The Betrayal of God by Church and State

The Betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot

The Betrayal of God by Church and State

by R.E. Slater

“For me, Russia is the guardian of

Christian values.” - quote from a

Russian Orthodox Leader

It is curious that so many traditional bible commentators have added unloving words and deeds to a God of love.

Not only so, but we find these same kind of statements about God's violence over and over again in the bible throughout the Old and New Testament books and in large biblical passages speaking to God's judgments and wrath.

Further, wishing to be suitably "biblical," the American evangelical church echoes these same passages of the bible declaring "the violence of the God of old" even as it actively participates in the dismantling of American civil democracy. In place of the United State's Bill of Rights and the American Constitution today's conservative Christian religionists seek to replace these legal documents with their own less qualified, and unloving, religious drafts.

Worse, such radical American groups have become voices for Russia's Putin, for global conservative Church Dominionism, and for White Christian Nationalism, as led by the immoral and failed presidency of Trump, his fascist GOP party members, and White supremacist groups found throughout America.

So then, we might ask, "Why is it Christians acknowledge 'God as love' but then divert this truth about God's holy personage for an idol made in man's own violent image?

It is hard to charge the Christian church with its misplaced beliefs about God if it is simply repeating biblical writer's claims in the bible of an unloving God made in their own ancient, religious and cultural, assessments of God.

But where have these errant beliefs about God gotten religious man?

After 4000+ years of preaching of a violent God might we ask just where has all this violent God-talk gotten us?

Nowhere... absolutely nowhere...

More pain... more suffering...

More inequity... more injustice...

Just more church-sanctioned violence begetting more and more brutish Christian violence used by religious zealots to purge unwanteds from their lands so to steal their oil, farms, and water resources including their faith adherents.

Our most recent example of the "Church gone bad" (besides the aforementioned Trumpian evangelicalism of America) is Komrade Putin's genocidal massacre of Ukraine under the guise of impugning Nazism to the Ukrainians. All the while being encouraged by a thoroughly corrupt and power-hungry Russian Orthodoxy urging Putin forward by-right-and-by-might 

So my question stands... what comes of violence... but even more violence? Both by the State and by religion, each together united in purpose to wield Russian Imperialism and Russian doctrinal dominionism over a civilly free and sovereign populace such as the Ukrainians.

Moreover, what comes of a God of violence but endless ages of violence committed in God's name however immorally and religiously justified?

And how can a God of love be taught when so much scripture in the bible speaks to God's violence and wrath? 

Let me suggest this small observation:

"Perhaps Jesus came to show the Jewish priesthood just how wrong their unloving doctrines of God really were? That they were making the same error - now carried to extremes in today's postmodernity era - within their first century sanctimonious religious creeds and confessions even as their wicked predecessors had done before them... albeit the empires of Assyria, Babylon, and later, Persia and Rome."

Ironic isn't it?

That the God of love is violently crucified by an unloving faith of religious zealots protesting their own self-rightness by their very acts of religious paganism?

In contrast, Jesus showed love, care and compassion to all who came to Him, all-the-while strongly pronouncing anathema upon the entire unloving Jewish religious system (and upon all future religious systems built on sin and evil)....

"And what did Jesus' intolerance for unloving creeds and behaviour get Him?" The very same religious and cultural violence He had preached against....

And we wonder today WHY the Christian church is so full of self-righteous anger and violence within its piestic halls and chambers?

If anything, the church acts no differently than has its religious progenitors over the aeons before it:

Like the prophets of old who testified to man's ignoble end by violence and sword, so too may we say, "Yeah, verily, it will be so." 

Violence begets violence. Bloodshed and war begets hatred and evil. What is sowed shall be reaped a hundredfold.

If we chose to live by the sword we will die by the sword. And in Putin's case - who commits no less crimes than his ignoble line of Russian despots before him - Putin is murdering innocents in the name of God and the church showing himself and his religious beliefs to be as vain and empty as all other ways of religious men and their heinous institutions: "Unrepentent, violent, evil."

The blood of the innocent of this world, who are trying to live by love, cries out from the earth for justice and an end to violence. 

Violence is not God ordained nor God inhabited. But love is.... 

Know this, God is a God of love, goodness, and justice. Stop impugning God for what God is not. And start becoming what God is. This is the betrayal of God by man both by church and state.

R.E. Slater

April 30, 2022

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Russian President Vladimir Putin is using religion for political purposes, and Patriarch
Kirill has instrumentalized the invasion for Russian Orthodoxy’s purposes. | Photograph
by Mikhail Svetlov / Getty

The Long Holy War Behind

Putin’s Political War in Ukraine

The New Yorker

by Paul Elie

April 21, 2022

Eastern Orthodox and Catholic leaders in the U.S. weigh in

on the Russian invasion—and the Russian Orthodox Church.

Pictured: Russian President Vladimir Putin and

Orthodox Patriarch Kirill attend a ceremony together.

In the eight weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, the war there has been interpreted in terms that are familiar from previous wars—terms that often seem to be in contradiction with one another. It is a proxy war, and it is a fight for national self-determination. It is a reprise of the Cold War, and a reset of Yalta. It is an inevitable consequence of nato expansion, and an unprovoked act of aggression by an autocrat bent on reclaiming a “greater” Russian unity that he thinks was taken by Western forces of globalization and political integration. All those ways of seeing the war are apt, but another familiar interpretation is pertinent, too. This is the view of Ukraine as a religious hot spot, where competing claims to a holy city, Kyiv, can be traced back hundreds of years, and where religious commitments and rivalries are deeply enmeshed in the society.

Since March 6th, when Kirill, the patriarch of Moscow and primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, gave an incendiary homily likening Russia’s invasion to a culture war against the West, plenty of questions have been asked about his role and his motives. Is he a tool of Vladimir Putin or Putin’s spiritual adviser? Is his vision of “Russky Mir” (“Russian World”) the basis for Putin’s war or just a rhetorical glaze applied to it? How can a religious leader with any integrity support so brutal a war, and might another leader—Pope Francis, with whom Kirill entered into dialogue in 2016—persuade him to withdraw his support and urge Putin to stand down?

Leaders of religious communities in the U.S. with histories in the region have some answers. Throughout Lent—the penitential season prior to Easter, which for the Orthodox is this Sunday—Ukrainian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, and Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishops, metropolitans, clergy, and scholars have been consumed with the issues of the war. At conferences, on Zoom, and on Public Orthodoxy, a Web site hosted by the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University, they have engaged in arguments that are often abstruse, but the underlying feeling is simple and shared: Anyone paying attention should have seen this coming. At a conference at Georgetown University, Metropolitan Borys Gudziak, a Ukrainian Greek Catholic archbishop based in Philadelphia, who also serves as the president of the Ukrainian Catholic University, in Lviv, said, “There are so many precedents, and there are so many trends, that were under way for such a long time.” He listed several long-term developments that he saw as having enabled an eventual Russian invasion, from the lack of any Nuremberg-like reckoning with the evils of Soviet Communism to the personal friendships that Western politicians of all stripes have cultivated with Putin. “There are so many explicit expressions of intention that our surprise is actually a result of us not wanting to hear—not hearing,” he said.

Last week, on Fox News, George Demacopoulos, a theologian at Fordham who has been honored as an archon—a distinguished Christian—by Bartholomew I, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, declared that “Putin is an instrumentalizer of religion.” Demacopoulos meant that, rather than looking to religion as a guide to action, Putin (who is Russian Orthodox) attacked Ukraine and then invoked Christianity to justify the invasion as an act of holy war. At a March 18th rally in Moscow, Putin paraphrased from the Gospel of John to exhort the self-sacrifice that his war against “genocide” in Ukraine would require of many Russians: “And this is where the words from the Scriptures come to my mind: ‘There is no greater love than if someone gives his soul for his friends.’ ”

There’s no question that Putin is using religion for political purposes, yet it is also true that Kirill has instrumentalized the invasion for Russian Orthodoxy’s purposes. Eastern Orthodox and Catholic leaders in this country thought it improbable that Kirill would stand back from this war, because they see the war as an extension of the Russian Orthodox Church’s efforts in Ukraine. For two decades, the R.O.C. has used state money and propaganda to assert itself in that country. Through his full-throated support for the war for a greater Russia, these leaders say, Kirill is militating against their own transnational Orthodox project, which has been under way since the fall of Communism.

Ukraine is where, more than a thousand years ago, a warrior prince took up Christianity to marry a daughter of the patriarch of Constantinople, and then compelled thousands of others to convert as he had. The conversion of St. Vladimir—also known as St. Volodymyr—is claimed as the foundational act of Christianity in the region, to which both Russian Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy in Ukraine trace their roots, and Ukraine has been religiously controverted territory ever since. José Casanova, a sociologist of religion at Georgetown, with Ukrainian family ties, sets out the modern religious history of the country in a recent essay. The historic center of Orthodoxy is Constantinople—present-day Istanbul—and the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople is recognized by other patriarchs (there are nine in all) as primus inter pares, or first among equals. In the nineteenth century, national churches that were allied with Constantinople but autocephalous (each with its own head) became “the norm throughout the Orthodox world,” Casanova writes, but Ukraine, which had not gained national sovereignty, remained mainly Orthodox but dividedly so, with the west in the sphere of Constantinople and the east in that of Moscow, due in part to a grant of authority that the ecumenical patriarch gave to the Moscow patriarch in 1686—and which has been contested repeatedly since then.

After the Russian Revolution, in 1917, the U.S.S.R. suppressed all churches. When Ukraine declared independence, as the Soviet Union dissolved, in 1991, and religion was freely permitted in civil society again, many Ukrainians sought to worship in churches with local or national ties rather than in those with ties to Moscow, and the new nation claimed many formerly Russian Orthodox churches as its own. In response, the renewed Russian Orthodox Church—then led by Patriarch Alexy II, with Kirill as its director of external relations—sought to reassert itself in Ukraine, using state funds to build several thousand new churches there. The R.O.C. wound up as the Orthodox church with the most property but the fewest adherents; Ukraine, a country with thirty-five million Orthodox Christians, was still without an autocephalous church.

As Russia’s 2014 occupation of parts of the Donbas and annexation of Crimea—regions where Russian ethnicity and Orthodoxy are robust—escalated the Russia-Ukraine fight, the conflict in Ukraine between Russian and Eastern Orthodoxy was also growing. Bartholomew I had attended Pope Francis’s inauguration in Rome, in 2013, becoming the first ecumenical patriarch ever to attend that papal event. Then, in 2015, his ideas were featured in the Pope’s encyclical on climate change, “Laudato si’,” auguring an alliance of the two leaders and their churches on “care for our common home.” Meanwhile, a pan-Orthodox council was being planned for 2016, and Bartholomew signalled an intention to eventually grant autocephaly to the church in Ukraine, aware that Kirill—now the patriarch of Moscow—would see the act as an encroachment on R.O.C. territory.

Kirill, too, was strategizing. Capping two decades of negotiations between Rome and Moscow, he met with Francis—the first such meeting in a thousand years—in Havana, and saw to it that their joint declaration referred to plans for a more independent Ukrainian church as a “schism” violating “canonical norms”—a clear rebuke of Bartholomew. And Kirill deepened long-standing relationships with Christian fundamentalists from the United States, making common cause with them on issues of gender and sexuality, especially. When the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church was held on the island of Crete in July, 2016, the R.O.C., along with a number of other national churches, did not participate. After the council, several dozen Eastern Orthodox leaders who had attended drafted a hundred-and-ten-page document framing a common “social ethos” in terms associated with the West—denouncing nationalism and racism, and affirming liberal democratic ideals of freedom and equality. “What we’re seeing on full display” in the R.O.C.’s support for Putin “is a kind of rejection” of that ethos, “a kind of religious nationalism that in many ways is cancelling out the other,” Aristotle Papanikolaou, an Orthodox theologian at Fordham, who helped draft the document, said at the Georgetown conference. “Regardless of how the other Orthodox churches see it, it’s out there, and thank God it’s out there, because it’s at least a prophetic witness for a different way of thinking and living the Orthodox faith.” Finally, in December, 2018, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was established at the St. Sophia Cathedral, in Kyiv. The next month, Bartholomew recognized it. Kirill declared the new church illegitimate and accused Bartholomew of “violating all rules.”

All this maneuvering, José Casanova writes, has resulted in “three competing ‘national’ churches”: one loyal to the ecumenical patriarch; one loyal to the Moscow patriarch; and a third, much smaller one that is loyal to the Pope. In polls conducted in 2019 and 2021, between a third and just over half of Ukrainians identified with the new church, and between a fifth and a quarter with the Moscow-allied church; others identified as “simply Orthodox,” as Ukrainian Greek Catholics, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, or Muslims, or claimed no religion. Yet the striking element was how well all these communities (the Russian Orthodox excepted) were working together. Given Russian Orthodoxy’s long sway over Ukraine and the historic pattern of religion in the region—a dominant state-allied church in each country, and a limited presence for other churches and other faiths—the religiously diverse post-Communist Ukraine, Casanova says, was a “sociological miracle.”

After the Russian invasion, Ukraine’s religious diversity has been subsumed into national unity. Whatever the war’s outcome, the biggest loser, in religious terms, will almost certainly be the Russian Orthodox Church. Last month, nearly three hundred R.O.C. priests and deacons signed an open letter in which they denounced the “fratricidal war in Ukraine” and called for an “immediate ceasefire.” (Those church leaders, however, are a tiny minority of the forty thousand clerics in the R.O.C.) Ukrainians who worshipped in churches tied to Moscow may sour on a religious leader who has lent holy purpose to Russia’s bombing of their country and its killing of their neighbors, and whose stature has been diminished forever by those acts. During services in Moscow on April 10th, Kirill gave a long discourse on the exercise of power, and concluded with a prayer: “May the Lord help us all in this difficult time for our Fatherland to unite, including around the authorities,” in order to “have true solidarity and the ability to repel external and internal enemies” for the sake of “goodness, truth, and love.”

But, if it’s clear that Kirill is not going to waver in his support of Putin, it is less clear what his Eastern Orthodox counterparts can do about it. They have encouraged the ouster of the R.O.C. from the World Council of Churches, and lauded the suspension of Kirill’s deputy, Metropolitan Hilarion, from the theology faculty at the University of Fribourg. Some have openly supported Ukraine’s effort to defend itself militarily and have spoken of it in terms not unlike those that Putin used last month: as a Christ-like act, a sacrifice, as Borys Gudziak has said, “for something that is greater than their very lives.” Mostly, though, they have been forced to look on from a distance, having no more power to stop the carnage than seemingly anyone else.

- TNY

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Vladimir Putin with Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox
Church, in 2020. (Alexei Druzhinin/Kremlin Pool/Sputnik/Reuters)

How Putin’s invasion became

a holy war for Russia

https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/03/21/russia-ukraine-putin-kirill/

by Jack Jenkins

March 21, 2022

Two days before he launched a bloody invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin sat alone in front of a camera and delivered a rambling hour-long address. It outlined the ideological justification for what would ultimately become his “special military action” in Ukraine — an invasion that, as far as Putin was concerned, had more than a little to do with religion.

“Ukraine is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space,” he said.

Two days later, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, spoke to military leaders and published a statement in honor of Defender of the Fatherland Day. The cleric congratulated Putin for his “high and responsible service to the people of Russia,” declared that the Russian Orthodox Church has “always striven to make a significant contribution to the patriotic education of compatriots,” and lauded military service as “an active manifestation of evangelical love for neighbors.” Within hours, bombs began to rain down on Ukraine.

This religious ramp-up to war was the culmination of a decade-long effort to wrap Russia’s geopolitical ambitions in faith — specifically, the flowing vestments of the Russian Orthodox Church. Fusing religion, nationalism, a defense of conservative values that likens same-sex marriage to Nazism, and a version of history that seeks to define Ukraine and other nearby nations as mere subsets of a greater “Russkiy mir,” or Russian world, the partnership of Putin and Kirill laid the ideological and theological groundwork for the invasion.

But as explosions continue to rock Ukraine, some in the church are beginning to resist the religious appeals of Putin and Kirill, pushing back on efforts to recast naked Russian aggression as something that sounds a whole lot like a holy war.

The partnership of Putin, 69, and Kirill, 75, began in about 2012, when the politician was reelected for a third presidential term. It was then that Putin began embracing the Russian Orthodox Church — not necessarily as a point of personal conversion so much as a mechanism for political gain, something foreign policy experts often call “soft power.”

The relationship between the president and the prelate escalated rapidly. Kirill, allegedly a former KGB staffer like Putin, hailed the president’s leadership of the Russian Federation as a “miracle of God.” Meanwhile, Putin worked to frame Russia as a defender of conservative Christian values, which usually meant opposing abortion, feminism and LGBTQ rights. The pitch proved popular among a broad swath of conservative Christian leaders, including prominent voices within the American religious right: In February 2014, evangelist Franklin Graham offered cautious praise for Putin in an editorial for Decision magazine, celebrating the Russian president’s support for a law barring dissemination of “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” — a statute which, activists argued, effectively banned children from accessing media that presents LGBTQ identities and relationships in a positive or normalizing light. Graham would travel the next year to Russia, where he met with both Kirill and Putin, and told local media that “millions of Americans would like [Putin] to come and run for president of the United States.”

By 2017, Politico was already describing Russia as “the leader of the global Christian right.”

The impact of this religious diplomacy was even greater in Eastern European nations that once belonged to the Soviet Union, where the Russian Orthodox Church and its allies still enjoy outsize influence. When Moldova sought stronger ties with Europe, Orthodox clerics operating underneath the Moscow Patriarchate campaigned against the move, with one bishop telling the New York Times in 2016, “For me, Russia is the guardian of Christian values.” Things were similar in Montenegro, where the Serbian Orthodox Church has a close relationship with the Russian patriarchate; priests there advocated against the nation’s plans to join NATO, and last year Russian Orthodox leaders lambasted Montenegro’s leaders for supporting “eurointegration.”

Kirill has long perpetuated a version of history that insists many countries that made up the former Soviet Union are one people with a common religious origin: namely, the 10th-century baptism of Prince Vladimir I of Kiev, known as St. Vladimir. It’s often paired with a geopolitical (and geo-religious) vision that hundreds of Orthodox theologians and scholars recently decried as a heresy: a “transnational Russian sphere or civilization, called Holy Russia or Holy Rus’, which includes Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (and sometimes Moldova and Kazakhstan), as well as ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking people throughout the world.”

It’s a Russian world with Moscow as its political center, Kyiv as the spiritual heart, and Kirill as its religious leader.

“May God grant that the Moscow Patriarchate, which unites us not on the political level, not on the economic, but the spiritual level, might be preserved to take pastoral care of all the ethnoses united in the great historical Rus,’ ” Kirill said in 2018.

But Russia’s religious and political arguments hit a wall in Ukraine, where protests — aided, in some instances, by Orthodox clerics — thrust off a pro-Russian government in 2013 and 2014, triggering Putin’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Frustration with Russia boiled over into the religious realm, exacerbating an existing divide between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church of Constantinople: In 2018, many of Ukraine’s Orthodox Christians declared independence from the Moscow Patriarchate. Kirill refused to acknowledge the new body, but the Orthodox Church of Constantinople, led by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, recognized it. So dangerous was this schism to Russia’s interests that Kremlin-linked hackers responded by reportedly infiltrating the email accounts of Bartholomew’s aides.

And then came 2022, when soft power morphed into support for outright war in Ukraine. Shortly after the invasion began, Kirill issued a statement making a vague call for peace and asking all parties to limit civilian casualties. But Archbishop Daniel, head of Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA, which is loyal to Kyiv, decried the statement as the words of a “religious politician” and rejected Kirill’s appeal to a “common centuries-old history” rooted in St. Vladimir’s baptism.

“To say that we share the same ethnic background and what have you — I think it’s a mistake,” Daniel said. “It’s an incorrect statement. And I wish the religious leaders would correct that terminology [when Kirill is] utilizing it.”

Kirill’s rhetoric has only escalated in the days since. He referred to Russia’s opponents in Ukraine as “evil forces,” and delivered a sermon on March 6 in which he suggested the invasion was part of a larger “metaphysical” struggle against immoral Western (read: liberal) values.

“Today there is a test for the loyalty to this new world order, a kind of pass to that ‘happy’ world, the world of excess consumption, the world of false ‘freedom,’ ” Kirill said. “Do you know what this test is? The test is very simple and at the same time terrible — it is the gay pride parade.”

It’s a distillation of an argument Kirill has pushed for years, contrasting Western values with those of the purported Russian world. For Kirill, this is often rooted in anti-LGBTQ sentiment: He has suggested that acceptance of same-sex marriage is a “dangerous sign of the apocalypse,” and once blamed the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group on efforts to escape “godless” Western societies that embrace gay pride parades.

As for his take on the ongoing conflict, Kirill reportedly has presented an image of the Virgin Mary to Viktor Zolotov, leader of the Russian national guard.

“Let this image inspire young soldiers who take the oath, who embark on the path of defending the Fatherland,” Kirill said.

But after years of wielding faith as a tool for accruing power, Kirill’s support for the war — tacit or otherwise — may end up costing him influence this go-round. To be sure, some of the pushback has come from expected corners: Kirill’s rhetoric triggered an immediate response from Orthodox Christians whose leadership is based in Kyiv, with one cleric dismissing Kirill as “discredited” and likening Putin to the Antichrist.

Yet calls for change are also coming from inside the manse. Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev, who oversees the Russian Orthodox faithful in Ukraine, immediately decried the invasion as “a disaster” and a “repetition of the sin of Cain, who killed his own brother out of envy.” Many of his priests in the country have since stopped commemorating Kirill during worship, and some even asked Onuphry to entertain breaking away from the Russian Orthodox Church — much to the chagrin of the patriarchate.

Outside Ukraine, more than 280 Russian Orthodox priests — most of whom operate within Russia — recently signed a petition condemning the “fratricidal” invasion and emphasizing Ukraine’s right to self-determination. One of the signers was later arrested in Russia after he preached a sermon criticizing the war. Authorities reportedly charged him with “discrediting the use of the Armed Forces.”

Meanwhile, the archbishop of Russian Orthodox churches in Western Europe has publicly implored Kirill to raise his voice with Russian authorities against the “monstrous and senseless war.” He also rejected the characterization of the conflict as a “metaphysical” battle.

“With all the respect that is due to you, and from which I do not depart, but also with infinite pain, I must bring to your attention that I cannot subscribe to such a reading of the Gospel,” read the archbishop’s letter.

And at least one Russian Orthodox church in Amsterdam has made moves to leave the church because of Kirill’s stance on Ukraine, hoping to affiliate with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. This despite an intimidating visit from a Russian archbishop: The cleric, who arrived in a car from the Russian Embassy, told priests that the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Foreign Ministry were keeping an eye on their church.

“We cannot go back on our decision to distance ourselves from Patriarch Kirill,” read a statement from the church’s priests. “Our consciences will not allow that.”

It remains to be seen whether these and other efforts will push Kirill to deviate from years of operating in lockstep with Putin. The Russian president’s drive to continue the war remains strong, as does his embrace of religious rhetoric: At a rally Friday, Putin praised Russia’s troops in a way that echoed Kirill and paraphrased the Bible, saying, “There is no greater love than giving up one’s soul for one’s friends.”

But religious pressure on Kirill doesn’t appear to be letting up either. When Pope Francis held a meeting with Kirill last week to discuss the conflict, he made a point of warning against trying to justify armed invasion, expansion or empire with a Christian cross — something the Catholic Church knows something about.

“Once upon a time there was also talk in our churches of holy war or just war,” Francis told Kirill, according to the Vatican press office. “Today we cannot speak like this.”

— Religion News Service

A Peace Child Brings Healing to the Nations

A Marind tribe sharing a southern border with the Sawi tribes of Papua, New Guinea

The Sawi, or Sawuy, are a tribal people of Western New Guinea, Indonesia. They were known to be cannibalistic headhunters as recently as the 1950s. They speak the Sawi language, which belongs to the Trans-New Guinea language family.

Sawi, or Sawuy, is a language of the Sawi people of the Trans–New Guinea phylum spoken in sago swamps in the southwestern parts of the Indonesian province of Papua. Of the neighboring languages, it is most closely related to the Awyu languages to the east.

Sawi is an inflecting language and uses both inflections of the stem and suffixes to indicate person, number, and tense.

A peace child offering among the Sawi tribe of Papua, New Guinea

Journey into the Unknown

I remember reading Don Richardson's story of Peace Child either in my late teens or early twenties and thinking how wonderful his use of the cultural elements he lived within to communicate Jesus not by his own Western standards but by the tribe's own standards whom he had befriended.

Yet in another sense I also remembered how the Sawi tribe was "fattening him and his family up" with good fellowship and tribal affection as they were preparing Don, his wife, and youngest child Steve, for a rite of death. Though Don never mentions this in his journal the tension was evidently there by his recounts of what he was witnessing. The Sawi tribe he was living amongst were a Papua, New Guinea tribe of Indonesia well know for their cannibalism.

It was through a cannibalistic incident between the Sawi tribes where Richardson first saw a glimmer of how to share the deep relevance of Jesus to his machiavellian hosts which might bring a deep spiritual meaning to upsetting both the human soul and tribal practices of a culture devoted to premeditated murder upon one another. And it was through this biblical form of typology that opened blinded tribal eyes to see the atonement of Jesus between God and man.

But rather than ruin or spoil the import of Richard's story I'll leave it to the reader to pick up an old copy and re-explore through Don Richardson's missionary eyes the perils he and his family had entered into amid the discoveries they had made having survived their first Sawi encounters. Peace Child reads simply and quickly, but within the words of the page lies a deep sublimity providing a transitional context between people and tribes of unlike cultures looking to find common ground with one another.

Context

Which brings me to my last thought of the day. Context. If, like Don Richardson, we are seeking a way to share the gospel of God's love through Jesus in a meaningful way, it is by listening and learning from within whatever cultural context (of community context) we find ourselves in. This is where an evangelist or missionary, pastor or discipler, might begin. It will never be obvious at first but with time and insight it might become obvious.

The key to Richardson's insight was that he came to live and work within the Sawi tribes. When he did, he found God's insight into a deeply formative tradition held within the very cornerstone of the Sawi tribes. An identity heightened by lies and deception before killing of another human being. It was this very cornerstone of their tribal identity the Lord reveal to Don that he might use it's same evil to share God's love.

Had Richardson brought his own culture into the tribe he might never have exposed himself to its hazards and reality. Further, Richardson could have recited the "law and order" sections of the bible's Hebraic traditions and simply forced his own Christianized Western culture upon the Sawi. But by proceeding through love and fellowship he exposed himself to the very evil lying resident among the tribes of Papua needing redemption. If he had not done this, the gospel wouldn't have been anything more than window-dressing added to craven human behavior and customs.

Context? Context is everything. Isn't it?

R.E. Slater
June 8, 2020

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Never The Same:

Celebrating 50 Years Since Peace Child

Pioneers USA

Dec 12, 2012

The Sawi were headhunters and cannibals when a young couple named Don and Carol Richardson arrived in their village carrying their seven-month-old boy Steve—and a message that would change the tribe forever. The year was 1962, and Steve—and later, three more children—spent their youth among the Sawi, learning the language and embracing the culture in ways that would shape the rest of their lives. Their story was immortalized in the best-selling book Peace Child and a feature film of the same name, inspiring a new generation to take the gospel to the remaining isolated tribes of the earth.

Fifty years later, Steve joins his father, Don, and two brothers, Shannon and Paul, to visit the Sawi village where they grew up. What is the state of the church they planted among the Sawi? Are the friends they played with still alive? Will anyone remember the mark their family left on the tribe? Journey with Steve as he travels to the swamps of Papua, Indonesia, to introduce you to the Sawi, and explore the impact of the gospel among a previously unreached people group.

• For more information on Pioneers, visit http://pioneers.org. 

• Check out "Never the Same" on Facebook at http://facebook.com/neverthesamemovie

• To order "Never the Same" on DVD or Blu-ray Disc, visit http://pioneers.org/store.

Music Credits

• "A Beautiful Tale" and "Revival" by Ryan Taubert © 2012 SHOUT! Music Publishing Courtesy of SHOUT! Music Australia

• "O My Soul", "The Introductions" and "Moving Frames" by Adam Taylor, used with permission

• "The Father's Heart" by Tony Anderson, used with permission

• "The Ladder" by Drake Margolnick, used with permission

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Never The Same: Celebrating 50 Years Since Peace Child

Missionary Visits Cannibal Tribe 50 Years Later

Moira Brown speaks to Don Richardson about his life's

work as a missionary and the impact it has had worldwide.

Don Richardson-Author / Conference Speaker

www.DonRichardsonBooksales.com  

Books: "Peace Child" & "Eternity In their Hearts"

To Get Your Copy:

http://www.crossroads.ca/estore

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The Hyposcrispy of Using Luke 22:36 As a Proof-Text for Packing Heat

Credit: James Shepard, Flickr Creative Commons

"... No matter how wonderful we might think our exegesis is, if our interpretation does

not lead us towards love of God and neighbor, then our interpretation is wrong."

- Zach Hunt

Jesus Was A Hypocrite

http://zackhunt.net/2015/12/09/jesus-was-a-hypocrite/

by Zack Hunt

December 9, 2015

A little while back I wrote a post asking “Are Bible Verses The Worst Thing Ever?”

This past week or so as I’ve read Christian defenses of Jerry Falwell Jr.’s call to kill Muslims and heard Christian rallying cries for more guns in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shooting, I’ve wanted to answer that question once again with a resounding “yes.”

Sure, there are obviously things worse than the Bible being divided into chapters and verses – like nuclear war or genocide or cancer – but few things have the power to engender, condone, and sanctify evil like a biblical proof-text.

Case in point: Luke 22:36,

He said to them, “But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise

a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one.

Taken in stripped down isolation, as I’ve seen done countless times in the past few weeks, it seems like the ultimate trump card for arguing that Christians should pack heat.

Of course, sequestered like that, Psalm 14:1b – “there is no God” – could be the ultimate trump card for atheism.

But the simple truth of the matter is there is nothing divine about the arrangement of the Bible into chapters and verses. In fact, they didn’t really even exist until the 13th century. But in trying to help the faithful more easily access and reference scripture, the inventors of the biblical chapters and verses unwittingly unleashed one of the most destructive forces in human history: the biblical proof-text; a weapon that needed only the effort to cite it to be effective and could be wielded at a moment’s notice to destroy any enemy and justify any action, no matter how heinous or unholy that action might be.

Sometimes though, and to the eternal consternation of the holy warrior, some of those proof-texts, when seen in their original context actually mean something quite different than we are led to believe.

As clear cut as it seems, the currently en vogue invocation of Luke 22:36 is a textbook example of a verse being used as a proof-text for something it can’t possibly mean.

Now, to be clear, Christians have been debunking this proof-text for quite a while. I am simply adding my voice to that choir because it doesn’t seem like anyone is listening. Perhaps, the louder the chorus becomes, the more likely it is that someone will eventually hear the truth.

So, here’s the thing about Luke 22:36.

If it’s true that counter to everything he said and did in his public ministry, in this private moment Jesus has declared that those closest to him should own swords (or in our case today, guns) for their own defense, then there is only one conclusion we can draw.

Jesus was a hypocrite.

And the rest of the gospel makes no sense.

If Jesus is truly pro-violence – in any form – in Luke 22:36, then the Sermon on the Mount is hypocritical nonsense. For in it, Jesus blesses the peacemaker, commands his followers to turn the other cheek, love their enemies, and pray for those who persecute them. He even goes so far as to equate hate alone with murder.

If Jesus is really telling his disciples to pick up their swords to defend themselves against their enemies, then his command to Peter (just a handful of verses later) to put down his sword is inexplicable. Yes, he was concerned with fulfilling prophecy, but even that concern (as we will see in a moment) only reinforces his commitment to non-violence. Moreover, even if we dismiss the specific command to Peter as something only relevant to that particular moment in time (which, curiously, is not something we do with anything else in the gospels – except, of course, Jesus’ call to sell everything and given to the poor), then we’re still left with Jesus’ unequivocal denunciation of violence and a life lived armed and ready for combat: “Whoever lives by the sword, dies by the sword.”

Once again, if Jesus is actually telling his followers to prepare for a fight, then on top of being a hypocrite, Jesus also becomes a liar. For, when he stands trial before Pilate he grounds his defense in the fact that his follower do not fight.

But that is just the tip of the exegetical iceburg of problems with using Luke 22:36 as a proof-text for packing heat.

If Jesus was literally calling his follower to carry the sword (rather than making a prophetic point), then we’re left trying to explain why there is no mention anywhere in the New Testament of anyone in the early Church carrying a weapon with them into any of the dangerous situations they found themselves in. In fact, if anything, the book of Acts alone is a testament to the early Church’s dedication to non-violence for records the deaths of the first Christian martyrs, including Stephen who was stoned to death without putting up a fight and James, brother of John, who was, perhaps ironically, killed by someone else’s sword as he conspicuously did not have one of his own with which to defend himself.

Moreover, if Jesus was indeed ordaining the use of violence in Luke 22:36, then we are left to explain why no one in the first three centuries of the Church’s history seemed to have received that memo. For the early Church was – in the name of the Lord – almost universally pacifist until its unholy union in the 4th century with Constantine and his violence dependent empire.

So, then, how are we to interpret Luke 22:36?

Well, first, we need to look at the entire pericope because, as I said before, we can’t just rip this passage out of its context and expect it understand what is really being said.

Then Jesus asked them, “When I sent you without purse, bag or sandals,

did you lack anything?”

“Nothing,” they answered.

He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you

don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. It is written: ‘And he was numbered

with the transgressors’; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what

is written about me is reaching its fulfillment.”

The disciples said, “See, Lord, here are two swords.”

“That’s enough!” he replied.

Now, I know even with the immediate context, if we do no further digging, it still seems plausible to use this passage as a proof-text for God-ordained violence.

But let’s dig a little deeper.

Early Church Theologians Origen and Augustine

And let’s do that by turning our gaze towards two of the most important figures in the early Church: Origen and Augustine. Their rules for reading and interpreting scripture are tremendously helpful, particularly in light of those modern interpreters who rely on what they euphmastically refer to as a “hermeneutic of common sense” which, ironically, makes no sense given that 1) we live in an incredibly diverse world full of an almost unimaginable diversity of outloooks on life and 2) more importantly, Jesus’ sense of the world was anything but common.

Anyway, for Origen, there are stumbling blocks in scripture which the Holy Spirit allowed to be there in order to draw us deeper into the text, moving us beyond the literal sense of what was on the page and towards the spiritual sense where the true meaning can be found.

We see such a stumbling block at the end of Jesus’ exchange with his disciples when they hold up 2 swords and he says, “That’s enough!”

This alone should send up red flags about the literalness of Jesus’ call to arms. For, on simply a pragmatic level, 2 swords is neither “enough” to start a rebellion, nor even to fend off the authorities who were on their way to arrest Jesus.

Therefore, as many scholars argue, Jesus’ declaration of “That’s enough” is probably best understood not as him exclaiming “Sweet! You guys already have what we need!” but rather him crying out in exasperation as he had so many times before, “You guys still don’t get it.” Yes, Jesus was warning them about terrible times to come, but the battle to come is against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places, not flesh and blood. Swords would be of no help. Therefore, they should be prepared for spiritual warfare, not physical violence.

Now, for Augustine (and really Jesus too if you think about it), our reading of scripture must be grounded in the Greatest Commandment. That is to say, no matter how wonderful we might think our exegesis is, if our interpretation does not lead us towards love of God and neighbor, then our interpretation is wrong.

We can’t be ready to love our enemies, when we’re already preparing ourselves to kill them.

Our reading of this passage from Luke, then, must keep us focused on the radical love and self-sacrifice Jesus lived out and called his followers to continue to embody in their own lives. To find that focus and, in fact, to find the key to understanding everything Jesus is saying here, we need to look at what he says in verse 37.

It is written: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors’; and I tell you that

this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment.

We hear Jesus say “it is written” a lot all throughout the gospels, usually without giving much thought to where it is written. In this case, the context of what Jesus is quoting is of critical importance (shocker, I know).

Jesus is quoting from Isaiah 53:12.

Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,

and he will divide the spoils with the strong,

because he poured out his life unto death,

and was numbered with the transgressors.

For he bore the sin of many,

and made intercession for the transgressors.

It comes from a famous chapter of messianic prophecy which you probably don’t recognize from that passage, but I’m sure you’ll recognize based on some of the early verses.

Surely he took up our pain

and bore our suffering,

yet we considered him punished by God,

stricken by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,

he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was on him,

and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray,

each of us has turned to our own way;

and the Lord has laid on him

the iniquity of us all.

In between that famous prophecy and the passage Jesus quoted, we find a passage that really illuminates what it means for Jesus to be “numbered with the transgressors.”

He was assigned a grave with the wicked,

and with the rich in his death,

though he had done no violence,

nor was any deceit in his mouth.

The emphasis is mine, of course, but it’s a critical point that can’t be missed when understanding what Jesus is saying – and not saying – in Luke 22:33-38.

A radical commitment to non-violence was essential to Jesus’ identity as the Messiah.

If Jesus was indeed calling his follower to arms, to be prepared for violence, then as their leader, as the one issuing that command, he too was participating in that violence.

Which would violate the prophecy he was so concerned with fulfilling.

And if in private Jesus was indeed calling his followers to arms despite everything he said and did publicly before and after that moment, then the Sermon on the Mount, his words to Peter, and his testimony before Pilate were all examples of deceit issuing forth from his mouth.

Which, again, would violate the prophecy he was so concerned with fulfilling.

As followers of this Messiah, if we want to claim the name of Christ as the marker of our identity, then we must seek to live as he lived. That doesn’t mean we’ll do it perfectly, but it does mean we must walk the same path of peace he blazed for us and called us to follow him down no matter how afraid of doing so we might be.

Which is why, given this and given all the other evidence I have already cited, there is simply no way to read Luke 22:36 with any integrity and claim that it is a God ordained endorsement of violence.

It just doesn’t work.

The only way that can be done is to completely ignore the immediate context and utterly disregard everything both Jesus and the early Church said and did.

Now, that doesn’t mean I personally don’t think you should own a gun. Speaking personally, I have no issue with hunting or recreational target practice, though I know plenty of other Christians do.

But, if you’re in need of a divine proof-text for packing heat in self-defense, you’re gonna have to look somewhere other than Luke 22:36.