Seeing God in a warzone.
Seeing God in a warzone.
Phil Klay on the God who shows up in conflict and carnage.
To give credit where credit is due, I was turned on to this piece by my friend Todd Brewer who included a snippet of it in Mockbird’s regular roundup of links and stories from around the web last weekend. Regardless, New York Times Magazine writer David Marchese recently sat down with veteran United States Marine Corps officer and award-winning writer Phil Klay to discuss among other things the current fracas between Israel and Palestine, and Ukraine and Russia. Klay offers an affecting perspective on war, not only due to his time spent on the front lines in Iraq but also because of his conviction that God himself can be found even in war zones. Even though that might sound like a strange admission, for Klay there is no option other than believing in a God who is not only not absent but is actively present amid the conflict and carnage of war. Here’s how Klay puts it in response to Marchese’s query:
How do you not see God in a war zone? The God I believe in was tortured and died in agony on the cross. God is there when I see another human being and see something of infinite worth and value. God is there in this infinite horror and majesty of the world. The idea to me that all of this beauty and all of this horror is nothing but mere matter seems ridiculous, and I can’t disentangle my sense of horror from my sense of the beauty and value of what is being destroyed in war. I spoke with a veteran who talked about how when he came back from Afghanistan, he said: “I stopped believing in God because it made it easier. It meant that there were questions I didn’t have to ask.” I feel that very acutely. You have God’s answer to Job, which is the majesty of the world — a world which is complex and beautiful and blood-soaked and infinitely generative. I feel the power of that vision. I’m also deeply convicted by the sense that there’s a God whose ultimate experience was to suffer and die, and yet that’s not the totality of the story: That is a central image in the idea of forgiveness and unearned redemption. It is deeply, deeply important to me. I don’t know what other option there is.
The “infinite horror” of our present moment surely feels beyond us. By every conceivable measure and perceptible outlet, our world is fracturing. The geopolitical fissures that encroach upon our living rooms have a way of making everything feel unsettled. All of that, however, has nothing on the blood-soaked dread of combat, in which every passing second is fraught with pressurized moral and existential angst. But as Klay notes, it is in the face of the tortured and agonized Son of God that we are given the ultimate expression of who God himself is. This response is teeming with the profundity of Martin Luther’s theology of the cross. And, if you’ll permit me, I come to the same conclusion in my book, Finding God in the Darkness:
Much to the world’s surprise, God in Christ undoes sin and death by taking on every last bit of it as his own. As he himself becomes sin on behalf of every sinner (2 Cor. 5:21), he likewise shoulders that which sin yields — namely, betrayal, agony, and brokenness. He unravels the enigma of suffering and sorrow by willingly succumbing to the acme of suffering and sorrow itself, that is, death. By dying, he acts as heaven’s sponge, soaking up all our liquid grief and frustration as his body throbs with every last prick of the world’s pain. This he does not only so that he can “sympathize with our weaknesses” (Heb. 4:14–16), but so that he might subsume them in the depths of his passion. It is in this way, then, that suffering offers us the most apparent manifestation of the God who suffers with us and for us.
Grace and peace to you.