Military History and Christianity: Do they mix?

What makes a good general? What is the relationship between the general and the troops and the front line? And what does this have to do with the Christian life? The first two questions are addressed by John Keegan, one of the premier military historians of our generation, in a work entitled Mask of Command (at least, writers of popular level military history: I’m very ignorant of scholarly military history). In this book he paints a portray of four types of military leaders: Alexander the hero (always at the front lines and lots of theatrics), Wellington the unheroic (sometimes at the front line and some theatrics), Grant the anti-heroic (sometimes at the front lines and no theatrics) and Hitler the false heroic (never at the front lines and lots of theatrics). Keegan draws some conclusions for military leadership in the nuclear age, but I think there are some interesting implications for Christians as well.

Keegan sees a nuclear general as being someone who needs to be unheroic: if he acts in any way in a nuclear threat, then he has already most likely caused many deaths. He must wait and be patient. That was not a highly interesting conclusion to me. Two other thoughts were more worthy of note in my eyes. One consideration is that the good generals focused more upon strategic considerations than tactical considerations (strategic refers to the big picture, while tactical is the smaller details). This was one of the idiosyncrasies of Hitler which caused his downfall. My thought for the Christian life is that this same focus is needed for Christian leaders. We need leaders who think about the big picture and let those under them determine the details. If there are leaders who are meddling in details, they are inhibiting the growth of leaders who serve under them, they are not giving sufficient time to what they should be doing and they often have insufficient data to make wise choices. Leaders should make general guidelines and then leave details and responsibility to those who serve in the specific area. Too many pastors do not give responsibility to leaders in the church.

Another item of interest is the spectrum of how often generals were in the front lines. Never? Always? Sometimes? Alexander, being the classic hero, was always at the front, once being inside an enemy city by himself for some time when it seemed his men were too slow in attacking. Hitler was never near the front, although he presented himself as the ultimate hero (and he was frequently in the front line during World War I). Wellington and Grant found a balance between the two ends. On the one hand, generals shouldn’t be on the front line in the days of bullets and machine guns. On the other hand, generals need to be close to the front line so that they can get a “feel” for what is going on. Just getting reports from others and never seeing and feeling the battle for oneself will force the commander to make decisions upon faulty data. This is a little more difficult to translate to the Christian sphere because of the difficulty of deciding what the front line is. But I think that Christian leaders, while not deciding all the details of the church, should be at least somewhat involved in what is going on in the church. The pastor who only preaches but doesn’t do anything else I think will lose touch with the people and not preach as effectively as he could otherwise.  

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