambiguity; he has just spent seven chapters of Romans trying to get his mind around precisely the legacy of the Torah. You can almost sense the frustration as he struggles to make sense of it all. But then he simply turns from analysis to contemplation as he recognises the divine energy we call the Holy Spirit weaving everything together into the greater eschatological purpose of God’s redeeming love. The whole of Romans 8 is notoriously fraught with textual and exegetical difficulty, yet the drift is clear. The sufferings of the present time pale into insignificance alongside the transforming purpose of God. Where was God in the trenches of the First World War? Grieving over the bondage to decay which is the hallmark of a creation groaning in travail. In this world of moral ambiguity we see only futility and despair. But caught up in that ever-present tension between the ‘not yet’ and the ‘already’ we know that redemption is sure. God in Christ has embraced our suffering and finally makes sense of it.
The people of Israel in exile in Babylon knew all about the consequences of war and violence. Isaiah suggests they too had to listen to the false idols of competing patriotisms saying ‘our gods are better than yours’. Yet in this battle for supremacy, thus says the Lord, the Lord of battles; I am the first and the last, there is no one else. I am the rock, the only firm foundation for understanding this horror and chaos. And I say, do not be afraid; in Christ, even all this finally makes sense.