Soldier saints, then and now
From All Saints until Veterans Day, I’m posting a blog series on soldier saints at Centurions Guild. “Ten Saints, Ten Days” explores ten lives, their context, and their relevance to soldiers today. In the Bible, the number ten signifies completion and wholeness—something many soldiers today do not feel. The moral complexity of their service is too often brushed away with a quick “thank you” or an upgrade to first class. But soldiers’ experiences, their testimonies, are part and parcel to the integrity of the church—especially in this time of war.
A theologically credible account of war requires the voice of soldiers, the actual bodies that participate in it. Yet many theological perspectives—from just war and pacifist traditions alike—have little to say to grunts slogging along in the desert or trudging along a mountain pass, hoping to make spiritual sense of their experience. Lives hang in the balance, lives swept up by the poverty draft and, too often, bulldozed into immateriality by the bludgeon of ideological rhetoric.
Being the body of Christ to those left isolated by the silence war creates requires a deeper understanding of their unique experience of sin and suffering. It requires seeking soldiers out, seeing them, hearing them, and embracing them as living members of the church—because that’s what they are. Christians do not get to “it is finished” without the witness of a centurion holding a weapon of war, the same one used to pierce Jesus’ side.
