The World Trade Centre, Babel and The Tower of Siloam

The World Trade Centre, New York

The Word Trade Centre in New York was not just the most conspicuous symbol of US capitalism. It was also intended to be a symbol of human unity and human greatness. Its architect, Minoura Yamasaki, said it should be ... "... a living representation of Man's belief in the co-operation of men, and through this, his ability to find greatness."

The towers were amazing with 12,000 miles of electric cabling, with 68 miles of steel used in their construction, with 43,600 windows and they could be seen from at least 20 miles away. They had stood for 30 years and were thought to be indestructible.

But as we now know, on 11 September 2001, at 7.45 am (US time) American Airlines Flight AA11 took off from Boston bound for Los Angeles with tanks full of fuel and with 81 passengers and 11 crew. At 8.10 am United Airlines Flight UA175 also took off from Boston. It too was bound for LA and had 65 people on board. At 8.45 am Flight AA11 was flown by Muslim extremists into one tower of the World Trade Centre; and at 9.03 am flight UA175, which was similarly hijacked, was flown into the other tower after swerving to cause maximum impact.

The rest is history, with another American Airlines plane being flown into the Pentagon in Washington and another United Airlines flight crashing in open country near Pittsburgh. The exact number of fatalities at the World Trade Centre is not yet clear. But at the time of writing there are believed to be in excess of 6000.


Babel

Several thousand years earlier, at the dawn of civilization, there was another disaster. This was in Mesopotamia. We are not told how or what precisely happened but just that it did happen. It too was at a time of progress and invention. Indeed, new building technologies had been invented. There was a project underway to build the tallest ziggurat in the world (a ziggurat being a Mesopotamian temple-tower). The account of what happened is given us in Genesis 11.3-4:

They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

Here, of course, is the same desire for human unity and human greatness. But the biblical analysis is that such a desire becomes demonic unless men and women share God's vision of unity and greatness. His vision is the very opposite, in may ways, of the world's vision. Greatness, Jesus said, comes from service, and unity is only and ultimately to be found in him. Greatness and power that ignore the ethical demands of God's law, and unity that is based on a philosophy that ignores God's claims, create a "Babylon". Babylon is the biblical example of, and then the biblical symbol for, a God-rejecting civilization, or State, that invariably becomes cruel and tyrannous in spite of all its initial glitz and aspirations. Ultimately it disintegrates. Nor is that just a theological judgment. It is a historical fact - witness Rome in the early Christian centuries and Nazi Germany, Stalinist USSR and Maoist China more recently.

The Bible (Genesis 11.5-9) in very simple terms describes the issues with Babel which is, of course, embryonic Babylon.

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel - because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

The Tower of Siloam

How should we react to the terrible horror that took place last month in New York? Surely the first thing to do in such a situation is to show compassion. There are now thousands who are mourning the loss of loved ones. We know that families have been devastated; businesses have been crippled; and many Americans who have never experienced an attack on their own soil before live in fear. So we should pray for those who suffer to realize that there is a "God of all comfort" and that he can "comfort us in all our troubles" (2 Cor 1.3-4). When Jesus was in the town called Nain, we are told his "heart went out" to a widow whose son had just died (Luke 7.13). We can do no less in respect of those bereaved as a result of the New York disaster.

But then questions inevitably arise - and they have been asked about everything from the intelligence services, to the design of the World Trade Centre, to immigration policies, to Islam in general and the Qur'an in particular, to the nature of the jihad, to the nature of Islamic Fundamentalism, to the ambitions of Osama bin Laden, to the decadence of the West, to the glory of the West, to the just war, to the nature of justice, and to the pivotal significance of Saudi Arabia and Israel at the present time. None of these questions can be ignored. But we surely should begin our analysis with Jesus' guidelines for thinking about disaster situations.

On one occasion Jesus was told about a terrible massacre. Some Galilean pilgrims were brutally killed under the orders of the Roman governor, Pilate, while in the very act of sacrificing, presumably in the Temple. But Jesus didn't want people to draw the wrong conclusions. And in his teaching he linked this tragedy concerning the Galileans with another one, the fatal collapse of the Tower of Siloam. At the time the tower was a landmark within the south-east section of the wall of Jerusalem. This is Luke's account of the events and Jesus' words (13.1-5):

Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them - do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish."


Jerry Falwell

This is of very great importance. In simple terms it warns us against simplistic judgments and saying that the individuals caught up in disasters are being punished because they are "worse sinners" than other people. Jesus emphatically says they are not. His implication is that all are sinners. So that included his audience and the brutal Pilate. Today it includes all those asking questions as well as all the people who died and their brutal Islamic killers. But Jesus also implies that while you cannot argue that all suffering is due to sin, sin may well lead to suffering. So he tells the people he is talking with to repent.

In the light of that, what are we to think about Jerry Falwell, the outspoken American Baptist pastor and former Moral Majority leader? Jerry Falwell appeared on TV a day after the terrorist attack had occurred. He decided not to criticize Islamic Fundamentalism but to major on faults that he saw at home in America. He was arguing that the root problem was the so called "liberal" agenda - for example, the exclusion of God from public education and the scandal of abortion: "when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are trying to make that an alternative lifestyle ... all of them who have tried to secularize America ... I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen'."

This was not the right thing to say on a day when most of America was still in a state of shock. "There is a time to be silent and a time to speak" (Eccles. 3.7). He was universally excoriated. Even his fellow TV evangelist, Pat Robertson, insisted that Falwell apologize (which he did). But was Falwell totally wrong? He perhaps should have said where he himself had gone wrong, rather than just speak about others. When disasters occur, the implication of Jesus teaching is that we should question how we ourselves have been living. Have we admitted our guilt and where we have gone wrong. For none of us can stand in judgment on others.

But that doesn't mean we cannot make judgments at all. Asserting the truth and being proud have no necessary connection. It is undoubtedly wrong to assert the truth proudly or arrogantly. But it is also undoubtedly wrong not to assert the truth when that is necessary. And the truth undoubtedly is that many Muslims world wide hate America and the West because of its perceived moral degeneracy. To say that is not to deny the hypocrisy of many Muslims. But the breakdown of the family, the permissive sexual culture and not least the homosexualization of the West is simply anathema to many Muslims and not just to extremists. In that respect it could be said that those who had worked for the demoralization of America in the last half of the twentieth century - the sort of people Falwell had in mind - had "helped this happen". And to say that is not to deny the proper use of force to bring to justice those who committed these crimes against humanity and to prevent further crimes against humanity. It is to admit sociological reality.


John Rodgers

The moral and spiritual condition of the world can no longer be ignored. Why was it that on Tuesday 25 September at the Party Conference of the Liberal Democrats the debate over relaxing the already lax censorship laws and giving encouragement to pornography was cancelled? If pornography is a good thing, why hold back because of the deaths of several thousand people? Is it because moral sanity is beginning to surface and people are realizing that there must be a limit to decadence?

That we need to view the current situation from a moral and spiritual perspective was brought home to me at the very moment the attacks were happening. I was sitting at my desk reading an e-mail from my good friend Bishop John Rodgers who preached at Jesmond last Autumn and who is one of the bishops working in AMiA (the American Mission in America). AMiA is a group of US Episcopalians who are resisting the theologically liberalizing drift in US Anglicanism with its disregard for the Bible and with its fixation on legitimizing homosexual sex and the ordaining of active homosexual clergy. The e-mail contained the report by a well-known US journalist about a homosexually abused Franciscan Friar who had recently committed suicide. He was a novice Friar and had been abused by one of the seniors of his order for almost a year "in the 'shiatsu' massage room of the friary at Long Island, the New York house of the Episcopal Society of St Francis." This resulted in severe depression and eventually suicide. According to his mother,

James [the young man] never recovered from the sexual abuse he received at the hands of the brothers at the Society of St Francis on Long Island. Despite all the counselling he remained depressed because he never got the justice he deserved. The Episcopal Church just buried the whole thing hoping it would go away. Furthermore the Episcopal Church's stance on homosexuality makes it impossible to condemn the behaviour even though it killed my son who was not a homosexual."

The account of this case is horrific and implicated bishops right to the top of the Episcopal Church. The mother's final comment was:

I hope his death is a wake up call for right thinking Episcopalians everywhere that homosexual behaviour, in fact any kind of sexual behaviour outside of heterosexual marriage, can cost you your life.

I had just read that sentence and was thinking, quite literally, "what will bring conviction and sense to the many in the church (in the UK as well as the US) who are in total defiance of God's laws?" when the phone rang. It was my daughter phoning from America. She wanted me to know what was going on. It was just after 2.00 pm (UK time) so just after the attacks had occured. I immediately switched on my TV and saw the unfolding tragedy.

That was certainly one of those coincidences that make you think. But will this be seen as "a wake up call" in any way? Some people seem to be saying it might be.


A New Era

Two commentators at opposite ends of the political spectrum think that we are facing the end of liberalism (or as it should be more corrrectly called "libertarianism"). On the one hand there is Christine Odone. She is the deputy editor of the New Statesman and writing in the Observer on Sunday 30 September she argued, referring to the attacks, that ...

... with a flourish of their knives, bin Laden and his disciples killed off the optimistic mindset that intellectuals and many among the middle class have subscribed to for the past two centuries ... They [the middle class intellectuals] seem unable to accept or even understand the contempt with which their creed is viewed by these strange men. They seem incapable of recognising that all along there was another vision, another set of values, that were taking shape ... Human nature, alas, is not always satisfied by an increase in salary or access to the internet. There are many people out there who long for far grander rewards, and who yearn for an ideology that claims to have the ultimate authority. For these people, anything else is banal and they will not be short-changed by some prosaic plea that, surely, we are all doing okay aren't we? Now that their sweet-natured mantra (reason is all we need to guide us, happiness in this world is all we need to aspire to) has been torched by the Taliban, what will liberals do?

On the other hand there is Paul Johnson who wrote the Saturday Essay in the Daily Mail on 15 September 2001. His piece was headed "Dawn of a New Age" and the sub-heading was "this week has signalled the death of liberalism. No longer will the West tolerate people and cultures that undermine its safety. We will see a new morality being born." And he asks: "Is the 21st century about to become the Age of Reaction, when the clock was put firmly back to severity, discipline and the implacable enforcement of the law?" He argues, "Yes!" and America will lead the way.

"Nor will the change of mood and direction be confined to combating terrorism. Just as, in the 20th century, liberal notions took over every aspect of our own society - from sex and the media to crime and punishment, from marriage and family life and the relations of parents to children to the replacement of traditional notions of duty by the pursuit of universal rights - so the reaction to the discredited values will spread gradually, but with growing speed, to every corner of our own permissive societies. It will affect such issues as divorce, abortion and illegitimacy, the nature of education, the conduct of universities, the upbringing of youth, the direction of scholarship and, not least, the future of religion and the fundamental dictates of morality ... Thus the French Revolutionary Terror of the 1790's shocked the world, led to a religious revival, and culminated in a recovery of values which produced the certitudes of the Victorian age.


Samuel Huntington

For a long time I have been persuaded by the thesis of Samuel Huntington in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Henry Kissinger calls this "one of the most important books to have emerged since the end of the Cold War". Huntington's view is that world affairs in the nineteenth century were chiefly determined by the nation-state, and in the twentieth century by ideology (e.g. Marxism and National Socialism), but in the twenty-first century they will be dominated by religion - by the conflict of civilizations, with civilizations being defined by cultures and cultures defined by religion. The collapse of Communism, according to Huntington, does not therefore point to a simple world-wide embrace of democratic capitalism and Western values and vices. Rather, he sees an era of conflict that will be deep seated and endemic. If this is true, the West will be at a great disadvantage, with its Christian culture having disintegrated under an elitist imposition of a non-cohesive relativism and pluralism. "Peoples and countries with similar cultures are coming together," writes Huntington. "Peoples and countries with different cultures are coming apart." If this is true and religion is at the heart of culture, religion will increasingly be a central, perhaps the central, force that motivates and mobilizes people.

Whether Huntington is right or not, it is quite clear that millions around the world are being motivated by religion. As Christians we can understand such a motivation. Therefore the ultimate solution to the current world situation can never be force - force can and must be used to ensure justice and to protect States. But you can never bomb people into changing their minds and hearts. If the root problem with Islam is a wrong understanding of the nature of God and his will, evangelism is the only answer. What is needed is not the power of cruise missiles but the power of the gospel. But in seeking to win Muslims to Christ we must show them much respect at the same time as we must, in all honesty, profoundly disagree with them.


Conclusion

We must be tolerant both of people of other faiths and of secularists. But we must understand that toleration is not indifference. Toleration implies disagreement. You can only tolerate those you disagree with, but you grant them freedom to hold their views. If you believe they are profoundly wrong, out of simple human concern, let alone Christian love, you will try to help them come to a right belief. But there can be no enforcing of belief. We must pray and, as we can, speak and then trust God. With people of other faiths we need to learn from Paul at Athens: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious ... [But] what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you" (Acts 17.22-23). With Western secularists it is often conceptually much harder. Perhaps, following 11 September 2001, things will become easier.