Dear Sister Goffar:

I have read and reflected on your restrained but kind comments to my sermon at Loma Linda. I suppose that there are some key issues in this discussion that you and I will view differently. "War" was not the subject matter of my sermon; my references to it were as a back-drop for my reflections on the passage of "looking after the widows and orphans in their distress" (James)

I come to the matter of war and our church's historic position from various perspectives. In my own childhood (from age 5-10), I shared house with 300 German soldiers for five years. I lived in Nigeria during the Biafran War of 1966-68. I have seen close up some of the terrible debris which a war leaves behind; and the only "crime" that the children, women and old ones were guilty of is that they were born at a particular time and lived at a particular place. They were otherwise innocent, but unable to protect themselves.

And I have read history. The definition "just war" is so imprecise and diffuse. Is it always "my war"?

And I have searched the mind of Christ, and I find nothing in it to lead me to take up arms and go to war.

Defending oneself comes in another category, as does the actions of pursuing criminals who must be brought to justice. I see this illustrated in the activities in Afghanistan where the allied Western forces pursued the terrorists who had perpetrated heinous crimes. This was done with great care by the Allied forces not to harm the civilians. These kinds of activities are not what we are talking about.

I believe that nations are meant to find solutions other than wars. And I think that with concerted multinational pressures other means will be found and can succeed.

Just these observations.

Yours in Christ,

Jan Paulsen