What hath the cross to do with the gun? How does the peaceable kingdom that exists proleptically in the church relate to the realpolitik of civil government? And what guidance can we find for a Christian who finds themselves straddling these two worlds? In this article, I interview Canadian apologist Stephen Bedard on his work […]
pacifism
Reckoning with the Peaceable Kingdom: A Review of Disarming the Church
Eric A. Seibert. Disarming the Church: Why Christians Must Forsake Violence to Follow Jesus and Change the World. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018.) Carl Norden was a devout Christian. So when he developed the Norden bombsight, it was with the intent of increasing the accuracy of aerial bombing to the end of decreasing the resulting collateral damage wrought […]
Can a soldier be a Christian?
The catalyst for this brief rumination is a tweet from Bruxy Cavey: "One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and the contents of the Gospels without feeling that something is amiss. One may feel that in the name of honesty, Christians ought either to quit fighting or quit calling themselves Christian." […]
You’re in a dark alley. Would you rather meet ten Christians or ten atheists?
This essay is a sequel to “Crematoria for the Canaanites?” * * * Perhaps you’ve heard this scenario posed by a Christian apologist. “Imagine that you encounter a group of rough looking men in a dark alley. Would you be nervous?” The answer, of course, is yes. To make it even more unsettling, give ’em […]
How will the Christians know when to commence the killing?
A few months back in my essay “Might God call Christians to participate in a future genocide?” I pointed out that Christians who believe that God commanded genocides in the past are forced to consider the possibility that he might command a genocide in the future. I pointed to Revelation 19:11-18 which describe a cataclysmic […]