It is hard to please everyone all the time.When it comes to martyrdom, I think OMTO'D has the lines just right here:
...a Christian witness to God's peace must always be acted out agianst the horizon of suffering and martyrdom. Suffering and martyrdom mark the point at which the possibilities of true judgment run out within the conditions of the word. They are necessary components of Christian practical reason, because they demonstrate the vulnerability of the praxis of judgment, and so protect it from serious misunderstanding. Judgment is an undertaking always under threat within the terms of this world, always liable to be overwhelmed by violence. It cannot possibly issue a licence to avoid defeat by all possibe means...Yet the horzon on which we are called to suffer and to die rather than wrong our neighbour is not reached before we actually reach it. The possibilities of active witness to God's peace are not exhausted until we have exhausted them, which we will not have done if have not explored them. In this context...the dutuies which confront us do not BEGIN with martyrdom; they END with it, when we have gone as far as we are permitted to go, done as much as we are permitted to do. Martyrdom is not, in fact, a strategy for DOING anything, but a testimony to God's faithfulness when there is nothing left to do. p. 9-10
I love that: martyrdom is no strategy. How could it be?
5 comments:
Hmm, I agree(d) with O'Donovan at this point (in the context of an essay involving, though not centred around, pacifism vs. just war), in that too often on both sides martyrdom is taken as some kind of beginning point for pacifism. pacifism cannot use martyrdom as a strategy, it lies beyond all action.
however, just as confusing the final point of martyrdom with a beginning point of action, too often I find just-war theorists treating just-war as a theoretical 'action of last resort', but their imaginative response to reality has been so foreshortened that in both theory and practice, last-resort has been exchanged for 'first-at-hand'.
but I digress...
Seumas
Is that a picture of your kids watching you kill a cute little squirrel? No wonder your daughter looks so distressed.
Is that Sasha on the left? I feel old.
A bit OT, but I found this letter interesting.
js
Post a Comment