Hanging Saddam Hussein will do as much for Iraq as hanging P.W. Botha would have done for South Africa -- see my earlier post: Notes from underground: What to do with old dictators.
Pastor Phil Wyman makes some interesting points on treating people as enemies in his blog Square No More: Those Who Pray Together Slay Together.
In the recent obituaries on Gerald Ford, the former US president, it seems that for many the biggest mistake he made was pardoning Richard Nixon.
St Paul warns us (in Eph 6:10-12) that our struggle is not against blood and flesh, but against principalities and powers, against spiritual forces of wickedness. Hanging oppressors does not get rid of oppression. Yet we persist in thinking that we are fighting against flesh and blood, and so the cycle of vengeance continues.
It appears the US president George Bush wants Saddam Hussein to hang -- but if Bush is ever brought to trial for his war crimes, will there be any to plead for him to be pardoned?
I have heard that at the war crimes trials of Nazi leaders at Nuremburg one of the difficulties faced by the court was convincing the accused that they were not on trial for losing the war, but for starting it. That Bush would lose the war in Iraq was a foregone conclusion; his crime was starting it in the first place.
PW Botha, so far as I know, went to his death unrepentant. Would hanging him have made things better? Did Jesus make loving enemies conditional on their repentance? It seems to me that in demanding vengeance we demonstrate that we have been infected by the same virus as those we seek to kill. Killing people does not kill the virus, it just causes it to seek a new host. And the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenlies behave very much like viruses in that respect -- C.S. Lewis called them "macrobes" rather than "microbes".
People with secular values find this difficult to understand. They believe it is letting people off the hook, denying responsibility, and letting them get away with it using the excuse "The devil made me do it." But for Christians that excuse doesn't wash. "Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." That is the real spiritual warfare -- resisting the devil when he tempts us, and especially when he tempts us with the relatively undemanding exercise of confessing other people's sins and ignoring our own.
3 comments:
Hi! Thanks for visiting my blog and commenting. I don't think the situation is so clear that it can be made into a Christian vs. Secular view of the world or Christian vs Muslim. America, a country whose many citizens purport to be Christian, and Bush and his cohorts who certainly profess to be Christians are more than happy to see Hussein hang. There are many states in the US that still have the death penalty and many of the people against Saddam's death sentence are not religious.
In any case I certainly agree with you that it solves nothing. It is not even a foul means to an end as it will make no practical difference in the lives of the people in Iraq.
No, it isn't absolutely clear. It just seemed to me that the treatment of PW Botha was more in accordance with Christian values than the treatment of Saddam Hussein, not that all Christians would actually put those values into practice, or that all Muslims or secularists would not.
Ahh, ok, I get the distinction and agree with you. Pardon the misinterpretation!
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