Response to Terrorist Attack

Six Perspectives on September 11
By Paul Borthwick, 9/22/01

Urbana 2000 friends and other readers,

The Urbana leadership has asked those of us who spoke at Urbana 2000 to reflect on the tragic events of September 11 - and the subsequent confusion that we all feel - especially those of us committed to God's global purposes, His love for all peoples, and His heart for the World.

How do we respond? I must confess - my emotions have gone from "Bomb them into oblivion" to "Let's respond to their violence by pronouncing them forgiven" - and everything in between. I've cried at the sight of an American flag - for the first time in my life! I've joined in singing patriotic songs, and I've prayed for my President as never before.

But as my emotions quiet a little, I start to think more "Christianly." You see, I am a follower of Jesus Christ, and I am a citizen of the United States of America - in that order. As a follower of Jesus Christ, I must always see any patriotism as subservient to my first loyalty - to Him and His purposes.

If I sing "America, America, God shed His grace on Thee," I do it with a sense of gratitude for God's generosity to our nation and a sense of responsibility - as in Luke 12:48 - "Unto whom much is given is much required." If I pray or sing "God bless America," I do so with Psalm 67 and Genesis 12:1-3 in mind - God bless us SO THAT we might be a blessing to the nations - that all the ends of the earth might fear You.

I want God to be the God of my nation - but He is not my national God. If we think of America as the dynamic equivalent of God's "chosen" nation, we blind ourselves with nationalistic pride, and God opposes the proud. Let those who think they stand beware lest they fall.

So how do I respond as a follower of Jesus Christ? Allow me to offer six "perspectives" I'm trying to keep in mind as I try to process all that is going on (and as I try to respond to those outside of our faith communities who look to us for answers).

Perspective #1: Beware simple explanations: some Christian media personalities have been quoted as explaining this attack as "God's judgment" on things in our country like gay rights, abortion, and feminism. (Ironically, they didn't refer to the sins of materialism or the idolatry of power.)

I wish it were that simple. The evil in this world would be a lot easier to explain if everything happened Cause-and-Effect like their explanation. But wicked people prosper. And innocent (at least from our vantage point) people die in planes and towering infernos.

Only God knows the exact inter-relationship between specific sins and corresponding consequences, but let's not try to over-simplify life, good-vs-evil, and God with trite responses. And let's never use the tragedy of others as a chance to condemn.

Perspective #2: Repent - then respond. Balancing the first perspective, I must confront the fact that the evil in the world includes me, includes us, includes our country. I resist the "Cause & Effect" explanation, but I have no problem accepting that God has certainly allowed this to get our spiritual attention. Our national trust in wealth and power is idolatry, and symbols of both were attacked.

As a follower of Christ, I want to use this event to cause me to reflect on my own sinfulness - even as Jeremiah did after the destruction of Jerusalem. I must repent of my hate so I do not respond in hate. I must repent of my desire for revenge so that I do not respond in vengeance. It's always easier to identify the magnitude of evil in the terrorists or in the Taliban than it is to confront the magnitude of evil in myself or in my country.

Perspective #3: Commit to understanding our world. This event underscores our nation's global ignorance. When I hear a political leader call for a "Crusade" against terrorism, does he understand the incredible volatility of that word in the Muslim world? The word "Crusade" alone could alienate even the most moderate Muslim nations.

As global Christians, we should be the ones educating our friends:

• All Arabs are not Muslims (did you know that Arab Christian congregations across the Middle East declared September 14th as a day of prayer?).
• All Muslims are not Arabs (in fact the majority of the world's Muslims are not Arabs, living in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India (yes ... India!)).
• Afghanis are not Arabs, & most Afghanis are not Taliban.
  
• Muslims are not Mohammedans
  
• Terrorism is not a tenet of Islam
  
• And the Taliban represents an extremist interpretation of Islam which is even rejected by countries like Iran!

A friend wrote to me, "Does Islam encourage such acts?" and "Does the Koran instruct or even command its followers to take such action against those who are perceived to be enemies?"

As an ambassador of Christ in the world, I owe it to my friend (and to the Muslim world) to research and give him an answer. And I must face the fact that - like the Bible - the Koran can be twisted to fulfill our pre-conceived opinions (as Christians have done with slavery, Aryan supremacy, abortion-clinic attacks, etc.) I'd guess that most Muslims look at these terrorists in the same way we look at Bible-waving Neo-Nazis who claim that their views come from the Bible.

Perspective #4: Reflect on economic disparity. The ring-leaders of this terrorist attack illustrate vividly what Henri Nouwen predicted in his book "Gracias: a Latin American Journal." While living and serving in the poorest slums of Lima, Peru, Nouwen foresaw a day when the world's poor would simply rise up to attack the rich with a "We've got nothing to lose" hopelessness.

Perhaps the rage of the world's poor against our flaunting our wealth has been acted out. After the World Trade Center was hit, one newscaster reported that the government had put Las Vegas on alert. If the terrorists were after symbols, he surmised, then the World Trade Center symbolized our wealth, the Pentagon symbolized our power, and Las Vegas symbolized our opulence.

The Taliban and Jihad against the West notwithstanding, one wonders if these radicals were not the voice of the world's poor lashing out against globalization. After all, their target was the World Trade Center. Can this event be used of God to call all Christians in the West to evaluate our excessive lifestyles - often lived at the expense of poor people we never see?

Perspective #5: Reflect on the true meaning of Christian hope. I find it easy to intertwine my Christian worldview with my American dependency on comforts and convenience. As a result, the Center of my hope gets displaced, and I start trusting in money or power, in the stock market or in our armed forces.

In his sermon on September 16, John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, preached out of the "nothing shall separate us from the love of Christ" passage in Romans 8. He stated,

Your steady, solid hope this morning - and it is the only lasting hope - is that if you will trust Christ as your precious Savior and your supremely-valued King, then you will be folded into the love of God in a way that no terrorist, no torture, no demons, no disasters, no disease, no man, no microbe, no government, and no grave can destroy. That's the hope of this text. That's the hope of the Christian life. It is not a political hope, or a military hope, or a financial hope, or a geographical hope, or a psychological hope, or an escapist hope. It is a blood-bought, Spirit-wrought, Christ-exalting, God-centered, fear-destroying, death-defeating hope.

Perspective #6: Please pray for Afghanistan. One of my seminary professors, Dr. J. Christy Wilson (the Director of the very first Urbana convention), dedicated a huge portion of his adult life to serving the people of Afghanistan and recruiting prayer for that nation. He put Afghanistan in my heart.

My wife, Christie, and I went to Afghanistan in late 1997 to encourage some Christians doing humanitarian work there. It was the most difficult place we had ever seen. Christie had to travel as a veiled Muslim woman. We got delayed in traffic in the city of Jalalabad because the Taliban "police" were beating a young man with sticks - because he had trimmed his beard. We saw the children victimized by a war that left 15+ million land mines throughout the country. They're blind or deaf or maimed because the war with the Soviet Union included land mines that look like toys - so that children would pick them up and be harmed.

Afghanistan has a long and tragic history of violence (some estimate the country has been at war for 50, 500 or 5000 years - depending on how you calculate war). Tamim Ansary, an Afghani-American, appeals to our understanding of Afghanistan when he writes:

Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan - a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets.

He goes on:

These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban. We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

So I close by asking you to pray for Afghanistan. Pray that God might somehow bring redemption out of the terror that has been ours since September 11 and the terror that has been theirs for years. Pray for God to break through to Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar (head of the Taliban) as He did with Saul of Tarsus.

And if you cannot get a handle on Afghanistan, then pray for "Bunny."

We visited Bunny on our visit in 1997 at a Refugee Camp on the border of Pakistan. Bunny was about 11 then. She lost her eyes and her eyesight when a land-mine exploded. Some Christian humanitarian workers took us to visit her in a reading program at the refugee camp, and she read to us from a book of Afghani poems in Braille.

We don't know her Pushtun (i.e., her ethnic group) name, but she was wearing a sweater with an embroidered rabbit on it - so we've prayed for her only as "Bunny" since then. But God knows her name. Her name flashed through Jesus' mind as He died on the Cross ... now we pray that she will know and call on His name.

Paul Borthwick

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