The Joy of Words

One of the choir school boys—he might be 25 years old now, but back then he was just 8 or 9—was bursting with excitement. He wanted to tell me a joke. “Go ahead,” I said.

    He: “A dog walked into a bar. Ouch!” Then he dissolved in laughter. A precocious boy (they all were precocious in one way or another), he knew enough to enjoy not only the double meaning of “bar”; he knew also that “walked into a bar” was a type of joke that usually went on longer. So it was funny that it just stopped. Ouch!

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    Jokes are great things to share with children. In a group, they all laugh. The older ones get the joke. The younger ones don’t, but they laugh anyway. When one person laughs, everyone else wants to laugh also.

    And the children in-between, they are the most interesting. They get it and they laugh, but then they want to explain it. One of my grandchildren will tell me, “bar means two things: it’s a place people go, and it’s a hard thing you might run into.”

    I have a new one to tell him—new to me; I heard it on a radio “joke show” and managed to write it down before I forgot it. “Why was Cinderella so lousy at baseball? She ran away from the ball and she had a pumpkin for a coach.” I can’t wait to tell it. I will try to resist explaining it.

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    The joy of words goes way back, all the way to the beginning. It was the evening after the second day, and God was pondering what he was going to do next. He said to himself, “I can’t wait to say, Let the dry land appear!”

    No one enjoys words more than God does.

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    Out & About: As previously announced, the seminars in Dallas are on summer holiday to return Sunday, Sept 14, to discuss A Time to Die by Nicolas Diat.

    More on War Basics: Some readers asked for some suggestions for further study of Christian thinking about war. There is of course “just war thinking,” sometimes misleadingly called “just war theory,” and you can find a lot on that easily. But to move deeper, I have two recommendations. The first is a slim volume by Oliver O’Donovan, The Just War Revisited. Although slim, O’Donovan’s thought is deep—these are essays that I have read and re-read many times. I had seminary students read it once and their response was overall positive.

    More recent is a much longer book by Nigel Biggar, who was O’Donovan’s successor in the Regius moral theology chair at Oxford. It’s called In Defence of War. I reviewed it in National Review about 11 years ago. The review will give you a good sense of this important book, and what’s at stake with pacifism and love of the enemy: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2014/01/27/peace-and-principle/ 

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

War Basics

Our nation’s dropping of bombs in Iran last weekend raises again the desire for some points of theological orientation regarding war. A theologian has no claim for wisdom on whether a particular course of action was justified. But there is a rich tradition of Christian thinking about war that is, unfortunately, largely forgotten. So—as an exercise of remembering—here are a few points to help take our theological bearings. (Of course, about each of these much more could be said!)
    1. Ruling authorities exist in order to provide judgment. This is why we have governments, and it is a reflection, however beclouded, of God’s good provisions for fallen human beings. This doesn’t mean that any particular government has God’s particular blessing. Nor does it mean that any particular ruling authority is infallible. But it does mean that one of the basic things we expect of government is to bring wrong-doers to judgment.
    2. Yet the world as a whole has no government, nor is the idea of a world-government compatible with biblical thought. To the contrary: any assertion of world-rule is implicitly idolatrous. We have multiple governments in the world because only God himself can rule humankind as a whole.
    3. Combine these first two points and one sees the problem: What about the need for judgment when the harm falls between existing governments? There is no ruling authority to provide judgment in such a case.
    4. War, Christianly understood, is an extrapolation of political authority into this vacuum. It can be necessary at times, but its rightness will never have complete clarity. It is inherently a rough exercise of judgment (unlike the exercise of laws within a well-governed society), and therefore should be as limited or focused as possible, consistent with its judicial purpose.
    5. Although war should be rare, the necessity behind war is the same as the necessity behind any act of judgment. And that is: to love one’s neighbor whose good is being seriously threatened. If you see A being mugged by B, it is your love for A (and, truth be told, your love also for B) that can authorize appropriate force to interrupt the mugging. Within a state, that force falls under the state’s authority. But if there is no authority over both A and B, then whatever action is taken has to be, in a sense, improvised.
    6. An oddity of war is that, having entered a war in order to provide judgment, we should, if successful in war, act not as the “winning side” but rather as a judge adjudicating right judgment.
    7. Christian thought is suspicious of self-defense. Jesus’ teaching of turning the other cheek is impossible to forget, and our own awareness of the egoistic tendency to prefer ourselves over other people is something we dare not forget. Yet Christian thought also teaches us of our obligations to other people, which include an obligation to take care of ourselves for the sake of those who need us. A parent should act in self-defense for the sake of children (or others) who depend on that parent’s protection. This, in fact, is not so much self-defense as it is love of neighbors who are dependent. Similarly, a government could rightly defend its country for the sake of its people. That is to say, self-defense, sometimes, is better thought of as love of one’s neighbor.
    8. One can even understand forcible action in war as an exercise of love, namely, love of one’s enemy. One might understand an effort to halt the enemy’s harmful actions as being done, not only for the sake of the victims, but also for the enemy’s own sake. The analogy here can go back to that mugger in #5 above. People who are harming other people are, by their very actions, inflicting harm upon themselves. Perpetrators of evil harm themselves, and thus to arrest their actions is to manifest, indirectly but nonetheless in reality, a measure of love for them as well.
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    Out & About: As previously announced, the seminars in Dallas are on summer holiday to return Sunday, Sept 14, to discuss A Time to Die by Nicolas Diat.
    On the Web: There’s a conversation on the web that needs more attention: It is Bruce Marshall and Adam Eitel talking with Doug Sweeney about the character and thought of two outstanding American theologians, Robert Jenson and Carl Braaten. Marshall is now at SMU and Eitel at the University of Dallas. I commend the conversation. Eitel is also the transcriber and editor of the little book of Jenson’s, A Theology in Outline: Shall These Bones Live?which many people have found the most readable of Jenson’s books. Take a look at this video: you’ll appreciate it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2klNoU7v0g
Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

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The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: 

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