Sarah Rice is a co-pastor at Wellington Central Baptist Church. This article is an edited version of one of her sermons.
Just imagine someone from overseas asks you to explain what it means to be a New Zealander. How would you respond?
Maybe you would talk about our nation’s love of sports and outdoor pursuits. Or the ‘number 8 wire’ and ‘can-do’ attitudes we pride ourselves on. Perhaps you’d mention New Zealand’s political alignment and our relationships with Pacific Island nations.
Would you mention the ANZACs? To refresh your memory, ANZAC is an acronym for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps, a grouping of several divisions created early in World War I (1914–18).
I ask because I know we all have different perspectives on the ANZAC Day commemorations. Some may see them as good or bad or a mixture of both, and that is alright – we are a broad enough movement to hold different perspectives on second-tier issues.
I would like to propose that a commonality we experience is that we live in a country where war has played a defining role in shaping our national sense of identity – what it means to be a New Zealander.
Have you noticed how in public discourse, this day, not Easter or Christmas, is referred to as “sacred”.
As Christians who live in this society and are citizens of God’s kingdom, as we see in Ephesians 2:19, “you are … fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household”.
I think it is valuable to ask questions around how ANZAC symbols, rituals, practices and languages are shaping our lived theologies today. Lived theologies is simply the decisions and actions we do in our everyday.
There’s a fascinating book called Pursuing Peace in Godzone edited by Geoffrey Troughton and Philip Fountain[1], which mentions an intriguing 20-year-long study involving more than 70,000 New Zealanders called The New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study.
Some findings from it offer some valuable clues to how the way we remember past war events may impact our lived theologies.
In the study, curated by Professor Chris Sibley, 4,463 participants who had different levels of Christian identification and 8,759 participants who had no religion affiliation, were asked to rank from ‘definite no’ to ‘definite yes’ this question:
“Of course, we all hope that there will not be another war, but if it were to come to that, would you be willing to fight for your country?”
How would you answer that?
The study showed that respondents who were participants at all levels of Christian identification were significantly higher in answering ‘yes’ to being willing to fight for their country, than those with no religion affiliation.
So, does that mean Christians are more prepared to kill in war for their country than non-Christians?
This brings up some tricky questions around allegiance. I wonder if there is an entanglement of allegiance between state and church happening in contemporary New Zealand Christianity.
How WWI changed religion
Christian historian Philip Jenkins wrote a book called, The Great and Holy War[2]. In it he offers helpful insights into how the state and church were entangled through WWI. Churches in the British Empire played an active role in helping believers integrate their faith with the national cause.
In New Zealand, for example, not long before WWI, the Methodist church passed a resolution stating:
“We regard the British Empire, with all its defects, as being in practical righteousness, the largest instrument of the Kingdom of God, that has yet arisen among men.”
This gave Christians motivation and purpose for joining the war.
Then, in the war, Christians who were Russian, German, British, Austro-Hungarians, French, Italian and American, and from places like India, Cameroon and Fiji were confronted with mass deaths, which raised questions like:
What hope can we hold onto in the face death?
Finding meaning in suffering
Families at home and the soldiers themselves needed to find meaning in this mass loss of life. By seeing the war as ushering in the day of the Lord or the apocalypse, Christians believed God was on their side, fighting the antichrist of Babylon with them. This brought comfort to them as they faced the horrors.
Each side sought to de-Christianise the other side and dehumanised them through seeing them as the whore of Babylon. This became a lived theology that helped those who affiliated as Christian to kill other Christians.
It continued in WWII. As I pause and look at this history of the entanglement between church and military, I cannot help but ask the question, ‘are my lived theologies impacted by this?’
Apocalypse: The uncover
Our current cultural understanding of ‘apocalypse’ or ‘apocalyptic’ is not far off from the time of WWI.
Apocalypse is commonly defined as:
- “complete and final destruction of the world, as described in the biblical book of Revelation”
- or “an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale.”
Surprisingly, it doesn’t mean that at all in Scripture.
In the New Testament, the Greek word apokalupto (ἀποκαλυπτω) means to uncover or reveal. It’s a compound word that means ‘to remove a cover from’ (apo = ‘from’ + kalupto = ‘to cover’).
This explanation from The Bible Project is helpful:
“An apocalypse is when you suddenly see the true nature of something that you couldn’t see before…this happens when someone on earth is exposed to the heavenly, transcendent reality of God’s realm, transforming their view of everything. In an apocalyptic moment, heaven joins earth in the mind and heart of the visionary, and they can see reality in a way that others cannot.”
An example of this is the apostle Paul, who in his letter to the Galatians, describes his meeting with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus as an apocalypse. Paul was violently trying to stop the movement of Jesus. But then Jesus showed up in a vision and pulled back the curtain to show him what was really going on in the world.
This was a moment where God’s revelation of himself redefined Paul’s understanding of reality and changed the course of his life. An apocalypse is revelations we have of Jesus in our faith journeys, which changes the way we see the world.
Another example of apocalypse is in the book of Revelation, where John paints a very different picture of Jesus riding in on the white horse. Jesus is announced as a victorious lion, but when John sees him, he is a bloody lamb. Jesus comes riding in on a white horse with a sword, but he is bloody before the battle even starts. Jesus conquers evil and death by letting evil exhaust itself on him. Jesus is not out for our blood. Rather he overcame evil with his blood when he died for his enemies. And the sword is not where we expect it to be – it is not in his hand but in his mouth. It’s a symbol of Jesus’ authority to define good and evil, which he holds us accountable to.
We follow a pre-bloodied saviour who died for his enemies – this is what I want to be shaped by.
This image describes how Jesus’ victory did not come through violent means but through his loving announcement of the kingdom of God.
What shapes our lived theologies?
For people on a faith journey, it seems obvious that our lived theologies must be shaped by Jesus Christ and his story, but, as we have seen, dominant biblical images can be given different cultural meanings for the sake of national interest, which can shape our lived theologies.
Our lived theologies are dependent on our allegiances.
One of the key ideas about being a Christian is that my citizenship is defined by Christ and his kingdom. We are called to respect and pray for our leaders and to live with humility, but New Zealand and the King’s sovereignty is only ever a secondary aspect of Christian life.
We stand before an audience of one, the triune God revealed in Jesus.
This reminds me of the Baptist distinctive of ‘liberty of conscience’, the separation of church and state. I wonder how this distinctive could shape our acknowledgement of the ANZACs?
As you come to your own conclusions today, we remember Jesus’ words in John 14:27.
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you”.
May God give us an apocalypse of his peace for the sake of our world.
Endnotes
[1] Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2018
[2] Lion Books, 2014
Photo: ANZAC Auckland Domain 2024. By Mike Crudge.
