“A solider in command must be told not to kill people; if he is order to do so, he should not carry it out. Nor should he take the oath. If he will not agree, he should be rejected. Anyone who has the power of the sword, or who is a civil magistrate wearing the purple, should desist, or he should be rejected. If a catechumen or a believer wishes to become a soldier they should be rejected, for they have despised God.”
Hippolytus, “On the Apostolic Tradition.” (SVS Press, 100). Mid 3rd century.
“To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to fail as a Christian and as a priest as I see it…I was there, and I’ll tell you that the operational moral atmosphere in the church in relation to mass bombing of enemy civilians was totally indifferent, silent, and corrupt at best – at worst it was religiously supportive of these activities by blessing those who did them…Catholics dropped the A-bomb on top of the largest and first Catholic city in Japan. One would have thought that, I, as a Catholic priest, would have spoken out against the atomic bombing of nuns. (Three orders of Catholic sisters were destroyed in Nagasaki on that day.) One would have thought that I would have suggested that as a minimal standard of Catholic morality, Catholics shouldn’t bomb Catholic children. I didn’t. I, like the Catholic pilot of the Nagasaki plan, “The Great Artiste” was heir to a Christianity that had for seventeen hundred years engaged in revenge, murder, torture, the pursuit of power, and prerogative violence, all in the name of our Lord.
Taken from Richard Hays, “The Moral Vision of the NT” (pg. 318-319)
I should’ve known something was wrong with this picture because when I’m awake I’m a pacifist. Anyway, a woman and her mother come to me and ask me to kill her husband. Apparently he’s been abusing her and she can’t escape him any other way. I agree to kill him and when I ask his name they tell me that he is John Nelson Darby – the post reformation “theologian” whose thoughts were later popularized by the Schofield Study Bible, which has swept through American evangelical/fundamentalism over the last hundred years. Officially the system is known as Dispensationalism and it’s probably best known for its rapture theology which says the church will be taken out of this world suddenly before the arrival of the Great Tribulation.
So I get a pistol out (not sure where I got it) and I go find JND in a church camp – he’s there with his father, his two brothers and his sister. I walk right up to him and shoot him in the chest. But amazingly he doesn’t die. I shoot him three more times but he still doesn’t even seem fazed.
Afraid of what has just occurred, I step back and begin apologizing (you would too if you didn’t have an escape from someone who apparently can’t die). In gentleness he forgives me. I am completely confused by this.
We walk into the church camp library and we’re standing there when all of the sudden a big earthquake strikes. Oddly enough, as massive as the earth quake is, the book on the shelves flip around over and over in their given shelves, but never fall. The paper signs taped above given sections indicating the kind of books in that section, they also come untapped only to spin around once and then re-tape themselves to the shelf. This happens numerous times.
For some reason the Darby family can’t survive earth quakes. One by one they pose (as if modeling) for their final moment, then they are shaken to death by the earthquake.
