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It is incredible how this little phrase, “peace on earth” is so divergently interpreted. Take just one example. At twilight, as 100,000 spectators looked on, 110,000 Nazi soldiers bearing 30,000 banners and standards marched onto the field. Then the Führer entered through a spotlighted gate. Instantly a line of 150 powerful, anti-aircraft searchlights, 40 feet apart, cast their beams 25,000 feet straight up into the night air. The effect was stunning. The British ambassador called it “solemn and beautiful . . . like being inside a cathedral of ice.”1 “Church” was now in session.

When Hitler took charge in Germany in 1933, he declared himself a prophet whose words equaled those of Jesus and Paul, and he called his rule a time of “peace.” With this new religion came “worship services,” most notably in the form of annual huge rallies at Nuremberg, running through 1938. Hitler “preached” electrifying messages to the gatherings. Having seen Leni Riefenstahl’s classic film of the 1934 rally, Triumph of the Will, rock star David Bowie marveled, “How he worked his audience! . . . The world will never see anything like that again.”2

William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, observed that one meeting at Nuremberg “had something of the mysticism and religious fervor of an Easter or Christmas Mass in a great Gothic cathedral.”3 It seems that men must worship something, and demagogues will answer this need with dreadful counterfeits when the Church falters.

Thankfully, some in the German Church kept their theological compasses pointed upward. For example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer lamented the failure of the Church to publicly refute the sins of the state. Hitler’s ideas were first supported by only a few extremists, but they soon rose to national prominence. The Church’s silence allowed Hitler’s influence to spread throughout Germany with little or no struggle. In his Christmas letter of 1942, Bonhoeffer wrote of the Church’s weakness:

“We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds: we have been drenched by many storms; we have learned the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use?4″

This Christmas, Bonhoeffer’s question is for us to consider: are we of any use? When we see war in the Middle East, genocide in Darfur, and terrorism’s pervasive threat, do we find ourselves resembling the mainstream German Church of his day, relying on human inventiveness to supply the solution, or do we follow the One who, as Paul put it, “is Himself our peace” (Eph 2:14)? Jesus, the true world Ruler, whom angels exalt in unapproachable light, is our only enduring hope. As Jesus died, rose, and inaugurated his messianic reign, peace extends to every corner of the earth. In Him, our hearts not only course with impulses of divine rest, but also serve as the privileged channels through which it forcefully engages the world. The hymn writer said it well:

For lo, the days are hastening on, by prophets seen of old,
When, with the ever circling years, shall come the time foretold,
When peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling,
and all the world give back the song which now the angels sing.

Merry Christmas, and God’s peace to you!

Footnotes :

1 Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (New York: The Overlook Press, 2003), 66.
2 Ibid., 56.
3 Ibid., 60
4.Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, “After Ten Years,” in Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1971), 16-17.

When, in 1989, Paul Seabury and Angelo Codevilla were, respectively, a University of California, Berkeley, political science professor and a senior research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, they authored War: Ends and Means. Prior to their collaboration, Seabury and Codevilla had both served President Reagan, the former as a member of his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the latter on transition teams for the president-elect within the State Department and C.I.A.

Their book argued for the rationality of war in many instances and for the indispensable prudence of a strong defense. Harvard’s Samuel Huntington called it “an elegant and learned essay,” and Yale’s Eugene Rostow called it “a calm, literate, and incisive rumination.” These descriptions would strike some as odd since the book claims that peace has been more deadly than war. But as the examples below show, ignoring and indulging tyrants is more lethal than fighting them.

“War is hell. Nobody doubts that. War means death, destruction of families, cold, hunger, and the subjection to harsh authority. So why is so much of mankind at war? One answer is that peace is no picnic. The very evils we associate with war have fallen upon mankind more fully in times and places well removed from battlefields and in conditions conventionally called peace. Especially in this century, the victims of peace outnumber the victims of war.

Perhaps 35 million people, of whom 25 million were civilians, have died as a direct consequence of military operations since 1900. These people have been killed by armies, navies, and air forces using the latest equipment and techniques. The soldiers who died this way suffered before their demise as well as during their final minutes. Nonetheless, they not only had a fighting chance, but their governments were also making at least some efforts to keep them comfortable. Even civilian victims were afforded some measure of protection.

During the same period, however, at least 100 million human beings have been killed by police forces or their equivalent, almost never using heavy weapons but relying on hunger, exposure, barbed wire, and forced labor to kill the bulk, executing the rest by shooting them with small arms, by rolling over them with trucks (a favorite technique in China around 1950), by gassing them, or, as in the Cambodian holocaust of 1975-79, by smashing their skulls with wooden clubs. These 100 million usually suffered for months or years before the end and perhaps suffered most of all by their helplessness in the face of monstrous acts committed against them and their families. Those who killed these 100 million men, women, and children did not have to overcome resistance, much less armed resistance. Because the victims could not (while others would not) make war on their own behalf, the killers did their killing in peace. Regardless of whether the victims were Armenians, Jews, Tutsis, Ukrainians, Chinese, or Cambodians, the stories of these historic horrors of peace are very similar.”1

Footnotes :

1 Paul Seabury and Angelo Codevilla, War: Ends and Means (New York: Basic, 1989), 6-7.

On September 14, A.D. 258, Cyprian (c. 195 – 258), bishop of Carthage, was executed for refusing to perform pagan religious rites. The Roman proconsul, Galerius Maximus, had commanded him to worship Roman gods or die. The faithful bishop did not submit, nor did he plead for his life; he simply responded, “I will not.” He then gave Maximus the following instruction: “Do as you have been ordered . . . In so just a matter there is no need for deliberation.”1

Cyprian’s execution epitomized the troubled times in which he lived. He was born in an affluent family in Carthage, North Africa, and was converted in 246. Two years later he hesitatingly accepted the post of bishop at Carthage.2 During the earliest years of his ministry, he hid from persecution by the Roman Emperor Decius, who tried to stamp out Christianity. Decius required all citizens to officially certify their worship of Roman gods. After numerous church members capitulated to Decius’ demands, Cyprian found himself at the center of a debate: should these Christians who “lapsed” be allowed back into the communion of the Church? In general, Cyprian took the middle road; he allowed idolaters to be restored but only after they sincerely repented. This Solomonic solution bolstered his growing reputation.

Cyprian was also respected as a pastor, because he was both heavenly minded and of earthly good. His preaching exhorted people to look beyond “the storms of this distracting world and to find a firm anchorage in the harbour of salvation.”3 His humanitarian efforts, however, helped his city to see that their pastor lived in the real world. When a plague struck Carthage in 252, he mobilized his church to help the victims.

Such godliness offended the civil authorities. When Maximus told Cyprian he would die by the sword, the bishop’s response was joyous: “Thanks be to God!”4 Escorted behind the proconsul’s home, he removed his own cloak and even attempted to tie a handkerchief over his eyes. In his last moment, Cyprian asked one of his deacons to give the executioner twenty-five pieces of gold. Why this generous act? Cyprian believed his executioner was doing him a favor by hastening his voyage to heaven. When it became clear his life was over, he was happy to go onto glory.

Cyprian refused to be intimidated by the world. He clearly knew the words of Christ: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). I pray that by God’s grace we would exhibit the same courageous faith.

Footnotes :

1 “The Acts of St. Cyprian,” in The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, trans. Herbert Musurillo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 173, 175.
2 Elgin S. Moyer, Great Leaders of the Christian Church (Chicago: Moody Press, 1951), 93.
3 Cyprian, “The World and Its Vanities,” in Fathers of the Church: A Selection from the Writings of the Latin Fathers, trans. F.A. Wright (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1928), 109.
4 Cyprian, Acts,173.

The life of the prominent atheistical philosopher, A. J. (“Freddie”) Ayer (1910-1989) illustrates the power of education to shape the soul—for good or ill. When he was a young man his maternal grandfather gave him a copy of the Confessions. Unfortunately, it was not the famous spiritual autobiography of St. Augustine, but the enlightenment reflections of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau, rather than Augustine, would help mold the life of the infamous, atheist Oxford philosopher.

As Ayer himself testifies his early years were solitary.1 His parents, a lapsed Swiss Calvinist and a Jewish convert to nominal Christianity, understood little about religion and communicated even less to Freddie. Ayer was sent to boarding school at the age of seven. “It was the beginning,” writes one biographer, “of a very English, which is to say a very unhappy education.”2

In 1923, Ayer left the Ascham School in Eastbourne on a scholarship to Eton College. He was twelve years old. Ayer’s status as a king’s scholar placed him in the intellectual elite of a school that claimed to represent the social elite of England.3 Tragically, Ayer’s education seems to have progressed without a single Christian influence from either a teacher or a friend. Perhaps the most hopeful source of such instruction emerged as the most destructive. The headmaster of Eton, the Reverend Cyril Alington, also taught divinity to the students. His reaction to Ayer’s teenage posturing and iconoclasm was to assign as reading W. E. H. Lecky’s History of Morals—a skeptical rebuttal of Christianity. Lecky’s work had also profoundly influenced Bertrand Russell in his school days. In his autobiography Ayer simply notes that the book provided him with a “storehouse of ammunition” against Christianity.4 At the same time he was captivated by Bertrand Russell’s Sceptical Essays.

From Eton Ayer went up to Christ Church, Oxford, to read Greats (Classics). There he came under the influence of the atheist philosopher Gilbert Ryle—who was, perhaps, most famous for defending philosophical materialism and for his arguments against the human soul. With such a man as the “most important”5 influence on Ayer during his time at Oxford, it is no surprise that Ayer developed into a passionate and skilled advocate of secular humanism and atheistic philosophy which declared religion and ethics meaningless. His popular doctrine, “logical positivism,” counted as nonsense all things not immediately observable to the senses, including God. Through teaching, writing, and frequent media appearances, he helped to shape the culture of the United Kingdom.

The tragedy of Ayer’s life is that he was shaped by those who should have walked faithfully with Christ, but utterly failed in their calling. His father was from a Christian home and professed some vague beliefs, but as Ayer recalls, “[o]fficially my Father was a Calvinist . . . [but m]y parents never went to church, with or without me. . . .”6 Doubtless Ayer’s parents recognized his talents from his early years. Such a genius required compassionate discipline and a rigorous Christian education from his parents, which he missed in boarding school.

Both Ascham and Eton were schools founded on Christianity, yet all Freddie encountered was harsh overbearing discipline and the corroding effects of apostasy from the faith. At Christ Church he was educated by the grandson of the famous evangelical Bishop of Liverpool, J. C. Ryle. But Gilbert Ryle’s family had turned from the truth, and the Bishop’s grandson became one of the most vigorous critics of the Christian faith in his generation. Ayer’s talents were such that he could have turned the world upside down for Christ—instead his education prepared him to live a grossly immoral life and to undermine all that is pure and good.

Footnotes :

1 A. J. Ayer, Part of My Life (London: Collins, 1977), 21.
2 Ben Roger, A. J. Ayer (New York: Grove Press, 1999), 22.
3 Only 14 students per year become prestigious King’s Scholars, the same number as in the 15th century, when Henry VI founded the school. In those days, Eton had only 70 students, 14 for each of the five years in its course of study, and all were underwritten by the monarch.
4 Ayer, Ibid., 50, 53.
5 Ibid., 76.
6 Ayer, Ibid., 16.