On the morning of 15 April 1994, each one of us woke up knowing what to do and where to go because we had made a plan the previous night. In the morning we woke up and started walking towards the church[…] […] It was as if we were taken over by Satan. We were taken over by Satan. When Satan is using you, you lose your mind. We were not ourselves. Beginning with me, I don't think I was normal. You wouldn't be normal if you start butchering people for no reason. We had been attacked by the devil.
Gitera Rwamuhuzi – Perpetrator: Rwanda Genocide 1994
Luke 11:24-26
24 "When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, 'I will return to the house I left.' 25 When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. 26 Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first."
Ephesians 5:18b
"…be filled with the Spirit…"
2 Corinthians 4:4
The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers,
so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
Becoming "mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ (Eph. 4:13)" is what is essential and necessary for the Christian and the unified Church if we are to ever be able to inwardly transformed into the image of Christ enough, order to transcend the hellish conditions of Genocide in order to be transformational within it. This is because no human effort can counter those demonic conditions – only Christ and certainly only fully Christ in us.
The affects of The Fall ultimately are to "dis-integrate." To disintegrate relationship between God and man; disintegrate man's relationship between men; disintegrate the internal nature within a man; and disintegrate mans relationship within the created order. In a demented effort to restore a fuzzy and residual sense of "Shalom" we can rationalize ANYTHING; even Genocide as a heightened form of "dis-integration" between man and man. It works well, even within the shadow of the Church and the presence of the Christian because they tend to be those things only in name and not in terms of authentic substance.
We live life in the face of evil with a false confidence. We do this because regardless of our Biblical knowledge, vast array of Bible resources, sophisticated and thoroughly reasoned theological systems and modern worshipping facilities. Kierkegaard once said:
Most systematizers stand in the same relation to their systems as the man who builds a great castle and lives in the adjoining shack; they do not live in their great systematic structure. But in spiritual matters this will be always a crucial objection. Metaphorically speaking, a person's ideas must be the building he lives in- otherwise there is something terribly wrong.
Provocations - Kierkegaard
The empirical evidence over the course of two millennia, perhaps particularly this past century would demonstrate Kierkegaard as right. Genocide works within the proximity of the Church, because the Church and the Christian fail badly to live incarnationally, thereby preventing them from embracing the reality of "missio Dei." Despite our failures at Christ-likeness we must not shrink back from our responsibilities as living, resident incarnations in Christ – Acts 1 Christ ascended, and in Acts 2 the Holy Spirit descended to live in us, for the world (Acts 2:1-4); but in woeful fashion the Holy Spirit resides in stubborn, often uncooperative, corrupt "jars of clay."
In addition, and more practically, Genocide flourishes within the "Christian" ethos, because we fail to see the truth, possibilities and implications of how our status as a "chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God… (1 Peter 2:9)," make everything else that was once a part of our old self – worldview, nationality, culture etc. entirely subordinate. Only Christ in us, "mature – 'to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ'" can prepare us adequately for every contingency in responding to evil and our eternal enemy. Christ, and Christ in us, supersedes all that came before...
A sociopolitical statement: the work of God in Jesus of and through the kingdom to include the marginalized, to render judgment on the powerful, to create around the marginalized (with Jesus at the center) an alternative society where things are (finally, by God) put to rights.
Scott McKnight
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