The Stillness between the shells

World War 1 was widely thought in the participating countries to be a ‘Holy War’, a spiritual conflict of light against darkness. That’s the view put by American history professor Philip Jenkins in his new book The Great and Holy War.

We tend to think of the UK in 1914 being much like the UK we know – a largely secular state. But in fact a century ago Christian belief was much more widespread than it is today. Church and state were linked in England, as in Russia and Germany, while the Ottoman Empire was Islamic.

And while some Christian voices - notably the Pope’s – raised calls for peace, there was much inflammatory rhetoric on all sides. London Bishop Arthur Winnington-Ingram believed it was the church’s duty to ‘mobilise the nation for a holy war,’ and the army’s duty ‘to kill Germans…to save the world.’

The German nation on the other hand saw themselves as God’s chosen people, and the conflict as ‘a war for God against Antichrist.’ An American Episcopalian rector claimed ‘It is God’s war we are fighting.’

It’s one thing to reluctantly believe (as did Archbishop of Canterbury Randall Davidson) that the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary was a sad necessity in the face of these countries’ aggression. It’s quite another to claim that a war is a holy crusade undertaken in God’s name.

Philip Jenkins claims the evidence suggests that this view was widely held, in the trenches as well as in public life. It’s a view which inevitably leads you to demonise the enemy, regarding them as sub-Christian. The Kaiser, Jenkins tells us, believes that the UK was ‘more or less in league with the devil’, while a former US President commented that ‘Germany has mistaken the devil for God.’

One tragedy of the Great War was the fact that Christian fought Christian in the name of Christ. Anglican William Temple said Christ’s body was ‘bleeding as it once bled on Calvary, but this time the wounds are dealt by his friends.’

It’s very relevant to reflect on this warlike rhetoric – so similar to that used today by radical Islam – at a time of war and rumours of wars.

I think Jenkins’ book alerts us to our prone-ness as individuals and churches to enlist God’s name in support of our own agendas, convincing ourselves that we are acting on divine authority, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. The incessant violence of the Great War and of the rash to 21st century conflicts makes us wonder if there is indeed some great, organising anti-God influence deluding us, pulling us away from the light.

We long to see fulfilled God’s agenda for a new society but sometimes try to make it happen by force and human stratagem. The German academic who said ‘The German state and its army is the earthly means used be God to bring about the kingdom of God in earth’ seems to have been speaking for many.  Knowing the history, we now see this as madness, yet at the time, in Germany, it was so believable.

Which alerts us as individuals and a society to the fact some of the things we believe with confidence today may in a century’s time be regarded as delusional.

There was a sense in that autumn of 1914 that the Apocalypse had come, that after the war to end war a new, purified, world would spring from the seed of human suffering.

But over the following years, millions were killed, millions more wounded in mind and body, millions were bereaved, there was famine and massacre, and a devastating flu epidemic. The world was broken. Jenkins calls it ‘the Great Disappointment’. God had not acted as many expected God would act, and the German and Russians peoples came to embrace alternative kingdoms offered by Fascism and Communism.

In times of perplexity and disappointment when we are torn between a pacifist instinct and a recognition that sometimes war is necessary in the name of justice, when the world is broken and God seems to have failed us, where do we find God?

God is with us where we are, in the heart of our pain, sometimes known only in our longing for God. Our hearts are secure in God’s spiritual kingdom. There are moments when in the stillness between the falling shells we glimpse what the world will look like when, in God’s time and God’s unexpected way the kingdom fully comes.

The poem Christ in Flanders imagines soldiers who thought little about God when in England saying in nightmare of the trenches ‘We have no doubt, we know that you are here’ while across no-man’s land a German counterpart wrote ‘In our distress we realise the nearness of God.’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 14th August 2014)