Pro Deo et Patria? On Remembrance Day

As a follow-up to our discussion of Anzac Day, here's Kim Fabricius' sermon from Remembrance Day 2009

On 1 November 1988, All Saint’s Day, I took part in a service celebrating both the 500th anniversary of the translation of the Bible into Welsh and the brand new translation of the Bible into modern Welsh. The service took place at Westminster Abbey. It was the first, and indeed the only time, I have ever been to this most distinguished of English church buildings. Before the service began, the Dean of the Abbey took us through the protocol, including what we should do when the Queen arrived. “When, and how, should we bow?” it was asked. As a Free Churchman, I was duly impressed to hear the Dean’s answer: one does not bow to the Queen in the Abbey; in the Abbey, before God the King, royalty has no prerogative over commoner: before the Lord, you might say, all lances are of equal length.

Which image – the military image of a lance – got me to thinking again about Westminster Abbey. What a magnificent architectural testimony to centuries of British culture, tributes to poets and scientists. The Abbey also, of course, has been the site of the coronations of kings and queens for almost a thousand years. And there are monuments to prime ministers. But also woven into the exquisite tapestry of the Abbey is the glorification of the warrior. Behind the high altar, for example, is the Order of the Bath, dedicated to various knights, which includes a display of flags and swords. Above all, there are the two monuments that are the cornerstones of the entire structure. At the east end of the edifice there is the chapel dedicated to the Royal Air Force, honouring the courage of Churchill’s so few who were owed so much by so many. And at the opposite, west end of the Abbey, the revered Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, commemorating the one who “gave the most so that man might serve God, king, and country.” Part of the inscription is taken from John’s gospel (15:13): “Greater love hath no man than this.”

I am always deeply moved when I stand before war memorials. And yet the awe I felt in Westminster Abbey, the respect I feel before war memorials in any church, is always finally displaced by a deeper sense of disturbance – particularly when I look at the inevitable plaque on which are inscribed the words: “Pro Deo et patria”. The brilliant Great War poet Wilfred Owen, in “Dulce Et Decorum Est”, bitterly called it “the old lie” (the translation is “It is sweet and right / To die for your country”). Nor should it be overlooked that Owen took his famous line from an ode by Horace, the Latin poet, the Laureate of Rome – Rome, the great pagan empire and war machine, one of whose procurators, known as Pontius Pilate, sent our Lord to torture and death for the threat he posed to the way that all states do business when push comes to shove: namely, they lie to their own people and they kill people in other states.

That is what is so profoundly disturbing about Westminster Abbey and other churches: they honour people who kill other people, including other Christians, and they do it in the name of Britain or America – or Germany, for example – that is, they do it in our name, which is disturbing enough, but they also do it in the name of God, assuming that God is on the side of Britain or America – or Germany, for example – because God is always “God with us” – or in German, Gott mit uns. Or has any nation ever gone to war without assuming that God is on its side? But in a church, where God is not just any old deity, and certainly not the tribal deity of any nation, but the God and Judge of all nations (and who is the God of all nations but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ?), is that not profoundly disturbing?

The biblical inscription in Westminster Abbey – “Greater love hath no man than this…” – it goes on: “that a man lay down his life for his friends.” “But what such monuments miss is the rest of the story: the Jesus we praise in our places of Christian worship is the Jesus who did not seek to kill his enemies, but to love them. The Jesus we exalt taught us not to destroy our enemies, but to pray for them. The Jesus we adore demonstrated his bravery not while taking the life of an opponent, but while laying down his life for the good of those who hated him” (Lee Camp).

I mean no disrespect to those who have gone to war for any nation, let alone to those who have “paid the ultimate sacrifice”. I will not disrespect men and women who, in good conscience, have become soldiers. I am well aware that, despite society’s valorisation of the warrior, most soldiers find the killing fields to be wrenching dislocations from their own moral geography (which is why nothing produces peace activists like warfare, veterans being among the staunchest). I will not even disrespect Christian men and women who, in good faith, have become soldiers.

And as for presidents and prime ministers with their pompous pronouncements about the “national interest” and “our great cause”, well, yes, I seethe when they send away people – always young people, usually poorer young people – to kill or be killed; and as for the “enemy”, they don’t count, and the civilians are, literally not even counted. But, on the other hand, what else should one expect from statesmen who, prodigally, fashion armies and perfect weapons of mass destruction as if they will not, eventually, use them, and who deploy propaganda, disingenuously, as if mendacity and mayhem weren’t bloody blood brothers? No, finally, it’s not the soldiers, and not even the statesmen, it’s the church that drives me to despair – and to shame.

The church: until the fourth century the church was pacifist, not only because soldiers of the empire had to take oaths of loyalty to the emperor, and Christians were forbidden to pledge their allegiance to anyone but Christ – Christ alone was their Caesar – but above all because Christ, as the early church father Tertullian put it, “in disarming Peter, Jesus unbelted every soldier from that time forth.”

The church: with the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century, the church became the church of empire, and with the birth of nations in the sixteenth century, the church of this state and that – the word is “Christendom” – such that the church became the spiritual wing of temporal power and wealth, and, worse, itself took on the accoutrements of temporal power – coercion – and wealth – corruption.

The church: when dissenters spoke out against this abrogation of the practice of Jesus and the early church, when during and after the Reformation they formed communities of the non-violent – the Anabaptists, the Mennonites, the Quakers – they were marginalized and martyred by Catholics and mainline Protestants alike.

The church: and now, in the West, here we are, enterprises in the business of selling the commodity of religion, with all the usual concerns of shopkeepers – packaging the product, luring the punters, keeping them happy, outfoxing the competition – and the state is delighted as long as we keep the enterprise a private enterprise and don’t dare let it interfere with the public enterprise of Realpolitik. And here is the irony: exalting the nation that guarantees our “freedom” in the marketplace of religion, we maintain the religion we are free to practice – how? – precisely by setting aside the way of Jesus in whose name we practice it.

So no, I will not disrespect soldiers, or be inordinately shocked by unscrupulous politicians, or even by the international dealers in destruction who operate on the cynical principle that “War is good business: invest your son”. For how should these people know any better when they have been baptised into churches that have colluded in chiselling that chilling inscription – Pro Deo et Patria – on war memorials all over the world, which is engraved in most people’s minds, too, like stone? No, it is to the church, and the church’s leadership, which this morning I represent, that I will say, “For shame!” For we have failed you by not radically problematising war – all war – and by not firmly fixing your faith on Jesus of Nazareth, the man who stalks the pages of the gospels, unmistakably and indefectibly preaching and practicing the way of non-violence, and who, as Risen Lord, continues to call, “Follow me!”

Jesus is the bearer of a radical new way of being human: free from the compulsion of being in charge, of thinking that we can fix things by breaking things; free to be obedient rather than effective, and effective only as salt, not steel, is effective; free to believe that little flocks of sheep, and not big packs of wolves, are the bearer of God’s purpose for the world; and free, finally, to see that the question of non-violence is not “Is it realistic?” but simply “Should it be?” And then to trust that “if it should, then God can,” and that “whether we can depends only on whether we believe and obey” (John Howard Yoder, adapted).

Peacemaking and Afghanistan: another look at Obama's Nobel Prize address

A guest-post by Glen Stassen, Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics, Fuller Theological Seminary

The recent discussion of President Obama’s Nobel Prize Address focused on his use of just war and realism to justify the Afghan War. He did mention “just war” three times. But he emphasized “just peace” four times. He mentioned only three criteria of just war, but all ten practices of just peacemaking.

His theme: “No matter how justified, war promises human tragedy…. Concretely, we must direct our effort to the task that President Kennedy called for long ago… ‘a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature, but on a gradual evolution in human institutions.’” He asked: “What might these practical steps be?”

Just peacemaking is a new ethic of peace and war. It names ten practical steps that work to make peace, and calls on us to prod governments to take those steps. This is set forth in the book, Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War (Pilgrim Press 2008). The consensus of thirty scholars, this book is based on the plain truth that it makes no sense to spend our time debating whether we approve of a war as just, if we don’t also debate the practices that work to prevent war. To debate that, we need to know the practices that have proven to work in making peace. What is truly remarkable is that now we have a president who understands the practices of just peacemaking, and advocates them in a major international address.

The thirty authors who reached consensus on just peacemaking include both just war theorists and pacifists. We don’t agree on whether war is sometimes justified or not. Not only the pacifists, but many just war theorists think the Afghan War is not justified; the Taliban didn’t attack the Twin Towers or any other nation; their focus is local. They always defeat foreign occupiers.

But we all agree on the ten practices that prevent many wars, and does Obama. If we miss his emphasis on the ten practices of just peacemaking, we'll miss his intention, and so miss the new paradigm for the ethics of peace and war that gives us new hope. Obama is nothing if he is not about giving reason to hope for something better. He concluded his address: “For all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate.”

One practice of just peacemaking is to acknowledge our own complicity in conflict and injustice. Obama began: “I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated…. I’m responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed.” And he acknowledged the threats of terrorism, new technologies of war, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the fact that though wars between nations have decreased dramatically, wars within nations still take many lives. Thus he pulled the thorn of controversy over his award and demonstrated the humility and respect that are keys to peacemaking.

Just peacemaking says talking and practicing conflict resolution with enemies, even enemies we have strong disagreements with, often solves problems better than war does. Obama said: Nixon met with Mao, despite Mao’s ordering the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, “and it surely helped set China on a path where millions of its citizens have been lifted from poverty and connected to open societies.” Pope John Paul engaged with Poland, and it created space for the Catholic church, and for Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement that toppled the dictatorship. Ronald Reagan talked with Gorbachev, and it resulted in arms control, in empowering dissidents throughout Eastern Europe, and in the Soviet Union coming to a peaceful end. So we should talk with North Korea and Iran, and the dictatorial government of Burma, in search of human rights for their people, despite strong disagreements with those governments.

Obama praised the just peacemaking practice of nonviolent direct action, practiced by Gandhi and King, very personally. “As someone who stands here as a living testimony to Dr King’s work, I am living testimony to the force of non-violence.” He praised Aung Sang Suu Kyi in Burma, and the nonviolent demonstrators in Iran: “It is the responsibility of all free people and free nations to make clear that these movements… have us on their side.”

Throughout the address, he argued for international cooperation. Evidence in the book, Just Peacemaking, says nations that engage in international cooperation experience war less often. Obama said of his commitment to international cooperation: “That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanimo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America’s commitment to abide by the Geneva Convention.” No nation “can insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves.”

Supporting the UN, too, decreases wars. Obama reminded us that the United States led in creating the United Nations, and “there has been no Third World War.” Throughout, he argued for the just peacemaking practice of supporting human rights. He supported international (not unilateral) sanctions and humanitarian intervention for the sake of human rights.

Furthermore, “a just peace includes not only civil and political rights—it must encompass economic security and opportunity…. For true peace is not just freedom from fear; but freedom from want.” He gave credit to the Marshall Plan and economic development in Europe for helping prevent World War Three.

And encouraging the spread of democracy spreads peacemaking. Only when Europe achieved democracy did it achieve peace, Obama said. As just peacemaking points out, though democracies may do wrong, and sometimes fight or support wars, they do not send their troops to make wars against other democracies. Obama pointed out that “America has never fought a war against a democracy.”

Reducing offensive weapons is a practice of just peacemaking. Obama committed himself to working with Russia to reduce nuclear weapons, and “to work toward a world without them.” Just peacemaking also calls for supporting grass-roots groups that work for peacemaking. Obama gave his support to the movements of Aung Sang Suu Kyi, Gandhi, King, Mandela, and the Solidarity Movement in Poland. (I was there in East Germany. Bitterfeld story. Hans Modrow addressing Parliament. I wept.)

The independent initiatives he commended were taken by “those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened cynics.” He concluded by acknowledging realism, and then advocated the practical work of just peacemaking: “Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace…. That’s the hope of all the world; and at this moment of challenge, that must be our work here on earth.”

Remarkable! Maybe we have a just peacemaking president. The Nobel Prize Committee thinks we do. I hope they prove right. Let us pray, realistically, that he doesn’t end up being remembered as the Afghan War President.

Obama and Afghanistan: the poverty of Niebuhrian ethics

by Kim Fabricius (originally printed in this month's Reform magazine, as a response to Ron Buford)

Jesus said, “Love your Niebuhr.” Or so Ron Buford would have us believe in his standing ovation for Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam – oops, I mean Afghanistan. (Sorry about that: we Americans have a lousy sense of world geography, not to mention an inexhaustible ignorance about regional cultures and histories. Which is why wherever our expeditionary forces go, even as they blow away one demon, there are always plenty more to take its place). Certainly, as Mr Buford notes, Obama loves his Niebuhr – his Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971). In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the president liberally deployed the language of the influential American theologian.

The appeal of Niebuhr’s social ethics is clear: it’s the Yankee pragmatism and “realism”. But its rich pickings for Obama cannot disguise its profound theological poverty. A loyal two-kingdoms Lutheran, Niebuhr was completely candid that the ethics of Jesus has no moral purchase in the realm of power politics.

That the gospel redefines what is “real”, and what is possible and practical; that in his life, death, and resurrection Jesus has actually inaugurated the eschatological transformation of the world; and that the Holy Spirit is now present and active in bringing God’s new creation to perfection – these facts of faith simply do not factor in the moral calculus of Niebuhr’s finally quite pagan and pessimistic reading of geopolitics. Hence the cynical reduction of the option for Christians, in the face of evil rulers, repeated by Mr Buford, to either blessing US military interventions or “doing nothing”. As if the way of non-violence were unreal, as if radical pacifists were political layabouts! On the contrary, as Niebuhr’s theological nemesis, the radical Christian pacifist John Howard Yoder, acutely observed, it is not the wielders of swords but the bearers of crosses who are ultimately “working with the grain of the universe.”

Of course even on the grounds of Niebuhrian realism the war in Afghanistan is widely, expertly contested as not only unjust but also tragically self-defeating. Obama’s Vietnam? Interestingly, Niebuhr himself, always ambivalent about President Johnson’s war in southeast Asia, ultimately confessed, in 1967, that “For the first time I fear I am ashamed of our beloved nation.” However the essential theological point for Christians is this. The central premise of Niebuhr’s social ethics is that the nation is the bearer of history. But the premise is false (a point made by Lawrence Moore in his splendid January Bible study on the “wilderness”). According to the New Testament, it is the church, the body of Christ, which transcends all national identities and loyalties; the church, however impotent it may seem, that is the true bearer of history. Unsurprisingly, Niebuhr is deafeningly silent on the subject of ecclesiology. For Mr Buford too, it would seem, the church is here, not to be a counter-political community, but, at best, to tweak the conscience of the state.

Even when Caesar is a good guy – and I take Obama to be a good guy, despite his idleness over Israel and his hyperactivity in Afghanistan – it is always a bad idea for the church to hitch its wagon to his military-industrial express, and to concede that, when push comes to shove, Christians may have to behave in ways that contradict the commands of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And there you have the ultimate tragedy of mainstream American Christianity, liberal as well as conservative: it thinks it can serve two masters. In that respect, even Obama remains mesmerised by the heathen myth of American exceptionalism.

Theology FAIL: Christians enjoy killing

OK, the world is filled with bad theology. But you'll seldom come across anything as bad as this – in a 2005 essay entitled "Onward Christian Soldiers", Gene Edward Veith asks the question: "Should a Christian soldier take pleasure in killing people?"

He replies that war is "fun" since we have a "primal love of war". There is "a pleasure in battle", an "excitement, exhilaration, and a fierce joy that go along with combat". We should "appreciate our troops' facility in fulfilling their purpose, namely, killing the enemy." Christians with a military vocation should thus "go forward with joy"; quoting Luther, Veith counsels Christian soldiers to "smite [their enemies] with a confident and untroubled spirit." And so his remarkable theological conclusion: "As in other vocations, so in the military, there is nothing wrong with enjoying one's work."

A friend came by my office today and read me this passage aloud. I burst out laughing, thinking for a moment that it was a parody. But alas, I was mistaken. Which just goes to show that the test of Very Bad Theology is whether it's beyond parody.

The things that make for peace

I’ll be in Canberra tonight, launching a new book on justice and peacemaking: Heather Thomson, The Things That Make for Peace (Barton Books 2009). Here’s a brief excerpt from the talk I'll be giving about the book:

The book’s whole argument is grounded in an analogy between divine justice and transitional justice – where an unstable and turbulent political order mobilises new instruments, such as judicial mechanisms, amnesties and truth commissions, in order to move into the peace and justice of a new regime. God’s own justice is like this, Thomson argues. Divine justice establishes a new constitution and a new political order, and issues amnesties so that we may enter into the new regime with a clean slate. In this way, we are enabled to make the transition from the regimes that govern this world into the reign of God.

This vision of divine justice, Thomson observes, is something we see in Jesus, the one whose entire life was an argument – to the death – about ‘what God is like, what God requires of us, what God’s justice is like’. The atonement is not about satisfying divine justice, but about establishing a new reign that differs fundamentally from ‘the authoritarian, violent and repressive rule that belongs to this world’. The atonement ‘mediates a regime change’, so that we are led out ‘from the power and kingdoms of this world’ into the kingdom of God. As part of this transition, God forgives our sins – just as a new regime may issue amnesties so that citizens can leave behind their former political allegiances and enter guiltless into the collective project of a new common life. The death of Jesus thus opens up a space of metanoia, a change of mind in which we renounce our former allegiance to the violent powers of this world, and enter into the new reign of the Prince of Peace.

Easter sermon: no payback!

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

Two numbers forever etched in our memories of infamy: 9/11. Reflecting back on the event a year later, one commentator (Stanley Hauerwas) wrote: It was “an apocalyptic moment Christians in America cannot ignore. Surely something like how we felt as we survived the days after September 11, 2001, is how the followers of Jesus felt after the crucifixion”: disbelief, confusion, grief, anger – and fear. We were all afraid of further acts of terror. The disciples too were afraid of further acts of terror – the state terror – of imperial Rome. What happened next?

For the followers of Jesus, there were two days of total eclipse, and then – resurrection! – an even more apocalyptic moment than the crucifixion: in Jewish thought resurrection belonged to the scenario of the end-times, when God would bring the old world of suffering and death to a dramatic conclusion and begin a new world of justice and joy. Surely a cause for celebration, you might think. But – observe – the immediate reaction of the disciples to the presence of the risen Christ is not joy – but, again, fear. A different kind of fear, the commentators tell us, than frightened fear, rather “awe” in the presence of the holy. But I wonder if there isn’t a bit of special pleading here. I wonder if there wasn’t that same fear-as-fright about their reaction, except now with a different object: not Caiaphas and Pilate but Jesus himself. For had not the cowardly disciples denied, betrayed, abandoned their leader to his fate? In other words, hadn’t they behaved in such a way as to invite and expect some sort of payback? Indeed, isn’t it that the most astonishing thing of all about the resurrection of Jesus: there was no payback!

Think of 9/11 again. On the third day, as it were, America rises from the dead, from the ashes of Ground Zero. What is the immediate reaction of the nation, embodied in the melodramatic speeches, soon to become military policy, of George Bush? What else but payback? First the easy pickings of Afghanistan, then the full-scale invasion of Iraq; and now here we are, five years later, with George Bush unbowed and unrepentant, in defiance of reason and evidence still speaking the empty rhetoric of freedom and democracy, still claiming that he did the right thing, and, notwithstanding the current anarchy and slaughter, eyes wide shut in denial, still declaring that he’d do it again: bring the superior firepower of the US, its swift and righteous sword, to bear on the evil and cowardly terrorists.

But after Easter, what does the crucified and risen Jesus do? Does he respond to his execution by marshalling that legion of angels he refused to deploy on Golgotha, smashing his way into the imperial palace with shock and awe, overwhelming the hopelessly outgunned royal guard, and exacting a righteous and terrible revenge on Pilate, who, of course, had form as a ruthless tyrant long before his showdown with the rebel from Galilee? Does he storm the Temple in a way that makes the disruptive demonstration the Sunday before look like the piece of street theatre that, in fact, it was, then advance beyond the court of Gentiles and invade the court of priests, seize the hapless Caiaphas and – how ironically apt – cast him from the spire he had once stood atop with the devil himself? Does he round up those reprehensible disciples, perhaps hood and humiliate them, or take them down to the pool of Bethesda for a bit of waterboarding, which, after all, isn’t really torture, or, at the very least, give them a tongue-lashing they’ll never forget and send them away in guilt and despair? None of the above. No violence, no vengeance – no payback!

So what does the crucified and risen Jesus do? He ignores Pilate and Caiaphas, his judges and executioners, completely. And when he meets his followers – who would believe it! – he says things like, “Do not be afraid,” and “Peace be with you.” He shows them his wounds to reassure them, and to demonstrate that even in his regnant glory his decorations will always be scars. And he commissions them to carry on his ministry – how? As avenging furies, agents of retribution? (“I’ll be back, through you, my shock troops, and this time it’s personal.”) No, no payback! Indeed the mission impossible he gives them is a ministry of forgiveness and reconciliation.

But why should this surprise us? Hadn’t the crucified One already disarmed his disciples in the garden, and forgiven his killers on Calvary? Will the risen One now change his mind? In John’s gospel Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on the disciples as he gives them the gift of peace (John 20:21-22). This is John’s version of Luke’s Pentecost. But the peace of Christ is not for them alone. The man for others (Bonhoeffer) commissions a church for others. The peace they receive they must share, declare, and effect. And this peace takes the form of – forgiveness! Jesus says: “If you forgive people’s sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven” (John 20:23). And though the construction looks like a conditional, as if forgiveness were discretionary – as if the disciples might grant forgiveness to this one but withhold it from that one – the key to Jesus’ command is its gracious sweep and urgency. Forgiveness itself is God’s judgement on sin, and forgiveness itself is the condition that makes justice possible. Wrath – whatever that might mean – must be left to the Father. This is John’s version of Matthew’s Great Commission.

Am I suggesting that forgiveness become the central plank of the West’s ethical foreign policy against terrorism? A counter-question: why the absolute astonishment, indeed repugnance, with which Christian themselves react to such a suggestion? Does it not, in fact, demonstrate – in the sense of “what difference does it make to our discipleship?” – that we do not live the truth that Jesus is the risen Lord, that we ignore the events of Holy and Easter week, as well as his life and teaching, that we honour the seventh beatitude more in the breach than the observance; rather we live as if Caesar (in whatever guise) were Lord, as if the events recorded in our tabloids rather than the stories of Jesus in the Bible define the “real” world, as if violence rather than peace were the origin, goal, and very grain of the universe? If being Christian trumped being American, British, or whatever, and if the church itself practiced a politics of peace, then at least we would have something to say to government that wasn’t the mere echo of its own loud voice.

It is a commonplace to say that the autumn of 2001 changed everything. In fact, 9/11 and its six-year wake has changed nothing. No, it was a spring weekend in the year 33, when there was a most rude interruption to the way the world does its business – a gruesome gibbet, an empty tomb, an unarmed man passing through barricades, waging peace – that is what changed everything. Though you wouldn’t know it. And why on earth should anyone, governments included, believe it when even the church doesn’t?

The American theologian Stanley Hauerwas was once asked, in his dissent from the war on terrorism: “Well, what alternative foreign policy do you have to bombing Afghanistan [and invading Iraq]?” Hauerwas replied: “My only response is [that] I do not have a foreign policy. I have something better – a church constituted by people who would rather die than kill.” People who believe in a saviour who would rather die than kill, who did die rather than kill, and who lives and rules the world – no payback! – with truth and grace, because God is non-violent, and in him there is no violence at all.

Not peace but the sword: reflections on peace, Hauerwas and the trivial

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

Peace is one of the most deceptive terms in public discourse. Consequently, it is not at all clear to me that people know what they are referring to when they talk about peace. Take the current political climate: peace most commonly refers to not having been part of the invasion of Iraq in the first place, or now getting the hell out of Iraq and thus bringing an end to our part in this bloody war. When it comes to Iraq itself, the West’s dreams of peace are for an end to sectarian violence and the emergence of some kind of nascent democratic society. And yet even at this point things are not what they seem.

Notice, for instance, that the recommendations coming out of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) have increasingly stressed the importance of the creation of low-wage employment for Iraqi youths (who comprise over sixty percent of the population). The rationale is: get them spending all their time working and saving for clothes, leisure activities or a new iPod and they won’t have either the energy or the motivation to kill other Iraqis. What I find remarkable about this is not just that the grand American rhetoric of ‘bringing freedom to Iraq’ is reduced to the more banal image of adolescent Iraqis flipping falafels at some street vendor in Baghdad. It is the way that this image reflects back to Western democratic societies its fantasies of what peaceful existence looks like. Let me explain what I mean.

The fundamental delusion that rationalised America’s invasion of Iraq was the belief that, once set free from the grasp of a maniacal tyrant, Iraqis would spontaneously adopt recognisably democratic forms of social life. In other words, they believed that beneath the skin we are all American, and that the longing for freedom, peace and the advantages of the free market run deep in the human soul. The reality of the situation, however, was that deposing Saddam Hussein opened the gates of hell. As George Packer wrote in The Assassins’ Gate, ‘Iraq without the lid of totalitarianism clamped down has become a place of roiling and contending ethnic claims’.

This state of affairs should have come as no surprise, for the chaos to which the nation reverted post-Saddam was anticipated in King Faisal’s chilling description of his own people in 1933: they are, he said, ‘unimaginable masses of human beings devoid of any patriotic ideas, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever’. Far from releasing Iraqis from the terror of the Ba’athist régime so that some repressed longing for peace could bloom, the American invasion exposed the inherent violence and sheer bloodlust that had been held in check for four decades.

My point here is not to try to exaggerate the violent nature of the Iraqi people, but rather to call into question the widespread belief that peaceableness is a quality that underlies the human condition, which is allowed to surface whenever the external determinants of tyranny or extremism are removed. Is it not rather that human beings partake in a violence so profound that it dwarfs even the most aggressive mammalian behaviour? And are humans not remarkable for their natural incapacity to organize themselves peacefully? These were the observations that troubled Thomas Hobbes, whose immense political theology stemmed from the conviction ‘that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.’ War, for Hobbes, is not an exceptional state of mass violence that interrupts a more fundamental tranquillity. War is the human condition itself.

(I have to admit that I like Stephen King’s variation on this same theme. In one of his more gruesome novels, Cell, there is a kind of electromagnetic ‘Pulse’ that is transmitted through mobile phones, which seemingly produces uncontrollable aggression in its recipients. As the book progresses, though, it is revealed that the Pulse didn’t introduce or generate this bloodthirsty animalism; it simply wiped away the veneer of human civility, exposing – to use Carl Jung’s phrase – our more fundamental ‘blood-consciousness’. Here’s how one character explains it to his companions: ‘At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago.’)

What then of the so-called ‘peace’ enjoyed and promoted by democratic societies? Isn’t it apparent from the Pax Americana that now holds sway – whether at home or abroad – that such peace has become little more than an obsession with the trivial, a benevolent boredom, or worst of all, the inalienable right to excess? It acts, in other words, like a palliative, a form of cultural sedation aimed at distracting us from our violent predisposition, all the while satisfying our bloodlust through vicarious means (television, movies, sport, etc.).

I think it is important at this point to register the extent of my disagreement with Stanley Hauerwas, someone I otherwise greatly respect, on just this question of the substance and character of peace. For all his notorious anti-American rhetoric, it seems to me that on this very point he remains an unreconstructed ‘good ol’ boy’, and his ethical program is perfectly at home within the greater Pax Americana.

I have already suggested that the conception of peace as a deeper (ontological) reality than violence – a concept that is fundamental for Hauerwas, John Milbank and David Bentley Hart – is theologically problematic and ethically impotent. But it is the way that Hauerwas characterises a life narrated by nonviolence as one of profound boredom, marked by the willingness to enjoy the trivial (he often likens the life committed to nonviolence to watching baseball) that I find deeply problematic. For he seems thereby to have accepted in advance the price to be paid for becoming a beneficiary of this idolatrous peace: that we abandon any kind of moral seriousness, renounce every ‘higher’ cause – such a subordination of one’s life to the state, party or cause, Hauerwas says, ‘is the character of totalitarian regimes’.

At this point, isn’t Hauerwas pandering directly to the American obsession with leisure? And further, is this depiction of the ethical life as one which ‘takes time for the trivial’ not an uncanny reiteration of George W. Bush’s urging of people to fight terrorism by continuing to indulge in the excesses of the American way of life? Hauerwas thus unwittingly confirms the accuracy of Slavoj Žižek’s recent observation, that ‘the split between the First and Third World runs increasingly along the lines of an opposition between leading a long, satisfying life full of material and cultural wealth, and dedicating one’s life to some transcendent cause. We in the West are immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything.’

Perhaps now, more than ever, it is important to be reminded of Jesus’ words, which war against this pseudo-peace – whether the bloody peace-through-submission of the Pax Romana, or the indolent peace-through-sedation of our current Pax Americana: ‘Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!’ The intense conflict introduced by Jesus and radicalised in his resurrection, cuts through every organic or ethnic tie (family, nation, gender), leaving those who follow him alone and unprotected in a world determined by self-interest. The apostle Paul goes even further, locating this conflict at the level of the Dawkinsian ‘selfish genes’ themselves – his term for which is ‘flesh’. If there is any peace recognized by Christianity, it is this experience of being profoundly disconnected within a world that knows only violence.

But today, the Church has traded peace for leisure, whoring after the trinkets of our pleasure economy and abandoning its calling to risk everything for the sake of Christ’s kingdom. Our Easter declaration that ‘Jesus is Lord’ is a manifesto for the only peace that really counts. Will we have ears to hear?

Ten stations on my way to Christian pacifism

by Kim Fabricius (this is also part of Halden’s series on pacifism)

1. I graduated from Huntington High School (New York) in 1966 and Wesleyan University in 1970. The Cold War and the nuclear arms race; the brutal reactions to the Civil Rights Movement and racial integration; the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, and of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King; the executions of Caryl Chessman and Adolf Eichmann; the riots in Watts, Detroit, Newark, and other major American cities; the war in Vietnam; the shootings at Kent State: these images of death were an inescapable and invasive reality of the years of my youth, even though my rather privileged upbringing provided a shelter, if not a bolthole, from the storm.

2. At Wesleyan I majored in English. My teachers included Ihab Hassan and Richard Slotkin. Hassan, through Freud and Norman O. Brown, introduced me to the psychic god Thanatos; Slotkin, through his work on the myth of the American frontier, to our national god Mars: violence – its appropriation and legitimation so central to American self-identity. The Power of Blackness, the title of Harry Levin’s seminal study of the leitmotif running through the fiction of Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, sums up the Augustinian take on the human condition that was shaping my spiritual formation, for, pagan that I was, the Confessions too had made a powerful intellectual impact.

3. And then there was Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: I discovered that Kurtz’s heart was my heart. Although all through adolescence I never got into fistfights, I was aware of an aggressive streak running like a coal seam through my character, safely, indeed rewardingly, sublimated into a fierce competitiveness in study and sport. “The horror! The horror!” of it only became deeply personal during several ugly experiences at the tail end of the sixties and the spring of 1970. The grim months between the murders of King and Bobby Kennedy and the invasion of Cambodia were a national nadir that aptly coincided with my sense of self-defeat and depression.

4. Eventually Jesus Christ, armed only with his word, launched his attack on me, and, exposing my situation as infinitely more hopeless than I had ever suspected, rescued me from behind enemy lines – though to this day I continue to skirmish and resist. As, of course, does the world. It never occurred to me that, with the peace of God, the personal isn’t the political – and vice-versa. II Corinthians 5:16-19 was a key text and force as I headed off to Oxford for my ministerial training. While Martin Luther King was a role model (his collection of sermons Strength to Love were inspirational), it was above all Karl Barth to whom I turned during my three years at Mansfield College, as I tried to think through and work out a personal and political theology that I could live – and preach.

5. Barth seriously engaged the ethics of war, considered the “inflexible No of pacifist ethics”, and judged that it “has practically everything in its favour and its position is almost overwhelmingly strong.” However Barth rejected “absolute” pacifism, allowing for what he called the Grenzfall, the exceptional case, where war-making is not only permitted but commanded. While Barth himself did not directly cite classical just war theory (not surprisingly given his rejection of casuistry, not to mention the theory’s origins in the philosophy of natural law), nevertheless I had enough respect for Augustine, Aquinas, and modern revisionists, and sufficient scruple about the staple example of the Second World War, to factor it into my thinking. Result: about the time of my ordination in 1982, I was an “almost pacifist”.

6. Nuclear pacifism was a whistle stop. In the face of WMD, just war theory buckled and collapsed. I am proud to say that my own United Reformed Church (UK) passed a resolution on unilateral nuclear disarmament by a two-thirds majority at its 1983 General Assembly – a position, alas, not reflected in local congregations where the realpolitik idol of deterrence was – and is – widely worshipped. Such grass roots Reformed recalcitrance, and the dithering of the Church of England, as well as Margaret Thatcher’s rout of the Labour Party in the 1983 General Election (Labour’s election manifesto was unilateralist – and was dubbed “the longest suicide note in history”), only hardened my resolve and drove me further to radicalise my thinking.

7. I should say that at no time did I have any truck with two kingdoms doctrine, in spite of clarifications and fine-tuning by theologians like Pannenberg. My thoroughly Reformed understanding of the universal Lordship of Christ over church and world (or state) precluded any such Lutheran “compromises”. As for Niebuhr’s Christian “realism”, theological “stoicism” is more like it: paper-thin doctrines of the Spirit and the church, issuing in a cynical attitude towards sanctification and regeneration, and behind it all a mythological take on the resurrection of Christ. On the other hand, Reformed theology (pace Barth) gave little guidance to my developing pacifism. Ironically, here it took a Lutheran to keep me on the straight and narrow – and a Mennonite to take me the rest of the way.

8. The Lutheran was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I had already discovered and dismissed the four traditional interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount: as a “counsel of perfection”, reserved for the monastery; as a “mirror of sin” (Luther’s usus pedagogicus legis), driving us to despair and the sola fide; as an “impossible ideal”, inspiring us to high moral endeavour; and as an apocalyptic “interim ethic” (the thesis of Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer). However it took Bonhoeffer, in The Cost of Discipleship, to resurrect the perfectionist conception – what he called the “extraordinary” – only now understood as gospel, not law, and for all disciples, not just the few. It was also Bonhoeffer who taught me to take “activist non-violence” (Ronald Sider), which he admired in Ghandi and would be deployed to such effect by Martin Luther King, not just as a tactical ethic, the answer to the “realist” utopian critique, but as a divine command to be obeyed irrespective of results.

9. The Mennonite, of course, was John Howard Yoder (with a nod to the then Methodist Stanley Hauerwas as a sandal-bearer). The Christology of The Politics of Jesus deepened my imitatio Christi pacifism and added an eschatological context with resurrection power to its cruciform shape. Yoder’s kingdom-centred ecclesiology combined with his ecumenical vision re-energised my commitment to a Just Peace Church. Then Karl Barth and the Problem of War pinpointed several major inconsistencies in Barth’s ethics of war, suggested a failure in Barth’s theological nerve as well as his political imagination, and resolved any lingering suspicions that Christian pacifism might be a hubristic occlusion, rather than an obedient expression, of the freedom of God.

10. Finally, if Christian pacifism has – and it has – its basis in Jesus, the non-violent one whose power is perfected in weakness, and if Jesus is – and he is – the human hermeneutic of God, and, further, if theological construction begins with the economic Trinity and works back to the immanent Trinity as its eternal source and substantiation – in short, if God is non-violent, and in him there is no violence at all – then, clearly, not only urgent ethical, but also major doctrinal reconfigurations are in order, not least in soteriology, which should be very high, as a pacifist’s Christology should be very high. And pneumatology too. And that takes me back to – me, the violent me, the reluctantly peaceful me – the me thus so suitably equipped for pacifism. Because (purloining Barth), pacifism is an impossible possibility, and because (purloining Jüngel) pacifism is not necessary but more than necessary, at the heart of Christian pacifism lies prayer, the prayer: “Veni, Creator Spiritus!”

Postscript
There is, of course, no single variety of Christian pacifism, and several typologies have been suggested delineating various historical and normative positions. You will find a recent, helpful classification in David L. Clough and Brian Stiltner, Faith and Force: A Christian Debate about War (2007). In their “scales”, my own brand of Christian pacifism is principled rather than (merely) strategic (calculative and consequentialist); classical rather than absolute (the former allowing for legitimate domestic and, in theory, international policing functions, the latter entailing anarchism); politically engaged rather than separatist; and universal in intent rather than (merely) communal (because Christ is Lord not just of the church but of the world).

The witness of chaplaincy

I posted a link recently to Scott’s critique of military chaplaincy. My friend Cam has now responded with a post defending the legitimate witness of chaplaincy. He writes:

“Whether or not one believes that the exercise of violence is ever legitimate, … the presence of violence in any culture does not preclude the possibility of legitimate Christian witness…. The vocation of chaplains is integral to the formation of witnessing communities in the military which legitimately use its particular language and culture to demonstrate and proclaim the shalom of God’s kingdom.”

The witness of chaplaincy

Over at Swords to Plowshares, Scott asks whether military chaplaincy can be a valid form of Christian witness. And he also points us to some excellent online video-lectures by Stanley Hauerwas.

Kim Fabricius, nuclear madness, and the BBC

In the UK, as you’ll know, the House of Commons has approved the government’s plan (in defiance of international law) to replace Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons system.

Our own theological pacifist, Kim Fabricius, was on BBC radio this morning, debating the ethics of nuclear deterrence with an Anglican priest (who offers the frightening argument that weapons of mass destruction might help to usher in God’s kingdom).

It’s an appropriately heated and vigorous discussion – you can catch it online here (starting about 7 minutes into the programme).

Blogging for peace

Our friend Michael Westmoreland-White has launched a new blog-ring for Christian Peace Bloggers – you can read about it here. If you’re interested in a theology of non-violence, you might like to consider joining.

Here’s a related quote from Joe R. Jones: “The church violates its own mission of witness to God when it does not have the practices for peace in the world at the forefront of its outreach practices. The peace the church works for is the peace of God’s kingdom – God’s shalom – in which people flourish without fear of violence and reprisal. The practices of making and promoting peace, even in their truncated and broken historical forms, are essential to the church’s witness to God as the Supreme Lord of peace, to Jesus Christ as the Prince of Peace” (A Grammar of Christian Faith, Vol. 2, pp. 632-33).

The question of pacifism: a response to Kim Fabricius

Over at Nothing New Under the Sun, Andrew Errington has started a new series in response to Kim’s various posts here on Shalomism (i.e. pacifism). Andrew agrees with Kim that the question of pacifism should be settled christologically – but his counter-question is: “Does the pacifist position inevitably end up with a Jesus who dies but is not then exalted?”

It will certainly be interesting to see how this series unfolds!

Why I am a Shalomite

Excerpts from a sermon by Kim Fabricius (read the whole thing here)

All my sermons have titles. I thought of calling this one “Why I Am a Pacifist.” But the term is too loaded to be of any theological use. So the title is, instead, “Why I Am a Shalomite.” It’s a term I made up – shalom, as you know, is the Hebrew word for peace, and includes the notions of human well-being and creation perfected. […]

As the American Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it – because he puts it so much better than I could: “Non-violence is not one among other behavioural implications that can be drawn from the gospel but is integral to the shape of Christian convictions.” And further – and to the point of the point: “Nonviolence is not just one implication among others that can be drawn from our Christian beliefs; it is the very heart of our understanding of God.” You see I am a Shalomite – and I believe that at least all Christians and, in principle, all people should be Shalomites – not because of anything I know about the world or human beings, or through a calculus of war and peace, “but because of something I know about Jesus” (William Willimon) and because of something Jesus knows about God: namely, that God is a God of Shalom, that (to adapt what St John says about God and light and darkness) God is non-violent and in him there is no violence at all.

And what is Christian ethics, what is the very heart of following the way of Jesus, if not learning to be like the God of Jesus? And how do we learn to be like the God of Jesus if not by obeying the teaching of Jesus? And what is the teaching of Jesus if not: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven…. Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:43-48)?

We are called to be like God: perfect as God is perfect. It is a perfection that comes by following and learning to be like this particular man Jesus of Nazareth. That is why being a Shalomite is not an ethic of principles, laws, values, or consequences, but an ethic that derives from and demands that we attend to the life and teaching of this specific individual who challenged his culture of violence by engaging in active non-violence, and who ended up on a cross. End of story, you might say, because Jesus of Nazareth is indeed the end of story, the climax of the story, God’s story of creation and redemption: the crucified Christ who yet lives.

I don’t need to say anymore. That is my explanation of why I am a Shalomite. And I don’t intend, because I don’t need – and it is not in my power anyway – to try to persuade you to be a Shalomite too. At the risk of sounding presumptuous – the risk, in any case, that a preacher takes every time he climbs the pulpit and dares to proclaim the Word of God – only the Holy Spirit can turn you into a Shalomite. […]

This alternative world and alternative lifestyle described in the gospels and proclaimed and embodied in Jesus is the real world, a world of grace and truth – and, yes, peace – the real world compared to which the so-called real world, the world of power politics, of wars and rumours of war, is nothing but a grotesque shadow destined to disappear in the full glare of the sun of righteousness.

So my job today is done as I conclude, “Look! See! God’s New World! God’s New People!”

Critiquing O'Donovan

The new issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology contains some excellent work on Luther, John Zizioulas, Eberhard Jüngel, christology, hermeneutics, and more.

In view of all the recent discussion here of pacifism, some of you might especially be interested in Justin Neufeld’s article, “Just War Theory, the Authorization of the State, and the Hermeneutics of Peoplehood: How John Howard Yoder Can Save Oliver O’Donovan from Himself,” IJST 8:4 (2006), 411-32.

In this searching critique, Neufeld argues that “O’Donovan’s authorization of secular authority to mediate God’s judgements is the product of an ontology that rules out beforehand both the possibility that Jesus’ death is decisive for understanding his mediatorial representation and, as a result, the possibility that the task set before the church is to model alternatives to the state based on its acquaintance with its own practices of reconciliation and discernment.”

O God of peace

A hymn by Kim Fabricius

(Tune: Sine nomine)

O God of peace, whose peace is Christ your Son,
put on your armour that the war be won,
the war on war, your Word against the gun:
   Alleluia! Alleluia!

O God of power, whose power appears so weak,
call up your soldiers from among the meek,
who won’t turn tail, but turn the other cheek:
   Alleluia! Alleluia!

O God of love, whose love casts out all fear,
steady your people when the warlike jeer,
but rather insults than their blood and tears:
   Alleluia! Alleluia!

O God of hosts, whose host is bread for life,
feed us by faith for strength in times of strife,
and fill with hope the grieving child and wife:
   Alleluia! Alleluia!

O God of time, whose time is always nigh,
keep us alert to leaders’ lethal lies,
come now your reign when truth will never die:
   Alleluia! Alleluia!

Kim Fabricius: on investing in the arms trade

[NB: The following is a paper given by our friend Kim Fabricius at the University of Swansea last week, at a teach-in on the university’s investment in the arms trade. He shared the platform with a Marxist and a Muslim. I think the paper beautifully models the character of Christian “witness.”]

On the Self-Contradiction of a University Investing in the Arms Trade

It is good to share a platform with people who are committed to a university free from all investment in the arms trade. Whether that commitment extends to an equal zeal for non-violence altogether – including whatever strategies of protest or resistance that some of you may adopt as a result of this meeting – I do not know. If not, then I would argue that your commitment is, in fact, totally compromised, indeed self-contradictory – as, indeed, is any commitment whose terms are dictated by what one is against. But that is another platform! For today, I am glad that we are united in our horror at an institution of higher learning that makes money out of mass murder.

I myself am a pacifist, a Christian pacifist. That is to say, my pacifism cannot be abstracted from my discipleship, from my being a follower of Jesus, which in turn cannot be abstracted from the being of God. To re-phrase 1 John 1:5, “God is non-violent, and in him there is no violence at all.” Put another way, my ethics of peace derives from an ontology of peace, which specifically derives from Christology – from the nature of the Prince of Peace. I say this in witness, but also in warning – the warning that, really, there is no reason why my ad hoc ethical solidarity with you should have any purchase whatsoever if you do not share my theological convictions.

That is the truth of the matter, and that is why I share it with you: because violence is always inextricably linked with lies. The tree of war always has deceit for its roots. And that is the single, fundamental point of principled practice that I want to make to you today: that for a university, an institution of further education, a community whose very raison d’être is the pursuit of truth (notwithstanding post-modern nihilists who, with Pilate, mockingly ask, “What is truth?”), for such an institution to be making profits from a business whose own raison d’être is mendacity and mayhem – this is a prodigious oxymoron, an undertaking of extreme bad faith, and indeed an act of academic suicide. For how can a school of virtue do deals with an industry of vice without its own spiritual death being the bottom line?

Therefore there can be no justification whatsoever for any university investing in the arms trade, for even if the operation is “successful” (in the sense of “lucrative”), it is a mortal blow to the patient. Even if one is not a Christian pacifist, or even a pacifist, even if one’s appeal is to so-called Just War Theory, the theory itself rejects that appeal, for the WMD we are talking about demonstrably, flagrantly violate the Just War criteria of proportionality and discrimination. And if the appeal is to so-called “realism” – well, how cynical can you get? The reality of the matter is that we make our own reality of the matter: for it is not that ethical policies have been tried and found wanting, they have not been tried at all.

Things have to be the way they are only if we concede that things cannot be different. But they can be different, because in fact they are different – forgive me if I end where I began – because Christ is risen, and therefore the impossible is not impossible, in fact it is practical. So that, finally, I am not suggesting that the university sacrifice financial prudence to moral purity. Rather I am saying that in rejecting all investment in the arms trade, the university will actually be going with “the grain of the universe” (John Howard Yoder). In short, to disinvest in the arms trade is not only to be right, it is to “get real.”

Propositions on peace and war: a postscript

by Kim Fabricius (a postscript to this discussion)

What a good discussion: resolute statements, discerning replies, penetrating questions – and all spoken with grace and heard with humility. A tribute to the ethos of Faith & Theology. Thank you, all; and thanks to Ben, who has asked me if I’d like to make any final comments. Yes, please!

First – to repeat – the Christian pacifist argument turns on the nature of the triune God; and the normative criterion of the nature of the triune God is the Christ event: the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, the hinge of history, and his life and teaching, the paradigm for all human action. If there is violence in this God – in this Jesus – the case for pacifism falls. Of course there are plenty of OT references to a violent deity, and a few in the NT too, but unless the opponents of pacifism can demonstrate a violent streak in Jesus himself (the hermeneutical criterion of all scripture), their case is like espresso without caffeine – it lacks the essential ingredient. In my view, the case has not – and cannot – be made.

Second, opponents of pacifism are also surprisingly – or perhaps I should say unsurprisingly – quiet about the pacifist church of the first three centuries. Did the church get it wrong? Or is it that the changing circumstances of the church under empire, and then under nations, changed everything? But if so, why? What does Constantinople – or Washington – have to do with Jerusalem? If Christians were pacifist under pagan rule, why should they abandon pacifism under Christian rule? Indeed, what constitutes “Christian rule”? Is not the very idea that a Christian ruler/government may wield the sword an oxymoron? This is certainly a question that needs to be answered rather than begged. As does the Lutheran idea that secular vocations absolve Christians from obedience to the Prince of Peace.

Third, that hard chestnut, which seems to be the soft-underbelly of Christian pacifism: what about the innocent and defenceless under violent attack, be it family or neighbours at a personal level, or racial/ethnic groups or states at a national/international level? Surely, it is argued, the love commandment itself not only warrants but indeed demands a violent, if surgical, response to violence. But if – and I take this as read – there are no theological grounds whatsoever for violent self-defence (forceful restraint is something altogether different), where is the logic in the leap to justifying the violent defence of others? Furthermore, does not this argument rely on blatantly sub-Christian ethical reasoning – namely, that the end justifies the means? More fundamentally still, does it not assume an understanding of “love” (and “peace”) derived apart from revelation, i.e., apart from the crucified and risen one? In other words, does not the argument rely on natural theology, specifically on natural law theory – i.e., on pagan sources? How interesting that, on peace and war, both Barth, and eventually Bonhoeffer himself, take this detour – or rather cul-de-sac – from their otherwise consistently biblically based and dogmatically mediated ethics.

Fourth, and following, I suggest that the anti-pacifist case is based on a skewered understanding of “realism/pragmatism” (severed from the Jesus-narrative), which in turn is based on the unexamined notion of “common sense.” For what is common sense but a prejudiced way of finding our way around the world which was, if not imbibed with mother’s milk, at least fixed in childhood and adolescence? And what is the gospel if not radically counter-intuitive? Even deeper, the anti-pacifist case seems to accept the assumption that there is nothing worse than oppression, defeat and death. But Christians should know better than that!

Finally, it hardly needs (I hope) to be said that authentic Christian pacifists are not do-nothings, let alone cowards – though (as one wag has put it) being a pacifist between wars is like being a vegetarian between meals. But as Hauerwas rightly insists, pacifism has its roots in Christian character inculcated and matured in everyday discipleship, so that pacifism is not a decision that is made but an identity that is given. Gandhi said that to do nothing in the face of evil is to deny one’s humanity, and to oppose evil with the weapons of the evil-doer is to affirm one’s humanity – but to oppose evil with the weapons of God is to affirm one’s divinity.

Eberhard Jüngel on peace war

“Can the church ... insist that every use of military force is against God’s will and therefore that even the threat of military force, institutionalised in the form of armies, is also to be condemned absolutely? ... Only by describing every war as an offence against God’s gracious and – precisely in its graciousness – holy will, can the church formulate the urgent demand on all states worldwide to condemn solemnly and together the mere threat of military force.... The institution of war can only be abolished if the institution of the potential for war is abolished....

“[I]t is important to ask whether the church can credibly proclaim the Gospel, the glorification of those who make peace, without at the same time rejecting every threat and use of military force. And how can it do this more convincingly than by working for the laying aside of weapons not only by Christians, but by all people around the world? ... [T]he question forces itself inexorably on the church, whether the time has not come in which Christians can only be credible witnesses to Jesus Christ as conscientious objectors.”

—Eberhard Jüngel, Christ, Justice and Peace: Toward a Theology of the State in Dialogue with the Barmen Declaration (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992), pp. 84-92.

Karl Barth on peace and war

“The decisive contradiction of the kingdom of God against all concealed or blatant kingdoms of force is to be seen quite simply in the fact that it invalidates the whole friend-foe relationship between one human and another.... The disciples are told: ‘Love your enemies!’ (Matt. 5:44). This is the end of the whole friend-foe relationship, for when we love our enemy he ceases to be our enemy. It thus abolishes the whole exercise of force, which presupposes this relationship, and has no meaning apart from it.... In conformity with the New Testament, one can be pacifist not in principle but only in practice (praktisch Pazifist). But let everyone consider very carefully whether, being called to discipleship, it is possible to avoid – or permissible to neglect – becoming a practical pacifist!”

—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2, pp. 549-50 (KD IV/2, p. 622).