You have written well in support of violence to resist oppression. You would like Christians to join with the violence in order to overthrow the corrupt. Morality you say is not what’s practical, it is what is right. On that point I would point out that for me, morality is what people actually do rather than an a priori code of conduct, unless it is true divine command.
Original sin is the human condition. There will never be a perfect and just government on Earth until the second coming of Christ. Christian conduct and ethics are for Christians. If everyone acted with true Christian ethics worldly governance would be better. Christ led by example; followers are to conduct themselves as best as they can in his way.
Human conflicts and human nature supply wrong answers and paradigms to solve political problems quite often. One who has witnessed the bungling of the post Cold War peace by the west leading to the Ukraine conflict and the million casualties roughly, or the first Syrian Civil War during the Obama era causing hundred of thousands of casualties and numerous other events of equally avoidable stature should realize that there is no point for Christians to chase after military powers or engage in civil wars as if they would bring about a just society of permanent duration.
Christians are supposed to keep their focus on the eternal time paradigm with God instead of the temporal where as Shakespeare wrote “It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” God has a plan for ideal human conduct for the kingdom of God. Mankind has very different ends than being in accord with God. Worldly codes of conduct are different than eternal codes. It is like comparing apples and shoes.
Christians can simply lead by example. They need to be the good news of Jesus Christ to those lost to wickedness, violence, corruption, exploitation, greed, envy and usual Machiavellian means of human conduct. That probably can't be accomplished by leading the charge in kamikaze attacks on the enemy. As a jihadist.
I believe your historical analysis is simplistic. Hitler was put into power by the high command of the Wehrmacht. He was sent to take over leadership of the Socialist Democratic Workers party with his recognizable charisma. Hitler had the inside track and easily became the leader. He was supported by the S.A. that was largely comprised of former socialists. They used violence and took down opposition leadership. After the German civil war deposed the aristocrats they needed to find a new avenue back into power and that was through Adolph Hitler and the NAZI party. Mussolini’s philosophy of corporatism developed by the Nazis brought the rich aristocrats into a new relation with the state uniting corporate leadership under the Fuhrer. That was an irresistible force for the Nazis. Germans did not know before the fact what extremes the Nazis would enact. Maybe they seemed morally correct to many before the war. Even in the United States eugenics were popular with some doctors. A few Christians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer did resit Hitler at the cost of their life.
Stalin was a ruthless dictator using state means to repress the public. With such power organized resistance domestically was nearly futile. Revolt needed simply to evolve within leadership ranks of the communist party such that the system could itself defect to non-being. If you were to read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago volumes 1-3 and a dozen other books on Russian history (I did) you might have a better idea about the nature of the regime and it’s means of control.
Christians are not submitting to unjust systems; for that matter all worldly systems have an element of injustice in them I would think, they are submitting to God’s will for humanity. The worldly system is that of outsiders to the theonomy that do the crazy things they do making life hell for people that Christians are not going to be part of.
There would be limits for Christians immersed in a corrupt system. Not so many Christians have the courage of Peter or Paul to be faithful unto death. Some do, some don’t. What Christians couldn’t do would be to perpetrate unjust acts themselves at the order of the state I would think, yet those are hypotheticals.
Slavery hasn’t actually ended everywhere, yet in the 19th century when it was ending it was largely conferred from above upon the enslaved. Britain’s motivated by Magna Carta ended slavery in their possessions. In the United States the government ended slavery in passing in order to keep the nation undivided. Southern slave state wanted to be free to violate state’s rights and assert their right to go into other states to capture and return escaped slaves. The U.S. Government couldn’t tolerate that and the slave states rebelled against the government. One might seem an element of divine providence in the end of slavery in the U.S.A.
I think the South Africans could have kept apartheid going for quite some time if the institution hadn’t become obsolete. The west no longer supported that policy. Without sanctions and disapprobation of the west it might have continued although it might have perished from internal rot. Negotiations to end apartheid started in May 19900. That was a hopeful time when the Soviet Union was crumbling. Russians had withdrawn a quarter million soldiers from East Germany in December 1989. One might see a divine hand in the events. Ronald Reagan was a man of faith.
-another reply
This is rather tedious yet I will need to itemize your points and reply. I have other things to do with my time.
1) I deny that my points are full of logical fallacies.
2) If you were advocating non-violent resistance to slavery and political oppression by Hitler and Stalin, that wasn’t the language you used. In democracy at least Christians are free to resist corruption through lawful means. I am glad that you do not advocate violence- it seemed that way.
3) I will quote the third point you made; “You also assert that morality is what people “actually do” unless it’s “true divine command,” but that’s an unproven premise. Your argument assumes divine command exists and that it’s the ultimate authority without providing any evidence for this claim.”
My viewpoint on morality is a philosophical one. Since there are so many varieties of moral packages in existence it is what the most realistic observation is so far as my opinion goes
Christian ethics are meaningful because of divine instruction. Christians believe that. The belief is not reliant on agnostic or atheist confirmation about being sourced from God.
4) It is not a false dichotomy to assert that divine commands are not secular. Christians can follow divine commands while the lost are free to follow secular moral systems that are incomplete and disregard divine commands. As I said there are a variety of moral systems and structures in existence. Many of those are incomplete and illogical.
5) Saying that there won’t be a perfect government until the second coming is not futility. I have worked to improve secular government for perhaps 40 years and that was futility. Humans repeat te same errors and inherit ignorance from generation to generations. “We learn from history that we do not learn from history”.
6) You wrote; “Hitler didn’t rise to power solely through the Wehrmacht or aristocrats; his rise was enabled by economic despair, anti-Semitism, and widespread support for his ideology, which he openly laid out in Mein Kampf.”
Hitler was ordered by the high command to infiltrate leadership of the German National Socialiist Workers Party. Obviously the economy and political structure was unstable and royalty had been overthrown. Hitler’s rise was engineered and then followed the build up phenomena such as being imprisoned for the Munich puscht where Rudolph Hess wrote Mein Kampf as Hitler dictated. AI;”he Sturmabteilung (SA), also known as the "brownshirts", supported Adolf Hitler in the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, also known as the Munich Putsch”. Hitler’s movement had power behind it from the start.
The SS and Gestapo also supported Hitler when he purged the leadership of the very dangerous S.A. in 1934 killing about 150 members include Ernst Roem.
7) You wrote “Similarly, while Stalin was a ruthless dictator his regime relied not just on top-down repression but on complicity from countless collaborators.”
Stalin was a ruthless dictator who continuously consolidated power in the communist party that was itself a minority movement. Just the dekulakization program to eliminate working class property killed 400,000. Twenty million people were liquidated by Stalin’s communist subordinates. Maybe you aren’t aware of what secret police forces did in the Soviet Union, or Iraq, Syria and Iran. The K.G.B. leader Beria had a room in a basement where he would take people to shoot them in the head himself. The Soviet experiement was a radical, aggressive program to weed out ‘anti-soviet activity’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin
8) To portray Hitler or Stalin as religious leaders is laughable.
9) You wrote “Your take on apartheid and slavery is downright dismissive. Saying apartheid could have lasted longer if it hadn’t become “obsolete” trivializes the suffering of millions who endured institutionalized racism. It wasn’t “obsolete”—it was unsustainable because of internal resistance and external pressure.”
Internal and external pressure to change is why apartheid was obsolete. I don’t have time or inclination to write a book on that topic. The slave revolt of Haiti was one of the few that was successful. The mistake they made was in inviting the former slavers to return to Haiti to make the plantations work and create jobs. Many of the former slavers did return to be executed. That created part of the problem for Haiti that lasted to the present.
10) You wrote “ By crediting divine intervention, you conveniently absolve human systems of their responsibility for perpetuating these atrocities.’
That isn’t even nominally logical. Compare “by crediting the F.B.I. for stopping drug trafficking, you conveniently absolve drug traffickers for perpetuating drug trafficking."
11) Christians don’t need to “claim the high moral ground”. You misunderstand Christian ethics and assume they are in competition with secular moral systems. Christians may act to put positive spin on political phenomenalities when it might do some good. Others might not want Christians to do that even in democracy perhaps.
