Recently the Internet Monk linked to one of his archival essays that critiques Christian pacifism. I didn’t realize he’d ever taken on the subject, but since the discussions of the subject on this blog rarely involve Calvinists, I was interested in seeing what he had to say.

The iMonk says that he thinks pacifism arises from a failure to appreciate common grace. For those of you who aren’t up on Calvinist terminology, this means the grace that God sheds on the whole world, as opposed to the “specific grace” that he sheds on his worshippers. To reject military service, in his view, is to make a manichean assumption that every authority that isn’t God must be satanic.

Now, that criticism is probably fair as far as some pacifist groups go, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and maybe the more conservative Mennonites and Amish. But I think that a lot of people at my church would actually agree that governments are basically good things. J.H. Yoder, as I explained here, also interpreted Romans 13 as meaning that God “orders” societies through governments, and so even when they are fallen they still reflect God’s will to some extent. I think the difference between his position and the iMonk’s is more a matter of degree than of kind.

Where the iMonk starts to lose me, though, is in his analysis of the Tower of Babel story:

I would like you to observe that what God is doing at Babel is a restraining act of mercy. It is God’s opinion that human nations will be less evil if separated into nations than if they are one nation, one culture. (One world government fans, have at it.) In other words, nations are, to a certain extent, a manifestation of God’s common grace, and this is, I believe, Paul’s entire point in the crucial text of Romans 13:1-13. The state is a minister of God to do you good. That is common grace in the form of a nation.

Now what is the purpose for God’s invention of a world of nations at Babel? If the purpose of the individual government is to bear the sword and punish the evildoer, then I do not think it a leap at all to say the entire Babel project had as one of its purposes the preservation of good and the restraining of evil in the community of nations. All nations are fallen, and all are under God’s judgment, but in the sovereignty of God, some nations will preserve genuine good more so than others. And the stage of Biblical history demonstrates that this is exactly the way God used nations: preserving truth and good, while bringing temporal, restraining judgments on individuals and other nations. (Read Habakkuk, where the prophet learns from God himself how God will use one nation as judgment and preservative.)

It is at this point that I want to say there is a good bit of unbiblical multi-culturalism underlying some of the criticisms I am answering, and I think it is important to point this out bluntly. A nation that treats women like animals is inferior to a nation that gives them equal rights. A nation that says kill innocents is worse than one that says protect innocents. (A true contradiction in America, as we protect some children and abort others.) A nation that protects religious freedom is better than one who denies it. A culture that allows people to choose their own government is better than a dictatorship. A nation that freed its slaves is better than one that enslaves its own people. A nation that gives generously is better than those who take ruthlessly.

Maybe I’m seeing things, but it seems to me that this passage winds up almost 180 degrees from where it started. To say that the destruction of Babel was a common grace seems to assert that multiculturalism is God’s will, but we end up with a critique of multiculturalism, and the implicit assertion that some nations are entitled to spread their cultural values militarily.

Now, again, I think that most of my church would agree with the idea that some nations have better values than others, and that American values are pretty good. When I took the inquirer’s class last year, the then-pastor said that political action is not just about calling the U.S. to Christian values but calling it back to its own professed values, which are after all somewhat congruent with Anabaptist values (equality, separation of church and state, etc.). Even Bert, our resident Pastor Protestor, said from the pulpit last Fourth of July, “This may come as a surprise to some of you, but I love this country.”

I think the problem is that the iMonk isn’t paying due attention to the dark side of the Babel story. Why was there a problem with everybody speaking one language? As God puts it: “Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” As with the denial of the Tree of Life, the implication is that if human beings had too much power we’d do the wrong things with it, because we are sinful. Yet the iMonk somehow moves from this act of restraint upon human power to an approval of the exercise of human power through armies.

The fact that the destruction of Babel is a result of sin is made clear at Pentecost, when liberation from sin means the reversal of Babel’s effects. The very first thing that the Holy Spirit does when it descends upon the new church is let everybody understand each other’s languages. “Nothing will now be impossible for them” has turned from a dire warning into a promise: in God, all things are possible.

Of course, that passage applies specifically to the church, not national governments. But I think that’s the problem with the iMonk’s Old Testament analogies: the acts of judgment-through-invasion are all based upon the status of Israel as God’s chosen nation. If God’s instrument in this case is not a conventional polity with its own military, but the transnational entity that the Holy Spirit immediately starts setting up in Acts, surely the rules of the game are not the same.

Another issue is that the church isn’t the only entity with dreams of reversing Babel. The Roman Empire also sought to bring the known world under one roof, and so serving it meant not just serving a particular government but a goal of global unification. The iMonk sort of acknowledges this by saying, well, if Rome had ordered Christians to go off and rape and pillage Britain they should have abstained. But honestly, I’m having trouble thinking of actions by the Roman army that didn’t serve the imperial agenda somehow. The “Pax Romana” came about from the whole region submitting to Roman authority, and the army’s job was basically to ensure that submission. The fact that Rome took it upon itself to police distant places like Judea or Gaul, even when we are talking about mundane civil policing, was an expression of its Babel-like ambitions.

The iMonk writes about Afghanistan and not Iraq, which suggests that he wrote the piece during the earlier phase of the war. But the course of things since then illustrates the tendency of defense to turn into offense. This may surprise some people, but I think that the logic of preemption is basically sound: if there is a large group of people out there with a wildly different vision for the world than your own, and a willingness to pursue it with violence, it makes more sense to conquer them now than wait for them to conquer you. Although probably the Unitarians on the Daily Scribe aren’t gonna like this, I think that peaceful coexistence depends on agreement, not on everything, but on certain essential things. The Romans knew it; John Lennon knew it; and I think that God knows it. Most people know the line from Isaiah about beating swords into ploughshares, but it is worth quoting the larger context:

In days to come
   the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
   and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.
³Â Â Â Many peoples shall come and say,
‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
   to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
   and that we may walk in his paths.’
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
   and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
⁴He shall judge between the nations,
   and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
   and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
   neither shall they learn war any more.

 

This is another reverse-Babel vision: a great high place of government is raised that unifies all people within in it. The difference is that it’s God who makes it and rules over it, while Babel is raised and ruled by human power. This is further evidence, to my mind, that God destroyed the Tower not because he likes the current fractious array of governments but because the Tower promised unity without God, power without submission to anything higher.

Not many people these days voice the rather quaint ambition to rule the world politically. But the effort to remake problematic countries in our own image seems to be trying to make a world that is culturally monolithic if not politically so. And God has indicated that if that monolith is based upon anything other than himself, he won’t let it stand, even when we can argue convincingly that our worldly security depends on it. There is no absolute security in worldly power, as the Romans (and all the others) learned the hard way.