The War We Must Win
Louis R. Tarsitano on Our Response to September 11
This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.
—Galatians 5:16–17
By any sane definition, since New York City and Washington, D.C., were attacked on September 11, our nation is at war. It is not a war that we have sought. It is not a war that we have begun. It is, however, a war that we must end, and we must end it in only one way. We must win it.
Those who have waged war against our country must be eliminated. Their safe havens and hiding places must be removed from this earth. Their allies must be compelled to give them up, or they must be required to share their fate. Nothing but victory will suffice, because nothing but victory can be a just or a moral purpose when the blood of so many of our fellow citizens, of our neighbors, has been shed in such a cruel and vicious way.
The Habitually Confused
While most of our nation, by the grace of God, has begun to draw together as a nation to seek an honorable justice for the dead, the voices of the congenitally or habitually confused have also been heard. “Peace at any price” some of them demand, although God Almighty warned in the days of Jeremiah that only a false prophet cries “peace” when there is no peace (Jer. 6:14).
Others insist that this slaughter of the innocents is a “crime,” but not an act of war, to be handled by some imaginary court of law. One might just as well imagine some bailiff delivering subpoenas to the Japanese high command after Pearl Harbor, or a writ of habeas corpus to Adolf Hitler, demanding the release of the Jews from Dachau and Auschwitz.
Worst of all, a small group of especially careless Christians has reverted to a form of ancient heresy called Gnosticism—a counterfeit sort of “spiritual knowledge” that at the least imposes a false separation between ordinary human life and a spiritual life in God, and at the worst hands the physical world over to the devil, to do with as he pleases, because only “spiritual” things truly matter. Such people have complained that the demand for earthly justice is “unholy,” and nothing more than bloody-minded human revenge, but their opinions are a gross perversion of the Christian faith revealed in the Scriptures.
Of course the American people are angry. What decent person would not be angry in such circumstances? But the mere fact of anger does not automatically make that anger a sin. As St. Paul wrote, “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath: Neither give place to the devil” (Ephesians 4:26–27).
There is a righteous anger, as well as a sinful anger. A righteous man does not go to his bed full of bitter hatred and a servant to the devil. Rather, he kneels down, confesses his sins, and asks God both to do true justice and to show him his own vocation in that justice, before he climbs into his bed and closes his eyes, confident both in God’s mercy and in his irresistible righteousness.
Dealing with anger in this way, precisely by seeking God’s justice and our proper part in it, is just one example of St. Paul’s general teaching about the Christian life: “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.”
Louis R. Tarsitano (d. 2005), a former associate editor of Touchstone, was a priest of the Anglican Church in America and rector of St. Andrew?s Church in Savannah, Georgia. He also was the co-author, with Peter Toon, of Neither Archaic Nor Obsolete: The Language of Common Prayer & Public Worship (Brynmill Press, Ltd., 2003).
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