Colin Chapman on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Cambridge Papers are published once a quarter and address a wide range of topics, offering ‘Christian reflection on contemporary issues’.

The latest paper is available online here (from where a pdf can be downloaded here):

Colin Chapman, ‘The Israel-Hamas War and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’, Cambridge Papers 33, 2 (July 2024).

Here is the summary:

‘Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s response have pushed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the top of the international agenda and created an existential crisis for Israel. This paper attempts to explain the background to these events by surveying the history of Israel’s dealings with Gaza since 1948. After asking whether there should be a distinctively Christian approach to the conflict, it explores the possibilities for a just and peaceful resolution of the conflict.’

Knowing and Doing (Spring 2019)

The Spring 2019 edition of Knowing & Doing – ‘A Teaching Quarterly for Discipleship of Heart and Mind’ – from the C.S. Lewis Institute is now available online (from here), and contains the following articles:

Joel Woodruff

President’s Letter: It’s About Transformation in Community, not Information in Isolation

Joel Woodruff challenges us to resist the tide of individualism and seek spiritual growth in community. Rather than pursuing “information in isolation,” the C.S. Lewis Institute President urges us to learn from and challenge others as we grow in Christ.

Thomas A. Tarrants, III

Persecution and Suffering for Jesus Christ

Looking at the process of discipleship from the opposite side of most discussions, Tom Tarrants raises the important, albeit disturbing, topic of persecution for the sake of the gospel. Jesus warned many times that his disciples would face specific trials that come from following him. This article helps us prepare for those inevitable trials.

Tom Schwanda

Biblical Foundations for Growing in Intimacy with God

Tom Schwanda steps back from practical considerations about discipleship and begins to explore the Biblical foundations for spiritual growth. This is the first of a three part series that reflects deeply on why we need intimacy with Christ, how scripture sets the platform for it, and then offers suggestions for pursuing that noble goal.

Bill Kynes

How to Read the Bible, Part 1: Introduction and Overview to the Bible

The role of the Bible in spiritual life is often assumed but not as often pursued the way it should be. Bill Kynes begins a four part series that considers how to read, study, and meditate on the Bible. He begins with a reminder that the Bible’s overall storyline must be the context in which we examine any specific passage.

Bryan Hollon

Catechesis and Christian Discipleship

Bryan Hollon points us to a topic that rarely is addressed in contemporary discussions of spiritual growth – the role of catechesis in spiritual formation. Many people don’t even know what that word means. Hollon defines, describes, and encourages systemic training in doctrine and theological reflection.

Joseph Loconte

War, Friendship, and Imagination: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918

Joe Loconte reveals to us some of the ways C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien found faith in some of the most unlikely settings – the battlefields of World War I. While many people lost faith in God because of the carnage they experienced during those dark days, Lewis and Tolkien were transformed for eternal beauty. And their friendship after those days encourages all of us in profound ways.

Aaron Welty

Modern Mythology Matters

Just as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien looked to mythology and story as ways to experience the storyline of the gospel, Aaron Welty shines a similar light on comic book heroes and the appeal they draw through today’s blockbuster movies. If Lewis could create Narnia and Tolkien could tell of Middle Earth, perhaps Superman and Marvel movies could point people to a better “savior.”

William Cowper (1731-1800)

Love Constraining to Obedience

C.S. Lewis loved poetry and wished he could be remembered most for his poems. They grab us in different ways than stories or prose. In each issue we feature a poem. William Cowper’s offering tilts our hearts toward obedience and joy.

Dwight L. Moody

Sermon – The Christian’s Warfare

The great evangelist and preacher Dwight L. Moody didn’t shy away from weighty topics. This sermon on spiritual warfare is a welcome reminder of the nature of our experience in a fallen world.

A Problem Like Syria

I wrote this week’s Connecting with Culture, a weekly email service from the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. As it happens, it’s a lightly-edited rerun of a piece I wrote in August 2013, when Parliament was recalled to vote on whether or not to intervene in Syria in an armed response, resulting in what was widely seen at the time as a humiliating defeat for David Cameron.

Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43) should be enough to persuade us of the deeply ambiguous nature of existence in the time before the final harvest. There is ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and both grow together until the end. Until then, we take seriously the inevitable messiness of life and the requirement for caution in some moral judgments. Unambiguous clarity is not always possible.

The alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime on its civilians has reignited debates on the principle of armed intervention. This week has seen threat and counter-threat, risking the escalation of conflict. Promises of action from Trump, May, and Macron have been countered with promises of reprisals from Putin, with Syrian civilians caught in the middle. While non-intervention is seen by some as appropriately cautious, others see it as an abdication of moral responsibility. There are MPs on both sides, campaigners on both sides, Syrians on both sides. And Christians – including Syrian Christians – are on both sides too.

For all of us, a bigger picture may provide some perspective. The Old Testament prophets make it clear that God holds nations to account. A nation or a people cannot conduct itself as though it were an ultimate end in itself. It must understand its own life in the context of a larger dynamic of which it is a part – and which will answer ultimately to God. There isn’t a direct match between ancient nations addressed by the prophets and their modern counterparts, but there is an uncanny resemblance in the reasons for which they are indicted – pride, greed, violence, injustice – and no one nation has a monopoly on those.

Indeed, the line between good and evil, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (who had good reason to yearn for regime change) reminded us, runs through our own hearts.

Prophetic sayings against the nations weren’t designed to deal with nitty-gritty decision-making in international politics. But they brought hope to the people of God – of his unrivaled supremacy in the world, and of his plan to bless all nations even while holding them to account.

Ambiguity about the best way forward needn’t lead to inaction or despair. Even when we can’t see it now, Christians of all people have reasons for hope and confidence. And to pray and work purposefully for things that make for peace now.

Mission Catalyst

I don’t think I’ve posted on this before, though I’ve intended to do so...

Mission Catalyst has just arrived through the post. Published by BMS World Mission and available free of charge, it’s an excellent publication which normally contains short articles around a particular theme.

The first issue of 2016 is devoted to War, carrying (among other features) an interview with Chaplain General David Coulter, an article by Michael Jerryson on ‘Does Religion Legitimate War?’, an article by Susan Niditch on ‘War in the Old Testament’, and an article by Steve Hucklesby on ‘Humanitarian Intervention: Justified War?’

Further information, including an online subscription form for hard copies, and access to electronic versions of past issues is available here.

Centre for Public Christianity (April 2015)

Among other items, the Centre for Public Christianity has posted an audio file bringing together interviews with Bible scholars, theologians, and philosophers (including Iain Provan, William Cavanaugh, and Miroslav Volf) on religion and violence – in the Bible, in Christian history, and on the contention that religion causes violence.

Ethics in Brief Volume 20, No. 2 (2014)

An issue from Volume 20 of Ethics in Brief, published by The Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, is now available online:

Philip Powell

Nigel Biggar, In Defence of War – A Review Essay

Nigel Biggar’s book In Defence of War is the most substantial, forceful and provocative Christian defence of the idea of a just war to have appeared in many years. This article presents a summary of key arguments of the book (Part I) and briefly offers three critical observations on these arguments evoke (Part II).

‘Peace, Peace’, Where There is No Peace?

[I contributed today’s ‘Connecting with Culture’, a weekly email service provided by London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.]

A generation of people know where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I missed that by (ahem) a few years, but I belong to those who will forever remember where they were when they heard the news of the hijacked planes being flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., eight years ago today.

How do you remember it?

Maybe your recollections will be coloured by the convictions earlier this week of Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Assad Ali Sarwar, and Tanvir Hussain, who were found guilty of a plot to use liquid bombs to blow up transatlantic airliners.

Maybe you’re still wondering about the whys and wherefores of the recent release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.

In all this, Christians are not immune from questions about balancing justice with compassion, or from the shock and sense of outrage that comes with attacks on a nation’s territorial integrity, or from the feelings of fear that might arise as a result.

As always, though, our engagement with these issues is rooted in a life of discipleship nurtured by relationship with Christ and reflection on Scripture. Our faith is defined by gospel interests before it is defined by geopolitical interests.

What we know of God assures us that nothing falls outside his providential rule. What we know of sin reminds us that ‘wars and rumours of wars’ will be a mark of the present age, one of the many consequences of our rebellion against God and our alienation from each other, and that we are on shaky ground when we divide the world into ‘evil’ people and ‘good’ people without recognising that the axis of evil runs through each of our hearts. What we know of redemption tells us that far from abandoning the world, God has loved it so much and given his Son for it.

Christians of all people, then, are ideally placed to understand the reality and seriousness of evil, telling the story of the God who will one day still the forces of chaos and make all things new. The gospel of God – as revealed in Scripture and testified to by the Church – shapes our engagement and gives the resources to respond, offering peace and hope to a confused and hurting world.

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For further reflection on this topic, see Nick Solly Megoran, The War on Terror: How Should Christians Respond? (Nottingham: IVP, 2007). Check out the publisher’s page here and the author’s homepage here.