Christian Jihad?

"Reaching the world for Christ"

...and breaching it, too?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Over at Ambivablog, Annie -- who calls herself Amba (but she's ambivalent about that) -- has posted an blog entry on imprecatory prayer.

That means praying God's curses down upon someone.

This has become a political issue because Rev. Wiley Drake, who pastors the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, California and was formerly the vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, supports Arkansawyer Mike Huckabee for president and has called for "the children of God" to call down God's curse upon "the enemies of God." Here's how he puts it:

In light of the recent attack from the enemies of God I ask the children of God to go into action with Imprecatory Prayer. Especially against Americans United for Separation of Church and State. I made an attempt to go to them via Matt 18:15 but they refused to talk to me. Specifically target Joe Conn or Jeremy Learing. They are those who lead the attack. ("Pastor Wiley Drake Calls for Imprecatory Prayer against So-Called Religious Liberty Watchdog Group," Christian News Wire, August 14, 2007)

I wonder if Pastor Drake conceives of ever taking this beyond mere prayer to direct action. I'm just asking, mind you, not accusing, and I'm asking because I had thought that -- at the very least -- the "New Covenant" espoused by Christians forbade imprecatory prayer and that Christians held that imprecatory prayers belonged to the "Old Covenant."

Apparently, Drake doesn't think this way, for he states, "Imprecatory prayer, is now our duty," and he does some prooftexting:

Now that all efforts have been exhausted, we must begin our Imprecatory Prayer, at the key points of the parliamentary role in the earth where we live.

John Calvin gave the church its marching orders from Scripture. The righteous have dominion, but only through imprecatory prayer against the ungodly.

David as our Old Testament shepherd gives us many Imprecatory prayers, and can be found to be in best focus in Psalm 109. Also chapters 55, 58, 68, 69, and 83

Pray these back to God and He will answer.

Jesus in Matthew 23: 13, 15, 16, 23, 24, 27, and 29 gave us our New Testament marching orders as well.

Let us join Paul and declare anathema upon anyone" who loves not the Lord Jesus." I Cor 16:22

Church father Martin Luther, led us by saying . . . "If any of the enemies of God's people belong to God's election, the church's prayer against them giveth way to their conversion, and seeketh no more than that the judgment should follow them, only until they acknowledge their sin, turn, and seek God." ("Pastor Wiley Drake Calls for Imprecatory Prayer")

That last part, from Martin Luther, is a right strawy quote! "If any of the enemies of God's people belong to God's election..."? A bit obscure, no? Well, I think that Drake quotes this to balance his Calvin quote about the dominion of the righteous over the ungodly. The Luther citation is intended to soften the effect a bit by emphasizing that imprecatory prayer is yet another way of winning souls for Christ because it will bring conviction to the hearts of those enemies of God whom God has already selected for salvation but hasn't yet followed through on by converting them. Cursing them will bring that about ... apparently.

I'm guessing that Reverend Drake believes in predestination, not freely accepted grace.

Anyway, noted above, I had thought that Christians were forbidden from uttering imprecatory prayers, which I understood had been excluded by such New Testament verses as those calling upon Christians to "love your enemies" (Matthew 5:44) and to "bless and not curse" (Romans 12:14). However, I've discovered that the issue, unfortunately, is not quite so clear. Here are some lines from the opening of a dissertation devoted to the issue:

I will seek to establish that the sentiment expressed in the Imprecatory Psalms is consistent with the ethics both of the Old and New Testaments, while at the same time recognizing that the New Testament evidences a certain progress in the outworking of that essentially equivalent ethic. This I will do by plausibly demonstrating that the Imprecatory Psalms root their theology of cursing and crying out for God's vengeance in the Torah -- principally the Song of Moses (Deut 32), the lex talionis (e.g., Deut 19), and the covenant of God with his people (e.g., Gen 12) -- and that this theology is carried essentially unchanged through the expanse of the canon to the end of the New Testament (e.g., Rev 15:2-4; 18:20). (John N. Day, "The Imprecatory Pslams and Christian Ethics," PhD Thesis, Department of Old Testament Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary)

I've not read this thesis and probably won't have time, but the mere fact of the document's existence provides evidence of a problem that I had thought behind us. I'm not shooting the messenger here. John Day may be right -- for all I know -- in his reading of the Bible on this issue.

For the record, I should note that Mike Huckabee would perhaps disagree with this sort of interpretation, for the Huckabee campaign has disavowed Reverend Wiley Drake's views as "evil comments." A campaign, however, is one thing, and biblical hermeneutics is another. I've not yet heard if the Southern Baptist Convention has distanced itself from Drake's hermeneutic.

And this is troubling, for if imprecatory prayer is legitimate, would martial cherem itself also legitimate? Can Christians also declare jihad? And who decides?