Everything Must Change: part 5

Sorry for the delay in posting this; I've been caught up more with writing my lesson plans for next term and in some church stuff.
Part five
Here we begin to unpack more thoroughly some of the themes that were outlined earlier, starting with the 'divine peace insurgency'. The trouble is that religious narratives are being used in the contemporary world to justify violence against enemies. In fact, the Hebrew bible has quite a bit of nastiness in it involving religiously sanctioned violence and even the Jesus of the gospels seems to have a less fluffy side involving a glorious return to put all his enemies under his feet. So McLaren's task in chapter 19 is to highlight the way that the gospels' deeper subtext is actually subversive of the violence-justifying ideologies, including those that might look to the Hebrew bible to do so. In particular a helpful reflection on the encounter with the 'Canaanite' woman and the following feeding of the four thousand where the seven baskets full of crumbs can only plausibly correspond to the seven gentile nations that were supposed to be driven out of the promised land. Once again, it is an appeal to the culturally contextualised understanding of Jesus that shows the deeper and fuller meaning and offers little comfort for those who would justify sacred violence.

In the twentieth chapter we are taken through a sobering reminder of the economics of weapons and war and see how the USA has, in effect, become Empire. with an ultimately illusory pursuit of absolute security and in chapter twenty-one we're reminded how in the pursuit of that security, paradoxically , makes it more and more unachievable. It becomes difficult to understand why 'we' continue in the war business unless we factor in the economic angle based on economies of scale: it's cheaper to produce lots of weapons and sell the surplus. And then there is the mythic status of war which produces a whole lot of emotional highs to which we, as societies, become addicted. So, in the next chapter we are introduced to warriors anonymous which talks about replacing our craving for violence with the challenge to struggle for justice and the relief of want and aid in times of disaster.

During the course of this section, McLaren calls for a rapprochement between pacifists and just war defenders around exploring what would truly make for peace. I amen this call but wonder whether part of the problem is really that just war thinking has been so thoroughly co-opted that it cannot now be part of the solution. As McLaren points out in an earlier chapter, in the words of Einstein: no problem can be solved by the consciousness that created it.

Amazon.co.uk: Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope: Books: Brian D. McLaren