In this wide-ranging collection of essays Ronald E. Osborn explores the politically subversive and nonviolent anarchist dimensions of Christian discipleship in response to dilemmas of power, suffering, and war. Essays engage texts and thinkers from Homer's Iliad, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament to portraits of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Noam Chomsky, and Elie Wiesel. This book also analyzes the Allied bombing of civilians in World War II, the peculiar contribution of the Seventh-day Adventist apocalyptic imagination to Christian social ethics, and the role of deceptive language in the Vietnam War. From these and other diverse angles, Osborn builds the case for a more prophetic witness in the face of the violence of the «principalities and powers» in the modern world. This book will serve as an indispensible primer in the political theology of the Adventist tradition, as well as a significant contribution to radical Christian thought in biblical, historical, and literary perspectives.
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Ronald E. Osborn. Anarchy and Apocalypse
Anarchy and Apocalypse
Preface
1 · War, Fate, Freedom, Remnant
2 · Bonhoeffer’s Pacifism
3 · The Christ of the Fifth Way
4 · “May Fire Come Out from the Bramble”
5 · Anarchy and Apocalypse
6 · The Death of a Peace Church
7 · William Lloyd Garrison and the Problem of Constitutional Evil
8 · Language in Defense of the Indefensible
9 · Obama’s Niebuhrian Moment
10 · Geometries of Force in Homer’s Iliad
11 · The Trial of God
Bibliography
Index of Names
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Essays on Faith, Violence, and Theodicy
Ronald E. Osborn
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All of the arguments dredged up from medieval scholastic theology to vindicate violence for “a just cause”—and particularly World War II—therefore miss the mark. The ethical principles set forth for defending stone castles, if ever valid, were rendered obsolete by the advent of modern war. As Thomas Merton wrote in his essay “Target Equals City”:
There is one winner, only one winner in war. The winner is war itself. Not truth, not justice, not liberty, not morality. These are the vanquished. War wins, reducing them to complete submission. He makes truth serve violence and falsehood. He causes justice to declare not what is just but what is expedient as well as cruel. He reduces the liberty of the victorious side to a servitude equal to that of the tyranny which they attacked, in defense of liberty. Though moralists may intend and endeavor to lay down rules for war, in the end war lays down rules for them . . . War has the power to transmute evil into good and good into evil. Do not fear that he will not exercise this power. Now more than ever he is omnipotent. He is the great force, the evil mystery, the demonic mover of our century, with his globe of sun-fire, and his pillars of cloud. Worship him.8
