Christianity’s power lights way in war-torn Ukraine
In a time of darkness, the teachings of Jesus still offer a vision of hope amid the despair.
– Paul, in his Letter to the Ephesians
At this Easter time, we cannot get the images of Ukraine out of our minds. One in particular stays with me. A big man, strong, lean, tall, is led to the passenger seat of a car. He sits there and weeps uncontrollably, unable to stop the tears, left alone as his friends presumably must attend some other urgent need.
I don’t know what grief the man was trying to absorb. Perhaps his family had been killed. Who knows, but for that moment, with the camera intrusively recording his distress, that man, accustomed perhaps to providing for his family, to protecting them, had lost all agency. There is nothing now for him to do but weep.
The lessons of Ukraine are many and terrible. They demonstrate the changeless essence of human nature – people are called to glory and yet every one of us is capable of monstrous evil. The Russian government is behaving exactly as the Roman Empire did in the time of Jesus, seeking conquest and subjugation with methods of remorseless brutality. We thought we had abolished that, in Europe at least.
If you want to see what Christian hope looks like, google Ukrainians singing hymns. See the solace and courage and inspiration there. Christianity is also evident in Poland’s generosity to Ukrainians fleeing the terror of the Russian military. Poles and Ukrainians don’t have an untroubled past, or an untroubled relationship generally. They are not, typically, best friends. Yet Poland, even today not an especially rich country, has taken in more than two million Ukrainians so far and the efforts of individual Poles in this crisis are magnificent.
Yet Christianity is dishonoured in Ukraine too. The backing of the invasion given by the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church is a crime, the most shocking misuse of Christian religious authority, to justify murder and cruelty and dreadful destruction, in many decades. We thought we had abolished that, too.
As John Dickson recounts in his marvellous Bullies and Saints, Christians first developed a coherent just war theory, in emergency conditions, under St Augustine, the fourth century bishop of Hippo in North Africa and one of the greatest minds of Western civilisation.
Christian villages in North Africa were being raided and plundered, innocent people murdered.
Augustine, as the relevant bishop, wanted the authorities to provide some protection. This meant sanctioning violence and this in turn required working out how violence could be deployed morally, consistent with the teachings of Jesus.
The just war theory has been debated and developed over the centuries. Essentially it holds that war is evil and violence is to be avoided but that sometimes it is necessary. As Augustine commented: “It is the iniquity of the opposing side that imposes on the wise man the obligation of waging just wars; and this iniquity should certainly be lamented.”
The just war theory holds that to be justified, military action must be in a cause that is just; undertaken only as a last resort when all other remedies are exhausted; there must be a reasonable chance of success; the harm you do will not be greater than the harm you seek to prevent; the war must be waged by moral means, not intentionally killing civilians, not executing prisoners.
There is simply no way at all that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine is a just cause, a last resort or being waged by proportionate or moral means. Therefore, every Christian, including Russian Christians, are obliged to oppose it, or at the very least not to participate in it.
But the tragedy of the Ukraine war engages Christian belief at a more personal, existential level. Every Ukrainian, deciding whether to fight or flee, to stay or go, how to help their family, how to help others, what the war means for their whole life project, for their very human existence, will confront their own mortality, their own human quest for meaning.
Every human being faces, ultimately, the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, hell.
Easter provides hope because it shows us that death does not have the final victory. But this works for a person, helps them, only if they understand something of the whole supernatural quality of human life. Modern Christians make a tremendous mistake in underplaying the essential supernatural claims of Jesus and the Christian tradition.
It is understandable that modern Christians in sceptical Western societies – phobic about the transcendent, scared of death and trained to mock belief at every turn – tend to emphasise Christianity’s good works, its hospitals, schools and shelters for the homeless. You might not like Mother Teresa’s theology, but how many homeless, diseased people did you personally try to help on the streets of Kolkata?
But, in truth, Christianity stripped of its supernatural claims is not just an attractive ethical system or a picturesque and benign myth. It is literally nothing at all.
Without its supernatural claims it is at best delusional, and really a system of lies. Nothing of lasting good can come from a system of lies. As St Paul says in Ephesians: “If Christ is not risen, our preaching is useless, your faith is useless … we are of all people the most to be pitied.”
There is a nice debate among Christians as to whether Western societies such as ours have become so post-Christian that they are in a sense pre-Christian, so removed from their Christian roots that they are wholly innocent of any knowledge of what Christianity is all about.
Easter is a good time therefore to remind ourselves just how absolutely weird and radical Christianity is, how unlike any prevailing social orthodoxy or ethos, how radically challenging it is to the zeitgeist, even though the good things in Western society, such as universal human rights and equality of the sexes, to name just two, derive directly from Christianity. It’s unclear, at best, that these good things can be sustained in the absence of transcendent belief, at least among a sizeable portion of the society.
But the good things in Christianity in any event are entirely dependent on the supernatural claims it makes, and these should never be watered down or put to one side by Christianity’s friends.
The entire sequence from the death of Jesus on Good Friday to his resurrection on Easter Sunday is not only unique in history, it is unique in its conception in the entire experience of human sensibility. It teaches, among other things, that resurrection is part of death. But even that is not its most radical claim. The most radical and distinctive claim of Christianity is not after all the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday but the death of Jesus on Good Friday.
Many religious traditions involve the interaction of God with humanity. Many polytheistic traditions even involve the idea of one of the gods walking the earth, sometimes disguised as a human being, and dealing with people. Sometimes the gods fall out. Sometimes they go to war. But true polytheism is, I think, much rarer than is generally claimed. For many seemingly polytheistic traditions have the idea that behind the lesser gods there is a Great Spirit, the author of all things.
The similarity of other religious traditions to elements of the Christian tradition does not suggest that all religions are just man-made artefacts and interchangeable. It suggests instead that profound religious hunger, and equally an instinctive religious knowledge, is part of the human condition, written in our spiritual DNA.
Any religious tradition that believes in any kind of God would hold that the gods can conquer death, or transcend death or not be subject to death.
But in all human sensibility, there is no equivalent, nothing even roughly similar, to the idea of Good Friday, that the eternal, all powerful, all knowing, everlasting God could become a human being, preach the truth, yet be mocked and vilified, be subject to all the limitations of the human condition, be defeated and humiliated, be tortured and killed, physically killed. Suffer, in other words, in earthly terms, comprehensive defeat. That God could die. That is Christianity’s most astonishing claim. That God in moments could need our compassion. It tells us a great deal about distinctive the character of God as understood in Christianity.
First, in Jesus, God didn’t just take on human form, like a disguise; he became a man, a human being, in an act of supreme solidarity with all human beings. Solidarity indeed with all human suffering, and with all the limitations and pains and frustrations of being a person.
In doing this, Jesus uniquely elevated the status of human nature. The ancient world’s first great pro-human rights statement came in the Book of Genesis, where it is declared that God created humanity in the image of God. This is not how humanity was seen before that. The experience of Jesus further elevates human nature. It declares that human nature is worthy of carrying the personality of God himself. This human nature is not to be trifled with, this human dignity demands respect.
The experience of Jesus also produces the most radical inversion of power in all history, then or now. Until Jesus came along, being weak, being defeated, being humble – these were not considered virtues. At best, you might temporarily endure defeat but hope for revenge. The idea of denying yourself power, making yourself weak to serve others, was revolutionary. It’s still revolutionary.
Jesus is absolutely clear about his divine status and supernatural claims. On the cross, enduring the most savage, extended, agonising death, he is concerned not only for the welfare of his mother and his disciple John, the only one of his male followers brave enough to stand with him at the foot of the cross.
He dies praying, in dialogue with God the father, and he exercises divine authority in offering heaven to the good thief: “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
After the resurrection, the early Christians were in no doubt about who Jesus was. Many endured violent death rather than deny that he had risen from the dead, or that he was the son of God.
In his letter to the Philippians, Paul offers his own answer to the central question of the New Testament: who is Jesus? Paul wrote: “His state was divine, yet he did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave, and become as men are; and being as all men are, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross. But God raised him high and gave him a name which is above all other names so that all beings in the heavens, on earth and in the underworld should bend the knee at the name of Jesus and that every tongue should acclaim Jesus Christ as Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
At the start of his breathtaking gospel, John, referring to Jesus as “the Word”, writes: “In the beginning was the Word: the word was with God and the Word was God.”
There is really no halfway house with Christianity. Either Jesus is God and we are immortal beings filled with eternal destiny, moral choice, divine status, irreducible human dignity and irreducible moral responsibility, and loved as though an only child by God, or it’s all lies and I’d rather be at the races. No halfway house works.
Several times in the gospels, Jesus talks of heaven. He doesn’t give us much detail but he certainly confirms its existence. He tells the good thief he will be in paradise that day, he talks several times of the eternal reward prepared by God the father, he explains that in heaven the saints, like the angels, don’t marry.
Yet heaven is a central part of Christianity. You can’t do away with it, and why would you want to? When they stop talking about the supernatural claims of Christianity, you wonder if Christians continue to believe in them.
One of the most enthralling contemplations of heaven is to be found in Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 Pulitzer prize-winning novel, Gilead. This is the best, most important Christian novel so far of the 21st century. Robinson is a liberal Calvinist and Gilead, a novel of sublime transcendence and hypnotic power, concerns the life of a Congregationalist minister, John Ames, aged 77 in 1956. He is likely to die soon of heart disease and writes an account of himself for his seven-year-old son.
Being an actually believing Christian, Ames is much exercised by what heaven will be like and the relationship between life in heaven and life on earth, especially life with his wife and son. He knows heaven will not be a disappointment. But how will he meet the people he loves? The idea of everyone meeting as a vigorous young adult appeals to him. But then he’d love once more to have his son as a toddler to jump into his arms. And what will be the relationship in heaven with this life, with all its beauty?
He reflects: “I can’t believe that, when we’ve all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that means the whole world to us … I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.”
In other words, in heaven we won’t lose the connection with our life on earth.
One of the great Christian philosophers of the 20th century, Jacques Maritain, a key figure in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as long ago as 1963 lamented the lack of dialogue about and with heaven among Christians.
He wrote: “It seems to me that an extreme negligence prevails among Christians concerning the Church of Heaven …” He went on to describe a bit of what we might know of heaven: “Just as the Word incarnate had on earth a life divine and human at one and the same time, so also the blessed in Heaven have entered into the divine life through the vision, but they also lead there, outside of the vision although penetrated by its radiance, a glorious and transfigured human life.”
We might all have our visions of heaven, and these might be domestic and quotidian: the family nearby, the Bulldogs winning the grand final in golden point time, chicken curry for dinner. For it is not to trivialise the terrible and the evil, to counterpose the domestic and the good against it.
Christianity is a power for good, because it is true. If it’s not true, it’s not a power for anything. But happily it is true. Ukrainians singing Easter hymns in the shadow of war might know this better than we do.
Greg Sheridan’s latest book, Christians: The Urgent Case for Jesus in Our World, is published by Allen & Unwin.
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