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What about Hitler?: Wrestling with Jesus's Call to Nonviolence in an Evil World (Christian Practice of Everyday Life, The)

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When one reads "What About Hitler?: Jesus's Call to Nonviolence in an Evil World" one is immediately struck by the amount of things going on at one time in this short book. The first thing that is important to note is the sheer honesty of this work. Not a conventional "academic" book, "What About Hitler" is revelatory in nature and takes the form of several "meditations" which usually contain a quotation of a Bible passage, Brimlow's prayer on that Bible verse and an anecdote from Brimlow's life (which are not usually flattering to him). All of this reveals Brimlow's inner struggle with the broader question posed by the book's title, "What About Hitler?"

The question posed by the title is meant to confront the Christian with the ultimate test of the call to nonviolence, namely, nonviolence in the face of ultimate evil - Hitler. On his way to answering to answering this question, Brimlow tackles the doctrine of "just war." In his analysis, Brimlow finds the criteria set forth to justify a "just war" to be too flaccid and easily malleable to justify even the most immoral "unjust" war. Brimlow also finds the theologicial justifications set forth by Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and other theologians as consequentialist which do nothing more than weigh the costs and benefits and advocate an "ends over means" mentality.

Brimlow also addresses Michael Walzer's contribution of the supreme emergency" as a refinement of the "just war" theory. According to Walzer, "supreme emergency" is defined by two criteria: "the imminence of the danger and the second with its nature." For a "supreme emergency" to arise, the danger of the threat must be imminent and the nature of the threat must be "immeasurably awful." If such a supreme emergency arises, moral and philosophical concerns are trumped and man must do whatever is necessary to confront this ultimate evil and the rights of neutrals, innocents and noncombatants can under the right circumstances be overridden. However, in overriding the rights of innocents in the supreme emergency, Walzer asserts, "when we override them we make no claim that they have been diminished, weakened or lost."

Brimlow finds incoherent Walzer's assertion that it can be both right and wrong to kill innocents in the case of a supreme emergency. Brimlow does not do much to rehabilitate Walzer's construction of a "supreme emergency" though one gets the impression by reading the text that Brimlow could easily do so. Indeed, one need only to analogize the "supreme emergency" as a wildfire in order to better understand Walzer's meaning. A wildfire begins in the forest consuming the trees. In order to save the rest of the forest (humanity, civilization, etc.), the firefighters (those responding to the "supreme emergency") create "firebreaks" which consist of chopping down trees to cut the fire off from the rest of the forest. By cutting down the trees (the innocents), the firefighters save the forest.

Brimlow chooses not to rehabilitate Walzer in the way I did above because doing so is inconsequential to his ultimate thesis which is, "we must live faithfully; we must be humble in our faith and truthful in what we say and do; we must repay evil with good; and we must be peacemakers. This may also mean as a result that the evildoers will kill us. Then, we shall also die" (151). Moreover, if a "supreme emergency" arises it is the result of our failure to heed the call to nonviolence; in short (and to modify a line from Billy Joel), we DID start the fire.

There is much that is troubling in this trying work not the least of which begins with the title. If, as the title suggests, we live in an evil world, one is confronted by the probability that evil will continue to triumph over good and one's efforts at living in a way that Brimlow is advocating will likely not have a positive outcome. Brimlow shows that our focus on outcomes is misplaced but in so doing also shows that the call to nonviolence is as much an article of faith as it is an intellectual belief.

Brimlow's work is searching and insightful and is relevant to the events of today. Though it seems like a bitter pill to swallow, there is also a glimmer of hope in what Brimlow has to say. Though I may not necessarily agree with everything that Brimlow writes in "What About Hitler", I hope I am the better for having read it.

Brimlow offers an honest, insightful and challenging look at Jesus' call to Christian pacifism. He begins each chapter with a prayerful reflection on a difficult passage of scripture, and then with a personal story that highlights a specific theme he then develops in the chapter. Brimlow writes with a transparency and honesty uncommon for many writers handling this topic.
I don't want to ruin too much of this book, but allow me to say that Brimlow tackles Just War theory before moving to terrorism and, of course, World War II and "the Hitler Question". Brimlow challenges our assumptions of what counts as successful and the ways in which we're called to holiness.
All in all, this is a fantastic book. I *highly* recommend it.

What Brimlow does well is demonstrate the raw honesty in the struggle to be a Christian pacifist. Reading the book left me asking, what is it that I want to believe? How do my own desires influence my position? Brimlow has the courage to say that a consistent pacifist will let the Hitlers win, and leave it to God.

We have an example of an activist Christian pacifism that worked during World War II: the village of Le Chambon, in Vichy France. (See Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed.) Yet, even it worked under the shelter of a war against Nazi Germany. Nonetheless, I don't want to deny the courage or power of a community that takes Jesus' words to turn the other cheek seriously.

The difficulty I have with Brimlow's book is that it doesn't really address the best argument for the "just war": love. I imagine a Rwandan Tutsi asking me, why did we not come and help? How can I respond with "turn the other cheek"? Does not our love for our neighbor demand that we do something about their peril? Though he only hints at it, Brimlow also undermines the use of a state's police powers to restrain evil. Yet, Paul seems to suggest that the state is ordained by God to do just that. If a non-Christian governor is allowed to restrain evil through his/her police powers, can a Christian do any less? Similarly, if a non-Christian is allowed to defend his/her people, should not a Christian do so as well? I feel as if I'm willing to be persuaded to Christian pacifism, but I still need to hear answers to these questions.

I also would quibble with Brimlow's characterization of Augustine, whose experience of evil (the fall of Rome, the seige of Hippo) was far from academic. His monumental City of God was not, in the end, a defense of a church-state alliance, but just the opposite: should the City of Man fall, the City of God continues...history is still in God's hands. That's actually very close to Brimlow's own conclusion.

I recommend this book to all those struggling with pacifism or just war theology in Christian context.

I was hoping for an easier read. But I must say that I got more than I expected. In other words, this book is a thorough philosophical discussion of the subject, leaving no stone unturned. I was hoping for something more concise, but how can I complain just because my expectations were unrealistic?

Brimlow is a professor of philosophy, and it sure shows. I mean that in a good way. At first I thought the book was overly academic. But then I realized that my problem was that I was trying to remember everything I read. There are just too many arguments to remember them all.

In other words, he deals with each argument one at a time, and he doesn't mince words. It would be impossible to condense this book without leaving huge gaps in the discussion of nonviolence. But the plus side is that because he is a philosophy professor, he anticipates every possible argument and counter argument and deals with all of them, very methodically.

For the general reader this book might be a little challenging. But please don't let that deter you. Just take your time and enjoy it. It's not that it is hard to read so much as that it covers a lot of territory very quickly. It's not too jargon heavy, it's just thorough and concise, and, for that reason, difficult to condense, perhaps, but not difficult to read.

THE STRENGTH OF THIS BOOK IS: That if you wanted to debate the philosophy of nonviolence with an atheist, a philosophy professor, a theologian, or a mystic, this is the only book you would have to read in advance, because it gives a point-by-point analysis of all related arguments.

An incredible book.

Brilliant book. The reasoning is tight and solid. The "meditation" chapters, while they seem to slow down the "action", are very germane and contain things I have never thought of about many difficult Scriptural passages. Not to mention intriguing ire toward even God occasionally, and much honest confessions of confusion on the part of the author. The chapters that directly reason on the topic of pacifism are great. Brimlow shows how just war theory is self-contradictory - a great but subtle argument, and then shows how Jesus' teachings are uncompromisingly pacifistic. His actions were too, as when he told Peter to put the sword away. No one could be more innocent than Christ, and if defending the most innocent person who ever lived is not allowed, how can it be allowed for others less innocent? Brimlow then argues that, while pacifism appears ineffective, that is the short term view. Look at Jesus' pacifistic yielding to death. Just after the crucifixion, his life appeared a total failure. Yet he has influenced western culture for 2000 years more than any other individual. Brimlow's final argument is that what we are called to do is cull out violence even from our thinking, and we do this by prayer and lives dedicated to merciful acts toward those less fortunate than ourselves. A great book. A wonderful, but almost terrifying argument, full of emotion as well as logic.

I found many parts of this book useful and interesting, but overall it was a disappointment for two reasons.

In the first place, Brimlow spends most of the book attempting to debunk the theory of just war, rather than carefully laying out his own position-it's a very defensive book. If I'd wanted a book about just war, I'd have bought a book about just war.

And second, his conclusion skirts the real issue. OK, if you call your book What About Hitler? you're probably setting yourself up for disappointment. But Brimlow's book wraps up with the assertion that followers of Christ are commanded to "follow Jesus along the path of peace as his faithful disciple," even though this "will probably lead to our death." Then he spends pages and pages defending this, on the assumption that his readers will say, "Hey, that can't be the message of the gospel!"

Well, of course it is, and anyone who's spent more than a week or so with the New Testament will have figured that out. The reason the Hitler question is vexing is because it doesn't pose us with the problem of: What if I choose nonviolence, and then die? It poses us the much more complex question of: What if I choose nonviolence, and then others die, six million or more?

Brimlow does point out, usefully, that the "What about Hitler" question, when posed to pacifists, is essentially unfair. The is passage worth quoting in its entirety:

"In a very important respect, the Hitler question is a dishonest one, or at the very least misleading. It assumes that Christians and the church have no involvement and no responsibility prior to some arbitrary date in the early 1940s. If the question is asking how a pacifistic church should have responded to the horrors of the Holocaust, the answer surely lies in being a peacemaking church long before the Holocaust ever began. The church should have preached and lived a love of the Jews for many centuries before the twentieth; the church should have formed Christians into the kind of people who do not kill Jews, or homosexuals, or gypsies, or communists, or other Christians, or Nazis, or whoever else was victimized by the war. The church should have lived and taught in such a way that the First World War would have been incomprehensible in a largely Christian Europe and, failing that, should have railed against the Versailles Treaty and the vengeance it embodied in favor of forgiveness and reconciliation."

All true. But I'm still left wondering...given that this entity called "the church" did no such thing, what was the responsibility of the individual peacemaker?

This question remains unaddressed. Brimlow does attempt to deal with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his choice to turn away from nonviolence and involve himself in an attempt to assassinate Hitler, but this is one of the most unsatisfying parts of the book-in fact I'm still trying to figure out exactly what he's getting at.

Comments sent to the author:

Dear Professor Brimlow,

The following comments are in rough chronological order, only rarely citing page numbers. I hope and pray they will prove edifying to you.

1. Let me start off with a sincere compliment. I think this book will go on my list of favorite books, which now numbers 3: the New Testament, The Last Day, and What about Hitler?. The Last Day presents a glorified account of a young Iraqi veteran who is a strong Christian believer, as well as a rather fierce warrior. The book is full of clever conundrums and paradoxes and presents Jesus in a most unusual way. It is so persuasive of the humble sacrificial sincerity of American soldiers that had I read this back in my high school days, I might have enlisted. I have long wondered why, as someone committed to non-violence as a key Christian virtue, I so admire the depiction of the soldier in this book. Your book comes as a welcome counterpoint, and I believe that all the service academies and public high schools would do well to include both of these works in their English or Social Studies curricula. (Assuming school boards could be persuaded that Catholic Just War theory undergirds much of American foreign policy.)

2. I also really appreciate the meditations you include before each chapter. You admit they were difficult to publish, being so personal, and I certainly can see that. But in these precious encounters with God you provide a living example of how to pray and to seek the heart of God. You demonstrate the true meaning of the Hebrew word for prayer, Tefilla, as a process of wrestling with self. Thank you for your gracious candor.

3. I also hope you don't mind that I am Ccing this to your partners at the Ekklesia Project.

4. I start off with your comments about the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness. You pose some rather skeptical questions. Perhaps my perspective on these will help you. I think first of all that Jesus could not have been tempted after only 20 days, because satan did not come to Him until after He had perfected Himself in the wilderness, a process that required a full 40 day period. Once Jesus became aware of His true spiritual powers and His destiny, satan then tempted Him to abuse those powers for self-gain rather than to glorify God. So for example, knowing He would become the bread of life that via communion His followers would ingest and see their hearts transformed from stone to flesh, Jesus refused satan's challenge to Him simply to use that power in a grossly self-serving way. Then satan challenged Him to worship him in order to receive all the kingdoms, again seeking to short circuit the path to the cross that would herald Jesus as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Finally, seeing Jesus spurn even this, satan tempts Him to dazzle people by jumping off the Temple, in an effort to attract a grand following. But Jesus refuses this too, realizing that He will be raised up as the new Temple of God in His resurrection, which necessitates the crucifixion. (Jewish convert Alfred Edersheim explains in a similar manner here.) I would sum up by saying that the three temptations offered Jesus an alternative path to glory besides the cross, and He bravely spurned all of them.

5. A very interesting film about reconciliation of enemies in war is Silent Night:

6. Out of order, but since we're on the subject of films, this is a very unusual portrait of Hitler as a young aspiring artist and the rich Jewish art patron, Max, who tries to mentor him. One of the most outrageous scenes depicts Max taking Hitler to a gentlemen's club in company of two escort ladies. During lunch Hitler explains that he is a teetotaler and vegetarian. When he excuses himself to go to the bathroom, the two girls turn to Max, who himself is a drunkard and philanderer, and exclaim: "He's absolutely the most disgusting person we've ever met!" There is much irony in that comment, since it is not altogether clear if it demeans Hitler to be insulted by two such persons. Or perhaps the point is that he is so deranged that even two prostitutes can take offense at him. Perhaps it has to do with Hitler's "evil sainthood", which as you note about saints in your book makes him removed from normal human affections. It certainly gives one pause to wonder about the precise nature of Hitler's evil, as you wisely ask in your book about why Hitler's evil intrigues us more than Stalin's or anyone else's.

7. To those who ask "What about Hitler", the proper response might be: "What about the German Churches"? Why did they support Hitler? And if they did so with clear consciences, then this should prove the fatality of Augustine's Just War Theory. You discuss this well in the book, describing how Germans might have viewed their actions within the parameters of Just War. A very poignant film, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, depicts the pious normalcy of the family of a death camp commandant as they pray before meals, before bedtime, arrange special tutors for their children, and generally seem not so different from the kinds of people I grew up with as a son of a university professor. Again, this shows the banality of evil as Arendt noted and the futility of Just War Theory, in my opinion.

8. The person who wrote to me in favor of Christian militarism suggested that when two opposing sides that are both Christian go to war, if they are both convinced of the righteousness of their cause then they will shoot and kill each other without any sinful convictions. He makes it sound almost like a western shoot out where truth and morality will be determined by the victor. I find this notion pretty reprehensible, as it reminds me of accounts I have heard about the American Civil War in which both sides would have Bible studies and prayer before a big battle and then leave the battlefield littered with tens of thousands of corpses. I cannot fathom how this is evidence of Christian love.

9. At the end of the book you allude to the disgrace of World War I that tore apart Christian Europe. I once heard a sermon at a very peaceable church. The guest pastor one Sunday was a WWII veteran who gave a patriotic sermon that so extolled the virtue of warfare that I half expected to find a Pentagon recruiter in the social hall after the service. I asked him precisely about the absurdity that in World War I all the adversaries (except for Turkey) were Christian. He responded without hesitation that only the US and her allies were true Christians; all the rest were fakes. His answer saddened me even more than his sermon, since it proved how self-deceived we are when we seek to vilify our enemies. Why does Jesus' parable about the speck and the beam get left out of discussions like this one? He also ranted on about the need to protect our women and children from foreign soldier rapists and such. Again I asked him if perhaps the enemy thought the same about us, to which he just looked at me blankly.

10. A serious problem with applying Augustine's principle to today's world is that he lived at a time when virtually all Christians lived within the Roman Empire, and thus there was essentially no danger of Christians fighting against Christians. But since the time of Charlemagne European history has been an incessant bloodbath of internecine Christian warfare, each side having its expert theologians who could justify the wars as "Just Wars". Surely this cannot be so! I don't know what Augustine would say about such a situation, but it hardly seems to fit his paradigm.

11. Augustine lived at a time when Rome was collapsing. He spoke of foreign threats, but he seems unaware (or unwilling to admit) that Rome's own cruelties and excesses may have provoked much of this hostility. Furthermore, when Rome finally collapsed, this enabled the conquering tribes to be converted to Christianity (although in an imperfect way), suggesting that losing the war was a direct means to evangelism, which seems to be the precise lesson of the Cross; that losing the battle is the surest way to win the war. It is my impression that missionaries only began to make serious inroads into pagan Europe after the fall of Rome. Had Augustine's doctrine prevailed and allowed Rome to stand unmolested, perhaps the barbarians never would have received the Gospel?

12. Perhaps we need to redefine pacifist as a one who engages in spiritual warfare. Perhaps we could spell it as Peace-a-fist (from the Latin prefix a- that negates something) and contrast it with Piece-o-fist. It should be clear that pacifism is not passivity!

13. Are you familiar with this person.

14. I totally agree with the writer you cite who says Christians should be apolitical. Romans 13 tells us to obey the laws (so long as they don't conflict with God's Law), but not that we should wave the flag. I think it is painfully clear that our political process is hopelessly corrupted, like a giant casino game. The amounts of money spent campaigning are truly revoltingly obscene, and in the end the officials end up representing the money powers anyway. Christians should not waste their precious time and resources being seduced by this dirty game. Here are some ironic slogans I have about American politics:

15. Irony of the American Revolution: John Wesley recalled all the Methodist ministers in protest of what he thought was an unjust rebellion against the king God had placed over us, whom Paul enjoins us to obey. Irony of the American Civil War: we love to sing Amazing Grace, without realizing that its author, a former slaver, succeeded in abolishing slavery in all the British colonies by statutory decree. America is the only English-speaking country that had to resort to war to abolish slavery. And could not President Lincoln have compensated Southern slave holders to emancipate their slaves at a fraction of the cost in money, not to mention manpower, of the Civil War?

16. Jesus said My Kingdom is not of this world, otherwise My disciples would fight for Me, and Paul said We battle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers on high. What could be a clearer directive against warfare, unless one explains that these ideas apply only to ordained clergy and religious orders, but not to Christian laity?

17. By the way, how do you reconcile Jesus' words at the Final Supper about selling one's cloak and buying a sword, and that two swords would suffice, with His words in Gethsemane about putting up the sword because He who lives by the sword dies by the sword? Was Jesus being ironic in the former, seeking to portray His followers as outlaws as He himself was now regarded by the authorities?

18. You ask early in the book the difference between a criminal who resists arrest and an enemy combatant who fights against the "just warrior". I think one difference is that the criminal already is subject to the laws of his state, and thus is culpable for his resistance, but the enemy soldier lives beyond the purview of the Just Land's law and so cannot be held culpable. And this is why all wars have an element of being "Holy Wars", as the book The Last Day so powerfully depicts.

19. One aspect of violence you don't consider (indeed no one does to my knowledge) is the tendency of women to incite wars. I think there are many reasons for this, but on one very sinister level I think women have a tendency to encourage their men to engage in warfare as a way to protect themselves from what they perceive as the danger of male aggression. They reason: better they fight the enemy over the horizon than abuse us here at home. (This would be the corollary to Bush's fatuous We fight them over there so we won't have to fight them here; with the women echoing: Better our men fight invisible foreigners over the horizon than that they abuse us right here at home.) Also women are seen as the prize of the successful warrior (like David and Michal). And have you ever found it curious that women are never indicted as co-conspirators with their war-criminal husbands? Surely Mrss. Goebels, Goering, and Himmler shared in the spoils of war and may even have egged their husbands on. Why are they immune to prosecution?

20. One serious problem with even what is normally perceived as Just War is that it almost always attacks symptoms rather than root causes. In the amazing story of Louis Zamperini, an American POW in Japan in WWII, he describes the sadistic camp commander who tells the prisoners that he was inspired by the teaching of Nihilism in university before the war. Likewise there is ample evidence that Darwin influenced some of the more savage ideas of Hitler. So we have the irony of fighting against Japan and Germany even as we allow these noxious teachings to be promulgated unimpeded here at home.

21. A similar charge can be made with regard to Islam. We are waging war against an enemy that largely eschews pornography, drinking, gambling, and upholds modesty in dress and comportment, all values generally trampled on in America. Again we see the splinter and the beam problem as we wage war against people whose values are in many ways more sublime than our own.

22. Tertullian seems much closer to the ideal than Augustine. But of course there is the problem that he lived prior to the rapprochement of Rome with Christianity. Traditionally Constantine is seen as a saint ("Brother to the Apostles") and certainly his acceptance of Christianity can be no less significant than Cyrus the Great granting the Jews permission to rebuild their Temple, for which Isaiah terms him Messiah. (And there is no evidence that Cyrus ever abandoned Zoroastrianism.) Catholics used to hold that the Millennial Age spoken of in Revelation 20 is the entire period of the Church Age. This would suggest that the lurid depiction of Armageddon in Revelation 6-19 is a metaphor for the struggle of the early church again pagan Roman persecution. All this to mean the following: perhaps the rules change in the Millennial Church Age? Perhaps Jesus now rules through the Church with an iron rod (Psalm 2) and many of the teachings about gentleness and submission no longer apply? This goes to the deeper problem of reconciling the lamb of God slaughtered for our sins of the Gospels with the victorious lamb sitting on the throne of Revelation.

23. Even were this true, the rise of Islam, the schism between Eastern and Western Christianity, and the proliferation of Protestant sects has led to a situation of tremendous disunity in the Church and suggest that perhaps the Millennial Reign is over. My personal belief is that we are in transition to what Revelation calls the Heavenly Jerusalem, which is closely associated with the rise of Zionist Israel. (Note that the first Zionist Congress was held within a year of the first revelation of the photo-negative image on the Shroud of Turin!)

24. I liked your meditation about Israel's request to Samuel for a king. Scripture seems to me perilous precisely because it presents wildly conflicting approaches to similar circumstances. You express well the problem of rightly discerning God's will for our lives. I find that people tend to use the Bible like an ink blot, seeing in it justification for what they already want and projecting onto it what they already imagine they think.

25. In discussing the just war rationale for invading Iraq, you do not touch on the fact that Iraq's weapons were sold to her by the US during the confrontation with Iran. Henry Kissinger is reported to have stated that he wished both sides would annihilate each other (see note to this youtube link). This gets to the problem of Macchiavelli, who in his advice to the Prince seems to throw all moral and philosophical calculations out the window. How exactly can we trust leaders to engage in just war when we can never know if savage Machiavellian calculations are motivating them?

26. This is precisely the difficulty with 9-11, for which you seem content to accept the official account. But I am persuaded that the official account is bogus and that this was America's Reichstag Fire to provide a pretext for war against a chimerical and largely innocent enemy. How again can we rely on Just War calculations when such deceit is operative? (I once was told by a FOX news cameraman that all the journalists know that the official version of 9-11 is bogus, but that the network owners will not permit them to explore the truth.)

27. I felt confused by your discussion of Gandhi. What are we to conclude about his pacifism? You seem to agree with Orwell's critique. And furthermore, given India's military prowess and nuclear weaponry status, did Gandhi really leave a lasting legacy?

28. Why did Bonhoeffer consider it a sin to kill Hitler? There is an Old Testament concept of Rodef: one who pursues with malicious intent. In this case bystanders are enjoined to intervene on behalf of the pursued by stopping and if necessary killing the rodef-pursuer. (Incidentally this is the source for the rabbinic ruling that a fetus can be aborted if it threatens the mother's life. The fetus is called katan harodef, or baby pursuer.) Is it possible indeed that Jesus' words about turning the other cheek and not resisting evil apply only to me personally, but not in a situation of rodef when I might be called upon to intervene on behalf of another? Indeed how do we know Jesus even speaks about lethal threats and not just non-lethal personal insult or injury?

29. On the problem of doing good in a coercive way, didn't Jesus apply some measure of coercion in exhorting people to follow Him? And what about His statement in Matthew 11:12 And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.

30. If German Christians had been peace-a-fists then Hitler never could have waged war in the first place. My email interlocutor stated that Germans had no choice but to be conscripted. I responded that if they were willing to risk death on the battlefield then why weren't they prepared to risk death and humiliation by refusing conscription in the first place?

31. Orwell overlooks the efficacy of prayer and other supernatural consequences of non-violent resistance. Sometimes defeat is the best way to win the war, as when Rome's collapse ensured the conversion of millions of barbarian invaders! And surely this is a clear lesson of the Cross: that victory is gained by death, not by domination.

32. Your discussion at the end of the book on our fear of dying is excellent. Whenever I visit nursing homes, I wince as I look at the sad situation of the residents. I so much want to avoid the enfeeblement that seems so pervasive there.

33. Your comment on page 166 about "Jesus wept" is extremely insightful. It is indeed ironic that here Martha and Mary seem to reverse rolls, whereas at the meal Mary took the better portion by sitting at Jesus' feet, now her faith is diminished. You beautifully explain the significance of this enigmatic verse!

34. On page 169 you again have an excellent discussion of the false assumption in asking "the Hitler question", since the Holocaust was not a sudden phenomenon but the result of many centuries of endemic Christian violence. I will forward to you some observations I have made from a Jewish perspective on the Holocaust.

35. On page 190 I would say that "Great love must entail suffering". Indeed passion means suffering in Latin. We suffer for what we love and we love more what we have suffered over. It is a tragic deception of American hedonism that love means pleasure. Pleasure may accompany love, but it is only incidental to its essence, which I believe is suffering. And I would further add that although I am not Catholic, I believe that Catholicism has a much better and more realistic notion of the necessity of suffering than Protestantism.

36. A strong critique of Christian non-violence is the charge that peace-a-fists are cowards who will not participate in the sacrifices of other members of our society. This is particularly sinister, because they employ cruel mockery to coerce us into killing. We need to portray non-violence as not passivity but active spiritual warfare.

37. On the famous question Christian warriors love to pose: would you use lethal force to protect your wife and children from attack. I think this too is fallacious for many reasons. First note that they always talk about their own wives and children and not anyone else's. Why don't they ask if you would use force to protect your neighbors (since even pagans would sacrifice themselves for their families)? And one could answer very reasonably that we rely on prayer and sanctification to invoke Divine Protection; and we choose to spend money, that otherwise would be diverted into weapons and ammunition, on charity. Then further one can see that this ends up in a reductio ad absurdum, for one could respond: How much protection do you think is necessary? To buy a weapon? How many? Should every member of the family have one? Should all family members spend time and money training in martial arts (which originated as a kind of religious devotion in the East)? And why not add security fences, surveillance cameras, and attacks dogs? And why not live inside a castle behind a moat? And why not have a private security force? And why not own a reconnaissance satellite? And how about a private arsenal of killer drones? You can see where this is going. Ultimately our quest for safety and security leads us to imprison ourselves behind walls of imaginary fears (that may in fact simply be projections of our own latent old-man tendency to hostility and violence) and forces us to forgo the risks Jesus requires to spread the Gospel. A wise man should perceive that it's all a futile exercise in faithlessness.

38. General Smedley Butler wrote a book called War is a Racket, and that seems to be the Gospel truth about this vile outrage against human dignity. American banks and corporations fueled both Germany and Japan's rise to military power in the 1930s. (As they did to Stalin's USSR. Indeed it was Imperial Germany in World War I that installed Lenin in power in order to remove Russia from its eastern front!) For banks and corporations, war is truly a gold mine, where they bet on all sides and win every time, while the actual military adversaries lose pitifully manpower, treasure, and hope. These war profiteers sell promiscuously to all sides, without any scruples at all.

39. The churches who exhort their members to take up arms often are richly rewarded by the money men for helping to ensure the steady flow of profits into their gaping coffers. These churches are truly vile, sanctimoniously administering sacraments to men who have been beguiled into serving as human cannon fodder. What kind of church can sit back [and administer communion to both sides] while German Catholics fight and slaughter Polish and French Catholics; and Italian Catholics fight American Catholics? And are these soldiers guilty of idolizing their nationalities above God? To me the answer is obvious. Nothing makes more of a mockery of Christianity in the eyes of unbelievers than the perversion of Christian internecine religious warfare.

40. On Christmas morning there was an interesting TV broadcast of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They did a special concert with Walter Cronkite about the famous Christmas Truce in 1914. The amazing thing is that prior to that truce the Catholic clergymen were administering communion wafers to men on both sides of the war, who then went out and fought and killed their fellow Christians! Although the above story is touching, in another respect it is appalling that men could fraternize with their Christian "brothers" over Christmas and then, as soon as the day ended, go back to their trenches and start shooting at each other again! Did they learn anything from Jesus? Or maybe they learned exactly the right things?! I think that their condemnation is worse, since now they are trying to kill people who they just acknowledged as their spiritual brothers. It would have been better had they never had such a peaceful and loving truce. No wonder people hate the so called Prince of Peace! Of course the soldiers probably kill more out of fear of their own officers, who goad them on, than out of fear of or malice towards the enemy. A failure of all institutions. It seems to me that in such warfare, people are perpetuating the sin of Molech in the Old Testament, whereby people would offer up their children to the idol of Molech. Is Christian warfare any different? It is even worse when you consider that the political leaders and military officers are generally older men who have lived full lives and now seek to sacrifice their own children in the flower of their youth. In my opinion only the Amish and the Jehovah's Witnesses are faithful to Jesus as Prince of Peace who deplores war and violence and commands His followers to "put up the sword for he who lives by the sword dies by the sword."

Thank you for allowing me to share these comments with you.

And thank you for the patience to read them.

And above all thank you for writing this brutally honest and difficult and challenging book.

Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we're free at last!

Amen.

Michael Korn

Brimlow takes his writing very personal, and throughout the book much of his reflections or comparisons resonate from stories of his experiences. Sandwiched between each chapter, you will also find a min-chapter, or "Meditation" where he openly reflects upon passages of the Bible and difficulties that he (and many Christians, particularly pacifists) deal with.

I really enjoyed the fact that he expounded a little on Emmanuel Levinas' writings (and his concept of the Other), something I've been waiting for since reading some works by Levinas years ago.

Not much directed at Hitler in the book, despite the title, and Brimlow explains why, he mostly focuses on the difficulties faced in the titled question, giving great consideration for writings by 'just war' claimants, and tackles them with honesty and prose.

Not a 'light' read.

I purchased this book along with 3 other books on the biblical view on war in an attempt to gain understanding on this difficult subject. I selected this book particularly because I had asked the "what about hitler" question in my small group.

The book is very uneven- it shuffles between short meditations on scripture and longer academic chapters that test and break down others thoughts on just war. The meditations did not strengthen the academic chapters as much as I had hoped. Also, much of the book focuses on secular perspectives on war, with very little direct interpretation of scripture.

My biggest issue with the book is that the author seems to start the book with a pacifism perspective and proceeds to defend it by finding the flaws of a just war perspective, instead of starting on neutral ground. By doing this, Brimlow ignores the violence found in the old testament and focuses only on new testament scripture. Though the viewpoint of violence/war cannot be directly carried over into present times, ignoring it can alter your understanding. If Jesus saw the OT as sacred text, then can we ignore OT text on war and still understand Jesus? I think you need to wrestle OT vs NT war before you can wrestle with nonviolence vs just war.

Having said that, all of Brimlow's wrestling ends in an answer that isnt satisfying. This might not be a negative, it could be that the answer to this question just isn't going to be satisfying. The book didn't convince me of that however.

All in all, it was a noble attempt that did not leave any more confident in my understanding of the "hitler dilemna."