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This note of irony—cousin to Christian humility—must still be sounded today, even as we fight the dear and present danger of international terrorism and rogue nations wielding weapons of mass destruction. Let no one, Shoemaker would say, confuse a just war with a just nation. The contradictions run too deep for such complacency.

Steven Gertz is editorial coordinator for Christian History magazine.

Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

More Christian History, including a list of events that occurred this week in the church's past, is available at ChristianHistory.net. Subscriptions to the quarterly print magazine are also available.

Recent Christianity Today articles about U.S. foreign policy, war, and Iraq include:

Bully Culprit | Can a pre-emptive strike against the tyrant of Baghdad be justified? (September 30, 2002)

Christian Leaders Respond to Bush's National Security Strategy | The White House outlines foreign policy in a changing world. (September 25, 2002)

Is Attacking Iraq Moral? | Christian leaders disagree, too. (September 4, 2002)

Wisdom in a Time of War | What Oswald Chambers and C.S. Lewis teach us about living through the long battle with terrorism. (January 4, 2002)

The New York Times ran a column by Peter Steinfels titled "Deaf Ears on Iraq". In it he writes, "It is interesting how little has been made of the declarations by so many Christian leaders and ethicists that the Bush Administration's proposed war against Iraq is unjust and immoral."

Christian History Corner appears every Friday at ChristianityToday.com. Previous editions include:

No Sex (Before Marriage), Please … We're Christian | Miss America preaches a 2000-year-old message. (Oct. 25, 2002)

The King Is Coming, Eventually | What if you announced the rapture, but God didn't show up? (Oct. 18, 2002)

Timeline of the Spirit-Gifted | Before Moody, Finney, Edwards, and Mather came a long line of Catholic and Orthodox believers reputed to enjoy "the promise of the Father." (Oct. 11, 2002)

Do Non-Charismatics 'Do' Holy Spirit Baptism? | Ask D. L. Moody, Charles G. Finney, Jonathan Edwards, or Cotton Mather. (Oct. 7, 2002)

Standing Alone for Unity | The attempt to bring European Christians together forced one reformer, Caspar Schwenckfeld, straight to the fringe. (Sept. 20, 2002)

9/11, History, and the True Story | Wartime authors J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis help put 9/11 in perspective. (Sept. 13, 2002)

Evangelicalism's Decades of Fire | New historical survey highlights twentieth-century evangelicalism's impassioned middle decades. (Sept. 6, 2002)

A Protestant Bishop Speaks Out on the Stakes of Public Education | Why concerned parents should read the 17th-century Moravian educational reformer Jan Amos Comenius. (Aug. 30, 2002)

Spurgeon on Jabez | What history's most prolific preacher said, in 1871, about the Prayer of Jabez (Aug. 23, 2002)

History in a Flash | A new CD-ROM offers quick access to the facts of church history, plus interactive quizzes. (Aug. 16, 2002)

How the Early Church Saw Heaven | The first Christians had very specific ideas about who they would meet in the afterlife (Aug. 9, 2002)

Divvying up the Most Sacred Place | Emotions have historically run high as Christians have staked their claims to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Aug. 2, 2002)

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October (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46