Origen on Christians in the military and religious freedom

This is taken from George Kalantzis's Caesar and the Lamb: Early Christian Attitudes on War and Military Service.  It is an excerpt from Origen of Alexandria's Contra Celsum, of which the best translation is Henry Chadwick's (Cambridge, 1953).  The excerpt is from book 8, section 73, and Origen is responding to Celsus's criticism that Christians take all the benefits of living in Roman society without constructively making it better, specifically by refusing to fight in Rome's wars.

"We would also say this to those who are alien to our faith and ask us to fight for the community and to kill men: that is is also your opinion that the priests of certain images and wardens of the temples of the gods, as you think them to be, should keep their right hand undefiled for the sake of sacrifices, that they may offer the customary sacrifices to those who you say are gods with hands unstained by blood and pure from murders.  And in fact when war comes you do not enlist the priests. If, then, this is reasonable, how much more reasonable is it that, while others fight, Christians also should be fighting as priests and worshippers of God, keeping their right hands pure and by their prayers to God striving for those who fight in a righteous cause and for the emperor who reigns righteously, in order that everything which is opposed  and hostile to those who act rightly may be destroyed?  Moreover, we who by our prayers destroy all demons which stir up wars, violate oaths, and disturb the peace are of more help to the emperors than those who seem to be doing the fighting.  We who offer prayers with righteousness, together with ascetic practices and exercises which teach us to despise pleasures and not to be led by them, are cooperating in the tasks of the community.  Even more do we fight on behalf of the emperor.  And though we do not become fellow-soldiers with him, even if he presses for this, yet we are fighting for him and are composing a special army of piety through our intercessions to God."

This is a remarkable argument for tolerance towards Christians, but it is one that requires a government that believes in prayer and a god who answer prayers.  Rome honored the gods and had civil religion with priests who offered sacrifices and prayers on behalf of the emperor and his people.  It is interesting to think about how our civil religion in America functions: who are our priests? what do we sacrifice? where are our temples?  But this is not the direction I want to take.  Origen's argument is profound, even if our secular age does not have the ability within itself to acknowledge the power of his argument since it requires the belief in prayer that works.  If you want the help of the Christian God, and if the help of the Christian God comes through prayer and piety, then you must have Christians who are pure and holy in order for their prayers to be heard.  The Romans believed that the gods answer the prayers of the righteous.  Asking Christians to violate their laws by requiring them to fight Rome's wars and then expecting them to also pray for divine favor is like asking a good Roman to offer a sacrifice in the wrong way.  Roman sacrifices required that the supplicant perform the proper rituals in their necessary form and order more than that the supplicant maintain personal sincerity.  In other words, the sincerity and righteousness of a person was measured more by their respect of the rituals that honored the gods than that they approach the gods with "a humble and contrite heart."  Christians must be enabled to be Christians, which Origen assumed included nonviolence based on the teachings of Jesus,  in order for them to be "useful" to the government.  

This is not an argument in favor of just war theory, but it does affirm the Christian's responsibility to pray that the government take up a "righteous cause."  We pray for "those who fight in a righteous cause and for the emperor who reigns righteously."  Origen's wording is subtle because he knows that we don't blindly pray for our governments and their success, for it was true then as it is now that not every cause is righteous and neither is every emperor.  We pray that when our governments act, they would do so justly, knowing full well that so often they do not.  Origen's point is that Christians qua Christians do not fight wars, regardless if they are just or not.  As he said before the excerpt above, Christians arm themselves with the armor of God, and "the more pious a man is, the more effective he is in helping the emperors - more so  than the soldiers who go out into the lines and kill all the enemy troops they can."  Can we even imagine what would happen if all the Christians in the world refused to fight in wars and gathered to pray?  Not being able to do so is, in my opinion, a lack of eschatological imagination that the NT and much (not all) of the Christian tradition requires.  

ordaining versus ordering

On July 13, 2013, my father experienced perhaps the worst call of his professional law enforcement career.  He was the first to respond to an accident at the home of a young couple with three kids.  While mowing his daughter's lawn, the grandfather accidentally backed up and ran over his grandson with a riding lawn mower.  The details are too disturbing to recount here, but it was fatal and tragic.  This family's life is forever changed.

I seem to have an allergic reaction of sorts to tragedy, which is not a virtue or a discipline that I've mastered over time but a kind of default set of emotions that simply come out.  My first response is usually anger.  The worst words I have ever said flow out of the frustration and pain that I feel because I cannot make sense of the tragedy.  Next come the tears and those haunting thoughts: How can that family ever function normally again?  Will the son-in-law have to learn how to love his wife's father again?  What about the daughter?  How can that poor grandfather ever keep going?  What would I do if I were any of these people?  The inability to process this and make any sense of it is debilitating, but I think this inability actually speaks to a deep theological truth that gives me a degree of comfort.  This truth is that evil, in whatever shape it takes (intentional, accidental, systemic, etc.), is incomprehensible, disordered, and chaotic.  It is not able to be sensible in itself.  This chaos, however, is God's enemy, and God is a God of order.

Built in to our awareness of evil in the world is a desire for justice.  When there is a crime and the criminal is caught and punished, we feel satisfied that justice was served.  When the crime is such that there is severe loss of life or well-being, even though the criminal is punished, there is often an emotional remainder.  On the one hand, we feel satisfied that justice was served, but, on the other hand, justice cannot fully replace the loss.  Settlement money in a lawsuit involving a fatality can never fully equal the value of the life lost.  What then do we do with complete accidents?  This accident was evil, but not due to the grandfather's malicious intent.  In light of my inability to make sense of these tragedies, I'm convinced of another way forward.  "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."  As I read this passage while reflecting on this tragedy, I came to the realization that in the face of accidental evil, mourning is the proper response.  Mourning is, perhaps, the only proper response because evil is chaos, and chaos is by nature disorderly and nonsensical.  In fact, we must leave it unexplained and simply mourn with those who mourn; to not do so, by which I mean to insist that it "happened for some reason," results in an anomaly (literally, a wrongly named thing): we end up calling disorder order.  The Old Testament rightly considers anomalies like these immoral because they violate a fundamental biblical truth: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil" (Isa 5.20).  God does not delight in the death of his creatures, and when people attempt to comfort others who are in pain by telling them that all things happen for a reason or that God's plans are bigger than our scenarios they are speaking half truths as best.  What is usually happening unbeknownst to the "comforter" is that they are trying to comfort by falsely reassuring people God did this for a reason, which is to say that God's plan included, and by extension needed, this tragedy to happen.  This is very poor theology.

There is a substantial difference between the belief that God ordains or causes evil for his good and the belief that God creates good out of evil.  Judas remains the betrayer, despite the fact that his betrayal led to Christ's death, which accomplished our redemption.  Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension don't make Judas's actions good.  The inexhaustible mystery of the Triune God is that he is able to create goodness out of evil, bring order out of chaos.  St. Athanasius said that redemption is the continuation of creation.  The very ordering of the (non-evil) chaos in Gen 1 is continued by God's (re-)ordering of the (evil) chaos of the world.  The introduction of sin allows us to unpack this ordering, and the Bible and Christian theology teach us that God often orders by conquering.  That is, some things are fundamentally against God and they cannot be redeemed.  The effects that these anti-God experiences have on us require conquering and healing, not redeeming.  We are in the process of being redeemed, but the evils themselves are not.  God doesn't cause evil for his good, he conquers evil for our good, which is also his good.  I consider this distinction between ordaining evil for good and ordering evil toward good a necessary one in order to affirm the essentials of Scripture and Christian theology: God is completely good; evil is a reality we have brought into the world and it is anti-God; and Christ has conquered, is conquering, and will continue to conquer sin, death, and the Devil.  Christus Victor!  "Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered!"

Lewis's Enjoyment vs. Contemplation

In C. S. Lewis's Suprised by Joy, he recalls an interesting epiphany that encouraged his conversion.  After having "aesthetic experiences," which were caused by ideas (and music, primarily Wagner) he encountered in his teenage years, Lewis set about to reproduce these moments of Joy, as he called them.  These experiences became a kind of measure or standard of his subsequent experiences.  However, Lewis realized that any experience of love, anger, ecstasy, or sadness cannot be enjoyed or contemplated simultaneously.  We experience love only when we have an object at which to direct and attach our love.  The minute we contemplate (he uses the word contemplate) what is actually happening, we momentarily cease enjoying that which we were encountering.  This fact, this human limitation, became an inescapable truth for Lewis, and it changed his pursuit of Joy because he had for years sought to find enjoyment by means of contemplation, which usually ended in disappointment.
We ought to reflect on the effects this anthropological schism has on our human existence.  One reflection Lewis lends in his book is the effects this divide has on vices.  If you contemplate drunkenness, fornication, or lying, they often appear as they really are: shameful, disgusting, and evil.  However, the minute one moves from contemplation to enjoyment, the true realities of these vices fade away and only the object is before us and we often indulge.  This is one inescapable danger of this schism: letting enjoyment override contemplation, that is, making the dialogue between these a monologue.  A second inescapable danger moves in the opposite direction but is formally the same.  By letting contemplation overpower enjoyment, we can only create false impressions, which at best are silly replicas, but at worst are idols.  Turning actual love of someone into a mental fiction.  Or, trying to reproduce a past moment of enjoyment by contemplating it, which leads to disappointment and possibly even the conclusion that no such experiences are possible any more.  How many marriages deteriorate and disintegrate because of this second error? Is there a solution?  This divide is too fresh to me to offer anything that would be remotely helpful. Lewis, at least, viewed his realization of this as ultimately freeing, since he had gone about things the wrong way, and so my initial take away is that of an important warning.