“Do Not Be Terrified”: Remembering the Great War
“When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.” Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.” (Luke 21:9–11).
The Terror of our Times
I teach mission and live as a missionary in Taiwan, and sometimes find myself the subject of other’s missionary efforts. Over the years, I have graciously welcomed missionary witness and have invited LDS missionaries to our home in Taipei and am friendly when Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on our door. I have had two discussions with Jehovah’s Witnesses, in particular, over the state of violence in the world. One time, a pair knocked on my door and shared a section of Luke 21:9–11 with me. The passage is, honestly, a terrifying one, and when used in mission is meant to do exactly that. In this case, the missionary at my door pointed to the earthquakes and disasters and wars around the world in an attempt to awaken my awareness to God’s judgment. Another time, I was approached at a fast food restaurant where two Jehovah’s Witnesses asked if I had noticed the direction of the world with its wars and disasters. Clearly, this was their common way of starting conversation. This announcement of doom is a missionary staple; some people are attracted to church sanctuary because the outside world is horrifying. Both occasions led to some good conversations about the nature of our world, how people treat each other, and the hopes we have.
Making Sense of the Great War
In the old days, I probably would have drawn on my theological background in these discussions, but now I start with history. One of my favorite seminars in graduate school was a modern history seminar that treated the last 500 years. These 500 years include an almost inexhaustible roll call of atrocities. If you made a listicle of bad things people have done to each other, you could easily crib it from the timeline of the last half-millennium: the triangular trade, the conquest of Latin America, Europe’s sectarian wars, the conquest of Africa, disease that sometimes wiped out 90% of populations, the colonization of large swaths of Asia, the rise of modern weapons of warfare, and the two world wars and the subsequent Cold War. World War I is often used to demarcate a particularly bad 75 or so years that stretched until 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) or 1991 (the dissolution of the Soviet Union). For this section of the course, we read Hobsbawm’s “Age of Extremes, 1914–1991.” In this book, the author cites the findings of Brezezinski that some 187 million people died in mega deaths during this dodranscentennial of death.
When I taught a year of Western Civilization, I learned that World War 1 is often presented as the great disappointment of Western Civilization—bringing to an end a century of relative peacefulness (for white Europeans) since Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, and also announcing a new era in modern warfare. The textbooks often say that during the hundred years from Napoleon to World War 1 it was relatively easy to believe in a benign Christian civilization, and to think that “progress” was real and visible (this was also the era of telegraphs, trains, locomotives, cars, and planes). The Great War literally blew up this idea of progress. The literature on the world wars is fascinating and horrific: books on war propaganda, on machines of death, on new technologies, on death camps and death marches, totalitarianisms, other –isms (socialism, communism), on carpet bombings, chemical warfare, unexploded mines and the nuke, colonization, semi-colonization, and decolonization. Often, however, it is the little details I remember: 8 million horses died in World War 1. Many scholars have said that even this war to end all wars was not the true world war—that would come a generation later. Still, something changed and the seventy-five years that followed saw new divisions and polarities.
I know this history fairly well, so when my missionary interlocutors ask me, “doesn’t it seem that we are now living in the age described by Luke?” my initial temptation is to nod my head, to remember the mega deaths and the destruction. After a minute’s thought though, I am more likely to respond, “Why, no, I think this is a quite peaceful time when stacked up against Bubonic Plague, the wholesale eradication of native peoples in the Americas, or the horrors of the long passage.” A century after the Great War, maybe we’re starting to turn the corner on total warfare. Scholars like Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature) see a statistically defined decline in violence and, going by the numbers, things are not what they were. The last decades have seen millions pulled out of the worst poverty. Populations have swollen but birth rates are declining. Somehow we have resisted the urge to use nuclear weapons. The Cold War thawed. The division into three worlds began to fade. Even if this is a terrible period in its own way, it seems less so than that world that was before. Those deaths that flared with the Great War may have been modern, but they were not necessarily worse than the bad old days. The world may be heading towards Armageddon, but it is not obviously closer than at many points in the past.
Dreadful Portents and Do Not be Terrified
In the age of “Make American Great Again,” one of the things that never ceases to surprise is how nostalgic people are for a time that they see as simpler and safer. In reality, if we think about it, the world is almost certainly a better place to live now than at almost any time in the past. Still, when I asked my Taiwanese theological students about the state of the world, they answer that it is certainly getting worse, and they point to pollution, low wages for new graduates, rising housing costs, and growing inequality. All true! And yet, who would go back to the disappearances of fifty years ago, or the warfare of seventy years ago? Who would go back to the harsh old family system, the limited mobility, the life of endless labor?
This issue’s topic is “the peaceable kingdom” and looks back to World War 1, now a century behind us. Christian civilization was forced to confront its old sins and new proclivities for violence in ways for which it was fundamentally unprepared. Nationalism, ideology, and technology were reconfigured in ways that shocked and wounded. I am enough of an old school liberal that I hope we are slowly getting things right and moving towards the Peaceable Kingdom on our own, and also enough of the skeptic to believe that maybe we are all headed to this hell of our own making. I really could go either way. I am not alone in this, and I think honestly in Jesus’ words we also see both possibilities. I wish to believe that the universe bends towards justice, but also allow that it may someday end in annihilation. Christians should witness to both, acknowledging “the dreadful portents and great signs,” but also saying “Do not be terrified.”
