Courage

The themes of courage and cowardice have been floating around in my head ever since we saw the movie Valkyrie over the Christmas holiday. The movie centered on some high ups in Hitler’s army who tried to take him down, at great risk to themselves. Edit: It must be noted that the version of this story portrayed in the film is likely more fiction than reality, but from a purely “story” perspective it still has immense value in the way that it affected me. End edit. What struck me the most about these men, especially their leader, Von Stauffenberg, was that they didn’t fight the injustice of Hitler’s regime because it was doing some direct harm to them, but because it was doing harm to others. While it makes sense for those who don’t benefit from the status quo to resist it, how strange for men who could have been so successful in Hitler’s Germany (most who were from royal, wealthy families… not to mention Aryan) to risk everything. I mean it makes sense for the peasants to revolt, when they are the ones who are poor and hungry and oppressed by a cruel king. But when the kings own men turn against him for his cruelty towards the peasants, even though they themselves are not poor or hungry or oppressed, well, there’s just something more unusual about that. These men chose to do something courageous when they didn’t have to, in the same way that whites who fought alongside blacks during the civil rights era chose to act justly when they could have looked away, and in the same way that men who fought alongside women for women to gain equal rights made the same choice.

After watching this movie, I couldn’t stop thinking about what makes some people act bravely and what makes others look the other way, and be cowards. A recent conversation with Brian about the story of the cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz helped me see that people choose to be cowards because they feel that they can be. They have options. The cowardly lion only stopped being a coward when he felt he had no other option but to be brave. Remember in the movie? Only when his being tough was the only way to save Dorothy, whom he loved so much, did he truly shed his cowardice. He could no longer afford to not be brave. The consequences were too detrimental to him.

And I think that’s true of real life too. When we feel we are out of options, we are forced to be brave. That’s why the peasants always revolt. They are out of options. And how often do we hear stories of people having performed all kinds of daring feats when their lives or the lives of their loved ones are in peril? When you’re out of options, you are more willing to take risks.

So, how then do you explain Hitler’s men, or the whites that fought with blacks, or the men who fought for women’s rights? They don’t seem optionless, do they? They could have just carried on with their regular lives and been mostly unaffected by whatever harm was being done to others. So why did they act bravely?

I think it has to do with loyalties, with where people’s loyalties lie. See, the more loyalties one has, the more options one has in moments of critical decisions. For instance, if someone is loyal to wealth, to a good reputation, to more basic things like life and physical well being, and then also to more selfless things like justice and mercy, and that person finds themselves witnessing an injustice, they have many more loyalties to consider than just their loyalty to justice. Surely, they want to stop the injustice, but if getting involved means being disloyal to wealth or reputation or even to ones life, well, then the injustice might just go ignored.

I think people who are able to act bravely, as if their options have run out, when there is no immediate apparent danger to them or theirs, are able to do so because they have so limited their loyalties to a higher plain (to what is good, true, or just), that no other alternative will do.

That’s how we can take courage in following God, too. We can limit our loyalties. We can’t follow God as courageously if we have multiple competing loyalties, than if we were loyal only to God. Because then, when we have to make a decision between doing something that God wants us to do and doing something else (or doing nothing), if our only concern were pleasing God, and not, say, remaining loyal to tradition, being liked, or anything else, our choices would become much more simple. God wants something? Okay, I’ll do it. Not, “Well what will people in the church say?” or “Does this break with tradition?” Our only loyalty is to God.

Then there is the question of how we can even know what God wants in the first place… And I think we let ourselves off the hook a lot because of the apparent difficulty of answering this question. But does the question really matter, when we aren’t even loyal to what we think would please God, regardless of whether or not we can know for sure what that is. Whatever it is he likes, is that even our main concern? Is it our first priority? No. And that, I believe, is the main issue (not, “Can we know the truth?” but, “If you could, would you do anything about it?”). I heard that Tony Campolo once asked a group of Southern Baptists the question: “Why do all you fundamentalist keep arguing so much about the inherency of the Bible, when you’re not going to do what it says anyway?” Consider the following quote from A.W. Tozer, he doesn’t seem to think it’s that hard to know the truth, just to do it (because of our other competing loyalties):

“The New Testament contains full instructions, not only about what we are to believe but what we are to do and how we are to go about doing it. Any deviation from those instructions is a denial of the Lordship of Christ. I say the answer is simple, but it is not easy for it requires that we obey God rather than man, and that brings down the wrath of the religious majority. It is not a question of knowing what to do; we can easily learn that from the Scriptures. It is a question of whether or not we have the courage to do it.”

What he is suggesting is that other concerns or loyalties, other than simply our loyalty to God, are what make our choices so difficult and complex. Our options become simple when our loyalties become limited. So don’t act like you don’t know what God wants you to do just because you are afraid to do it. If you know the right thing to do, then limit yourself to doing only that. It will make life’s choices way simpler, but it will make life’s results way more interesting.