So even if this saying was true for Jesus: that faith literally removes mountains; it is unlikely to be true for anybody today. I do not think you can expect God in his Heaven to intervene on your behalf. My hope is that the Almighty will condescend to accept my companionship, and guide me in the right way; but I do not expect any red carpets to be rolled out for me.
It is a different matter if you think that the spirit of God lurks in the depths of the psyche. Does he ever intervene then on your behalf? I think here we are on more secure ground. Winston Churchill’s defiance of Hitler in June 1940 was one of the most superbly courageous acts in modern history. It was a situation where the spirit within inspired supreme courage in action. It is one of the few actions in the world of affairs which I am sure was right. I refuse to say that as a Christian country we should have practised the meek gospel of Christ, turned the other cheek, and capitulated. For 12 months from June 1940 until June 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, Britain kept the torch of freedom burning, apparently against hopeless odds. This raises, perhaps for the first time in history in such stark and glaring terms, the problem of Christianity’s relationship to conduct in the secular world. This I believe is why we in Britain still go on about the War, those of us who can remember it; because it was so obviously right to fight it, yet how can this be reconciled with a religion whose founder preached non-violence? And who said his kingdom was not of this world?
When you read the Bible, you find to the consternation of your liberal upbringing that War was the foundation of Christianity too. And probably it is the precondition for any monotheistic religion. If Joshua had not conquered “the promised land”, there would have been no country for the Jewish tribes to settle in after they left Egypt; without a country, there would have been no nation; without a nation, no prophetic tradition; without a prophetic tradition, no Messiah and no Jesus! Whether Jesus realized it, or not, his Gospel depended entirely on Joshua and his successors conquering Canaan by force of arms. So it is not going too far to say that in considering the apparent conflict between the rightness of Britain’s war-effort, and the ethos of Christianity which rightly emphasises peace, we are going back to first principles.
As usual the C.of E. in its desire to be all things to all men has got itself into a mess. In my limited experience it failed to support the War whole-heartedly; and after it was over, failed to think things through, and work out its implications. This is illustrated by the outrage that greeted the service of reconciliation after the Falklands War, which seemed to the public to strike exactly the wrong note. And is even more graphically illustrated by some clergymen preaching at the approach to the Iraq War that, “War is never an option. I don’t know what the answer is, but War is never an option”.