It was terrible to hear that Tom Fox, one of the so-called Christian activists who was kidnapped last year, was found dead in Baghdad. And the cry of pain from the Christian Peacemaker Teams homepage was from the heart:

In grief we tremble before God who wraps us with compassion. The death of our beloved colleague and friend pierces us with pain. Tom Fox’s body was found in Baghdad yesterday.

Unfortunately, the banner at the top of their homepage lent a grim irony to the site. It confidently asks: What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?

And directly under it, today’s headline looks like the answer to their question: We Mourn the Loss of Tom Fox.

Pacifism is a fine goal. It may ultimately be the goal that the Lord will bring us to. But it is one of a number of good and noble causes that has been subsumed by a political world culture that destroys everything it touches. There shouldn’t be anything in the nature of pacifism that would lead to apostasy, just as there shouldn’t be anything in vegetarianism or the humane treatment of animals to do so. But to ignore that those good ideals have been subtly transformed into false gods by those who seem desperate for moral high ground seems very ill-advised. (More on the problems of pacifism here.)

In the case of these Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), it seems that an assumption was made and never questioned. They assumed that the insurgents weren’t really violent and opportunistic, and that their avowed hostility to Christianity was just a misunderstanding. I’m sorry that at least one of them has now paid with his life just to prove that assumption wrong. It may be that the ranks of CPT will swell with others who see it as the Lord’s work, but I hope not. It is possible to have the right idea at the wrong time.