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"Matters of Opinion" is an occasional department that allows discussion of perspectives not necessarily shared by Christianity Today or the evangelical community as a whole. It is intended to encourage dialogue, and we welcome readers' responses. Is it time for the American church to "divorce" the military? Let us know what you think. The EditorsDuring the Kosovo bombing campaign a year ago, a reporter asked a middle-aged man whose reserve unit was preparing to be shipped to the Balkans: "Are you afraid?" "No, I'm not afraid," the reservist replied, "because the Lord is on my side." A young, sincerely religious pilot fondly told another reporter about prayer meetings in the chaplain's office before bombing raids, where a small group petitioned God for safety and success.These perspectives make sense for Christians only if the God known in Jesus takes sides in war. But can a Christian really claim that "The Lord is on my side" in war, or pray for the success of missiles?One of the most important—and controversial—aspects of being the church in the twenty-first century is the relationship between the church and the military. I want to suggest that the time has come for the centuries-old marriage between the church and the military to end in divorce.I confess some degree of anxiety in making this suggestion. I do not want it to be taken as a personal attack on any individual Christians, including some of my own family members and friends who have served in the military. Many of these people have felt a sense of vocation—in the most profoundly spiritual sense of the word—in such work. My concern is not with them personally, but with the vocation of the church, from which all other appropriate vocations for Christians should be derived.

One of the most important discoveries about the New Testament church made by biblical scholars during the last third of the twentieth century was the thoroughly political character of the language used to describe it. From the Gospels, to the Epistles, to Revelation, the new community inaugurated by God in Christ through the Spirit is depicted in the language of kingdom and reign, lordship and empire, body and people, heavenly colony and resident aliens. This political language, we discovered, can no longer be spiritualized into some otherworldly or inner experience. Rather, the church portrayed in the New Testament is designed to be an alternative empire or "contrast society." The church in the New Testament is a concrete, this-worldly community with its own emperor or lord—the true Sovereign of the universe—shaped by this Lord's counter cultural values and lifestyle.Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon captured the relevance of these images most clearly in their 1989 book Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (CT, March 5, 1990, p. 16). Former CT associate editor Rodney Clapp's A Peculiar People (1996) is similar in spirit. These authors drew on the work of many other theologians and biblical scholars, showing clearly that any church faithful to the New Testament will challenge the social, economic, and political status quo of its day simply by being itself.The church, then, is a culture within a culture, embracing the good things in the host culture but living in stark contrast to the values that oppose God's design for human life. The church's authentic mission is not to offer a few tidbits of moral advice on how a culture should synthesize its values with those of the Christian faith. In that synthesis, culture wins and the church loses. Rather, the church offers an alternative vision of human life, bearing witness against the world, for the world—beneficent sabotage, to borrow an image from C. S. Lewis. Evangelicals have a history of emphasizing the distinction between the church and "the world." But this emphasis has too often been selective and individualistic, frequently focusing on sexual matters and seldom challenging the social and political status quo. One of the fundamental points of contrast ought to be, indeed must be, rejecting the host culture's violence. The church is called to be a church of the cross that endures and opposes violence, not a church of glory and power that makes use of it. Unfortunately, evangelicals have been especially quick to defend state-sanctioned violence like warfare and capital punishment even while rightly condemning the violence of abortion. This opposition to violence, as I suggested nearly two decades ago in Abortion and the Early Church, can no longer be a matter of individual conscience or selective renunciation, for that is to privatize and fracture what is an essential, comprehensive, and consistent statement of who we are and what we are about as Christ's church.It is time, I suggest, for us to enlarge our understanding of "the world" to include the military, and of "the church" to exclude it.

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March 6 2000, Vol. 44, No. 3