What is a Martial Hermeneutic?
If there is a name I had to give to the one overall thing I do other than human dignity for military families, it would a Martial Hermeneutic. Martial means anything pertaining to the military, and a Hermeneutic is any lens we use to interpret our surroundings. We might never do so consciously; maybe your hermeneutic is just your own personal experience and logic. There are some people, however, who choose to live an examined life by stepping outside themselves to see things in new and challenging ways.
Then there are those of us who take forever to realize our personal experience, contrary to what others might have us believe, is actually valuable in and of itself.
I went through seminary being told, both implicitly and explicitly, that my military experience had no positive value. Some Christian combat veterans publicly identify as penitent, as though it is anyone’s business but theirs and God’s. It took me nearly two decades of mistreatment and abuse to finally distrust anti-military hermeneutical approaches and believe in myself and my own interpretation.
So what is a Martial Hermeneutic, and why do we need one? I’ll let myself explain;
When I began to shed civilian theology (which I’ll write about soon), the Bible began to open up for me, like the skies above the Jordan River when John baptized Jesus, whose Anglicized name is actually Joshua. That matters because His name means salvation, just like the two preceding Joshua, Son(s) of; Nun’s son, the military commander, and Jozadak’s son, the high priest who built the second temple.
A martial hermeneutic asks us to consider the fact that Mary’s Son was baptized beside soldiers because he was the Divine Warrior sent to save humanity through spiritual combat. Regardless of what you may have heard, the early church never excluded military families because the Holy Family itself was one; the Father is a “man of war,” making [Joshua] a military brat.
Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing more insight from reading scripture through my own (trustworthy) military experience. If you want my reflections hot off the press, then you should subscribe to my TikTok channel, where I’ll put my rough sketches online before writing them out here on The ☧ost before revising them for publication on The Training Room (the Pew Pew blog).
Here are some of the videos I linked above all in one place so you can see them for yourself;
Jesus was baptized beside soldiers (if you believe the synoptic gospels)
Early Christians never excluded military families (so neither should we)
The name of God’s son is Joshua, not “Jesus” (and why it matters)
