- PO Box 107
Grand Marais, Michigan 49839 - 651-707-4579
Gerald W Schlabach
University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, Theology, Faculty Member
Gun-control advocates need to name what they are up against in the U.S. gun culture. Once so many guns are in circulation, there may be no solution short of mass conversion. While there are many good reasons to regulate and reduce the... more
Gun-control advocates need to name what they are up against in the U.S. gun culture. Once so many guns are in circulation, there may be no solution short of mass conversion. While there are many good reasons to regulate and reduce the aggregate presence of guns in US culture, these are almost all collective reasons and to reduce gun ownership, which presents a classic “collective action problem.” After all, any one person or family can easily imagine a moment of extreme crisis that gives them reasons to become a “free rider,” insofar as those reasons for self-preservation diverge from the collective reasoning about what best serves the common good. And unfortunately, philosophers and economists alike have shown that the free rider problem may well be insoluble. If reasons for free riding can only be renounced not argued down, we must admit – as an objective statement not simply a religious appeal -- that we need nothing short of conversion. Whatever our scruples against proselytism, gun-control advocates and progressives should put them aside. With gun culture, we are dealing with idolatry anyway, and thus are in religious terrain already. But in turning to a “just peace” ethic and the normative practices of “just peacemaking” we find that taking the first step to respond to conflict with creative, unexpected transforming initiatives, along the lines of Glen Stassen’s exegesis of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, can break vicious cycles and thus neutralize the free-rider problem.
Research Interests:
Deep questions of identity ar e always at play in war and peacemaking, sometimes hidden yet always decisive. Thus, for Christians, peace activism needs peace theology and, indeed, peace theology needs peace ecclesiology. Efforts to... more
Deep questions of identity ar e always at play in war and peacemaking, sometimes hidden yet always decisive. Thus, for Christians, peace activism needs peace theology and, indeed, peace theology needs peace ecclesiology. Efforts to transcend classic debates between just war theory and Christian pacifism by developing a just peace ethic will falter if they fail to address more basic questions of how Christians are to sustain a primary loyalty to Jesus Christ in relationship to other identities of family, tribe, nation, and global citizen. Attention to the biblical trajectory of Abrahamic community, the patristic embrace of life in exile, and Vatican II calls for the Church to be the "sacrament of human unity" by recognizing itself as a "pilgrim people" suggests that the Catholic Church can truly be a "peace church" only ifit embraces life in diaspora.
Research Interests:
This is a paper I did in graduate school at the University of Notre Dame for a class on just war theory. It examines the way that the 16th-century Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria used his tradition to critique the Spanish... more
This is a paper I did in graduate school at the University of Notre Dame for a class on just war theory. It examines the way that the 16th-century Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria used his tradition to critique the Spanish conquest. What strikes me reading it 30 years later -- and prompts me to post it now at a time of much attention to the dynamics of colonialism -- is the way that Vitoria tried to imagine an alternative history in which Europeans encountered the indigenous peoples of the Americas entirely as guests not settlers, much less conquerors.
Research Interests:
Addressing the urgent issues facing humanity today, in his recent encyclical on social friendship, Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis reminds us that it is "all the more urgent that we rethink our styles of life, our relationships, the... more
Addressing the urgent issues facing humanity today, in his recent encyclical on social friendship, Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis reminds us that it is "all the more urgent that we rethink our styles of life, our relationships, the organization of our societies and, above all, the meaning of our existence" (no. 33). In this and in his previous encyclical on care for creation, Laudato Si', Francis makes clear that we do not have a moment to waste. None of his diagnosis should "be read as a cool and detached description of today's problems" (no. 56).
Before an onslaught of urgency backfires in paralysis, however, we might notice a heartening paradox: Read carefully, Francis's message to us is that we move quickly to slow down! Yes, "rethink" immediately. Yes, act now, and "boldly." But then, once we have promptly changed direction, Francis insists that we take all the time we need. After all, what we most urgently need is to do the hard work of truly human encounter on the way to authentically human solutions. We might call this "the fierce urgency of the slow.
Before an onslaught of urgency backfires in paralysis, however, we might notice a heartening paradox: Read carefully, Francis's message to us is that we move quickly to slow down! Yes, "rethink" immediately. Yes, act now, and "boldly." But then, once we have promptly changed direction, Francis insists that we take all the time we need. After all, what we most urgently need is to do the hard work of truly human encounter on the way to authentically human solutions. We might call this "the fierce urgency of the slow.
Research Interests:
In his 2017 World Day of Peace message, Pope Francis made a subtle yet stunning move when he called the Sermon on the Mount the Church’s “manual” for peacemaking at every level. Continuing the “fresh reappraisal” of war that the Second... more
In his 2017 World Day of Peace message, Pope Francis made a subtle yet stunning move when he called the Sermon on the Mount the Church’s “manual” for peacemaking at every level. Continuing the “fresh reappraisal” of war that the Second Vatican Council launched, Francis’s choice of a term associated with the “Manualist” tradition of natural-law casuistry signaled the Catholic magisterium’s growing commitment both to rooting its teaching on peace and war in biblical sources instead, and to active nonviolence in pursuit of just peace. Given centuries of dismissal of Jesus’s teaching as irrelevant to real-world politics by both Catholics and Protestants, reception of Francis’s signal will benefit both from fresh biblical exegesis and new insights into natural law. Informing the biblical side is the groundbreaking work by Glen Stassen on the triadic structure of Jesus’s teachings in Matthew 5-7, and its practical implications for just peacemaking. Informing the natural-law side are recent findings from social psychology and neuroanthropology on the role of mimesis in human formation. The two fields join in underscoring the creative power of what Stassen called transforming initiatives for breaking cycles of violence.
Research Interests:
This paper was first presented as part of a panel on "just peace" at the Society of Christian Ethics annual meeting in Portland, OR, in January 2018. Other panelists were Lisa Sowle Cahill and Eli McCarthy. Their presentations were... more
This paper was first presented as part of a panel on "just peace" at the Society of Christian Ethics annual meeting in Portland, OR, in January 2018. Other panelists were Lisa Sowle Cahill and Eli McCarthy. Their presentations were published in the June 2018 issue of The Journal of Moral Theology, available at http://msmary.edu/College_of_liberal_arts/department-of-theology/jmt-files/JMT%20Full%20Issue%20June%202018.pdf.
Description of the SCE panel:
While just war approaches receive ample attention and analysis by scholars, the just peace approach is still relatively underdeveloped and appreciated. There are ecumenical, interfaith, and multicultural expressions and recent developments of just peace. There is also movement in the Catholic community, including a Vatican conference that called for official development of a just peace approach and Pope Francis’ 2017 World Day of Peace message. Some governments are starting to draw on the basic elements of a just peace approach. Thus, we may be at a tipping point for norm change.
Contemporary theological scholarship has offered an increasing variety of developments such as normative practices in a just peacemaking theory (Stassen, etc.), just peace criteria or principles (Cusimano Love), justpeace ethics (Sawatsky), virtue-based just peace approach (McCarthy), just peace churches (Thistlethwaite) and an ecumenical call to just peace (World Council of Churches and Enns).
Each of the three panelists are working on distinct books to address the issues of peacemaking, theology, and ethical method. Gerald Schlabach will present on how a just peace approach arises from the Gospels, survey ecumenical work to develop a just peace framework, and anticipate some of theoretical and practical challenges that will need facing in order to elicit wide reception as an approach not only for civil resistance but for governance. Lisa Sowle Cahill will present on how a just peace approach fits with the trajectory of Catholic social teaching and her view of next steps for official development. Eli McCarthy will present on a virtue-based just peace approach and his view of next steps for development.
Description of the SCE panel:
While just war approaches receive ample attention and analysis by scholars, the just peace approach is still relatively underdeveloped and appreciated. There are ecumenical, interfaith, and multicultural expressions and recent developments of just peace. There is also movement in the Catholic community, including a Vatican conference that called for official development of a just peace approach and Pope Francis’ 2017 World Day of Peace message. Some governments are starting to draw on the basic elements of a just peace approach. Thus, we may be at a tipping point for norm change.
Contemporary theological scholarship has offered an increasing variety of developments such as normative practices in a just peacemaking theory (Stassen, etc.), just peace criteria or principles (Cusimano Love), justpeace ethics (Sawatsky), virtue-based just peace approach (McCarthy), just peace churches (Thistlethwaite) and an ecumenical call to just peace (World Council of Churches and Enns).
Each of the three panelists are working on distinct books to address the issues of peacemaking, theology, and ethical method. Gerald Schlabach will present on how a just peace approach arises from the Gospels, survey ecumenical work to develop a just peace framework, and anticipate some of theoretical and practical challenges that will need facing in order to elicit wide reception as an approach not only for civil resistance but for governance. Lisa Sowle Cahill will present on how a just peace approach fits with the trajectory of Catholic social teaching and her view of next steps for official development. Eli McCarthy will present on a virtue-based just peace approach and his view of next steps for development.
Research Interests:
What is “just peace?” In recent decades, representatives of various church traditions have called on their churches to move away from, replace, or transcend the “just-war” framework for discerning responses to war and violence in some... more
What is “just peace?” In recent decades, representatives of various church traditions have called on their churches to move away from, replace, or transcend the “just-war” framework for discerning responses to war and violence in some way, in favor of a “just peace” framework. Recently and prominently, such a call came from Catholics gathered in Rome in April 2018, where we issued an “An Appeal to the Catholic Church to re-commit to the centrality of Gospel nonviolence.” (See https://nonviolencejustpeace.net.)
As a contribution to work following up on that appeal by the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative — and as a reference point for scholars in my field of Christian ethics — I have been trying to articulate what we mean by “just peace.” The “we” here would be some consensus of groups and people who have been advocating for a “just peace” or “just peacemaking” framework. Although most are Catholics and ecumenical Christians, many of us are also in conversation wider disciplines and schools of thought.
Note that the results are provided in two separate files here.
A relatively short synthesis of just peace norms organized according to the categories of:
jus in conflictione – normative dispositions, skills, virtues, and principles for acting justly and wisely amid all conflicts.
jus ex bello – normative practices that allow actors on every side to escape vicious cycles of violence and retribution that may seem justified by the past, but that nonetheless invite continuing cycles of violence in the future.
jus ad pacem – guidelines for attending to the social and ecological conditions that promote and sustain human thriving at every stage of conflict — from prevention to post-conflict.
(Also included are a list of background assumptions, and an addendum for distinguishing between just policing and war.)
A longer document that expands on this synthesis by “showing my work” through a collation of what other scholars and church bodies have said about “just peace” and “just peacebuilding.”
It would be disingenuous of me to claim that the results of my survey, collation, and synthesis are a perfectly objective summary, free of any normative recommendations of my own. The very task of categorization involves judgments about what to prioritize at what level. And admittedly I am proposing that the categories of “jus in conflictionis,” “jus ex bellum,” and “jus ad pacem” might be useful ways to articulate a “just peace” framework with a pedagogical elegance that rivals the simplicity of just-war categories (“jus ad bellum,” “jus in bello,” and more recently “jus post bellum”). Still, if this exercise has had integrity, I think I dare hope that it speaks for an emerging approach that is broader than simply the “position” of one ethicist.
Gerald W. Schlabach
March 2018
As a contribution to work following up on that appeal by the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative — and as a reference point for scholars in my field of Christian ethics — I have been trying to articulate what we mean by “just peace.” The “we” here would be some consensus of groups and people who have been advocating for a “just peace” or “just peacemaking” framework. Although most are Catholics and ecumenical Christians, many of us are also in conversation wider disciplines and schools of thought.
Note that the results are provided in two separate files here.
A relatively short synthesis of just peace norms organized according to the categories of:
jus in conflictione – normative dispositions, skills, virtues, and principles for acting justly and wisely amid all conflicts.
jus ex bello – normative practices that allow actors on every side to escape vicious cycles of violence and retribution that may seem justified by the past, but that nonetheless invite continuing cycles of violence in the future.
jus ad pacem – guidelines for attending to the social and ecological conditions that promote and sustain human thriving at every stage of conflict — from prevention to post-conflict.
(Also included are a list of background assumptions, and an addendum for distinguishing between just policing and war.)
A longer document that expands on this synthesis by “showing my work” through a collation of what other scholars and church bodies have said about “just peace” and “just peacebuilding.”
It would be disingenuous of me to claim that the results of my survey, collation, and synthesis are a perfectly objective summary, free of any normative recommendations of my own. The very task of categorization involves judgments about what to prioritize at what level. And admittedly I am proposing that the categories of “jus in conflictionis,” “jus ex bellum,” and “jus ad pacem” might be useful ways to articulate a “just peace” framework with a pedagogical elegance that rivals the simplicity of just-war categories (“jus ad bellum,” “jus in bello,” and more recently “jus post bellum”). Still, if this exercise has had integrity, I think I dare hope that it speaks for an emerging approach that is broader than simply the “position” of one ethicist.
Gerald W. Schlabach
March 2018
Research Interests:
What is “just peace?” In recent decades, representatives of various church traditions have called on their churches to move away from, replace, or transcend the “just-war” framework for discerning responses to war and violence in some... more
What is “just peace?” In recent decades, representatives of various church traditions have called on their churches to move away from, replace, or transcend the “just-war” framework for discerning responses to war and violence in some way, in favor of a “just peace” framework. Recently and prominently, such a call came from Catholics gathered in Rome in April 2018, where we issued an “An Appeal to the Catholic Church to re-commit to the centrality of Gospel nonviolence.” (See https://nonviolencejustpeace.net.)
As a contribution to work following up on that appeal by the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative — and as a reference point for scholars in my field of Christian ethics — I have been trying to articulate what we mean by “just peace.” The “we” here would be some consensus of groups and people who have been advocating for a “just peace” or “just peacemaking” framework. Although most are Catholics and ecumenical Christians, many of us are also in conversation wider disciplines and schools of thought.
Note that the results are provided in two separate files here.
A relatively short synthesis of just peace norms organized according to the categories of:
jus in conflictione – normative dispositions, skills, virtues, and principles for acting justly and wisely amid all conflicts.
jus ex bello – normative practices that allow actors on every side to escape vicious cycles of violence and retribution that may seem justified by the past, but that nonetheless invite continuing cycles of violence in the future.
jus ad pacem – guidelines for attending to the social and ecological conditions that promote and sustain human thriving at every stage of conflict — from prevention to post-conflict.
(Also included are a list of background assumptions, and an addendum for distinguishing between just policing and war.)
A longer document that expands on this synthesis by “showing my work” through a collation of what other scholars and church bodies have said about “just peace” and “just peacebuilding.”
It would be disingenuous of me to claim that the results of my survey, collation, and synthesis are a perfectly objective summary, free of any normative recommendations of my own. The very task of categorization involves judgments about what to prioritize at what level. And admittedly I am proposing that the categories of “jus in conflictionis,” “jus ex bellum,” and “jus ad pacem” might be useful ways to articulate a “just peace” framework with a pedagogical elegance that rivals the simplicity of just-war categories (“jus ad bellum,” “jus in bello,” and more recently “jus post bellum”). Still, if this exercise has had integrity, I think I dare hope that it speaks for an emerging approach that is broader than simply the “position” of one ethicist.
Gerald W. Schlabach
March 2018
As a contribution to work following up on that appeal by the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative — and as a reference point for scholars in my field of Christian ethics — I have been trying to articulate what we mean by “just peace.” The “we” here would be some consensus of groups and people who have been advocating for a “just peace” or “just peacemaking” framework. Although most are Catholics and ecumenical Christians, many of us are also in conversation wider disciplines and schools of thought.
Note that the results are provided in two separate files here.
A relatively short synthesis of just peace norms organized according to the categories of:
jus in conflictione – normative dispositions, skills, virtues, and principles for acting justly and wisely amid all conflicts.
jus ex bello – normative practices that allow actors on every side to escape vicious cycles of violence and retribution that may seem justified by the past, but that nonetheless invite continuing cycles of violence in the future.
jus ad pacem – guidelines for attending to the social and ecological conditions that promote and sustain human thriving at every stage of conflict — from prevention to post-conflict.
(Also included are a list of background assumptions, and an addendum for distinguishing between just policing and war.)
A longer document that expands on this synthesis by “showing my work” through a collation of what other scholars and church bodies have said about “just peace” and “just peacebuilding.”
It would be disingenuous of me to claim that the results of my survey, collation, and synthesis are a perfectly objective summary, free of any normative recommendations of my own. The very task of categorization involves judgments about what to prioritize at what level. And admittedly I am proposing that the categories of “jus in conflictionis,” “jus ex bellum,” and “jus ad pacem” might be useful ways to articulate a “just peace” framework with a pedagogical elegance that rivals the simplicity of just-war categories (“jus ad bellum,” “jus in bello,” and more recently “jus post bellum”). Still, if this exercise has had integrity, I think I dare hope that it speaks for an emerging approach that is broader than simply the “position” of one ethicist.
Gerald W. Schlabach
March 2018
Research Interests:
Final version of this draft now available at https://rdcu.be/bfWNE. Although the Catholic Church has never made an explicit claim like that of Reinhold Niebuhr to the effect that Jesus’ ethical teachings are irrelevant in public... more
Final version of this draft now available at https://rdcu.be/bfWNE.
Although the Catholic Church has never made an explicit claim like that of Reinhold Niebuhr to the effect that Jesus’ ethical teachings are irrelevant in public affairs, centuries of appealing exclusively to natural-law principles in matters of war and peace constituted a functional equivalent. What then are we to make of Pope Francis’s claim in his 2017 World Day of Peace message not only that nonviolence should be our “style of politics,” but that the Sermon on the Mount should serve as the Church’s “manual” for peacemaking at every level, including domestic policy formation and international diplomacy? The late Glen Stassen’s well-received exegesis of Jesus’ sermon, as organized around a series of fourteen triads (not dyads or antitheses), points to a way of receiving and developing Francis’ teaching. What at first may seem like a technical matter of literary analysis shows Jesus not to be providing impossibly “hard sayings,” but pointing the way to escape our vicious cycles through practicable transforming initiatives. Mimetic theory as developed both by classical social psychology (G.H. Mead) and the emerging field of neuroanthropology (Merlin Donald et al.) suggests the potential of transforming initiatives to change social dynamics and counters the Niebuhrian assumption that enemy-love is necessarily politically irrelevant. The ten verifiably realistic “normative practices” that Stassen and others highlight in just-peacemaking theory all draw upon these dynamics in various ways.
Although the Catholic Church has never made an explicit claim like that of Reinhold Niebuhr to the effect that Jesus’ ethical teachings are irrelevant in public affairs, centuries of appealing exclusively to natural-law principles in matters of war and peace constituted a functional equivalent. What then are we to make of Pope Francis’s claim in his 2017 World Day of Peace message not only that nonviolence should be our “style of politics,” but that the Sermon on the Mount should serve as the Church’s “manual” for peacemaking at every level, including domestic policy formation and international diplomacy? The late Glen Stassen’s well-received exegesis of Jesus’ sermon, as organized around a series of fourteen triads (not dyads or antitheses), points to a way of receiving and developing Francis’ teaching. What at first may seem like a technical matter of literary analysis shows Jesus not to be providing impossibly “hard sayings,” but pointing the way to escape our vicious cycles through practicable transforming initiatives. Mimetic theory as developed both by classical social psychology (G.H. Mead) and the emerging field of neuroanthropology (Merlin Donald et al.) suggests the potential of transforming initiatives to change social dynamics and counters the Niebuhrian assumption that enemy-love is necessarily politically irrelevant. The ten verifiably realistic “normative practices” that Stassen and others highlight in just-peacemaking theory all draw upon these dynamics in various ways.
Research Interests:
Presentation for panel on "The Church and Nonviolence" at conference on "The Catholic Church Moves Towards Nonviolence? Just Peace Just War In Dialogue," at the University of San Diego, Center for Catholic Thought and Culture, 6-7 October... more
Presentation for panel on "The Church and Nonviolence" at conference on "The Catholic Church Moves Towards Nonviolence? Just Peace Just War In Dialogue," at the University of San Diego, Center for Catholic Thought and Culture, 6-7 October 2017.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Advance paper for Pax Christi International / Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace conference, Rome, April 2016: “Nonviolence and Just Peace: Contributing to the Catholic Understanding of and Commitment to Nonviolence”
Research Interests:
Both within and among churches that have traditionally held to just war teaching, various formulas in the last 50 years have allowed for the recognition that Christian pacifism is a respectable tradition alongside just war. It is not... more
Both within and among churches that have traditionally held to just war teaching, various formulas in the last 50 years have allowed for the recognition that Christian pacifism is a respectable tradition alongside just war. It is not obvious, however, how historic peace churches can officially reciprocate with the same kind of ecumenical generosity by recognizing the legitimacy of the just war tradition. To do so, after all, would seem to require giving up their very claim to the confessional status of nonviolence, thus undermining their very identities as historic peace churches. Glen Stassen’s well-accepted exegesis of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount opens up an unexpected path out of this impasse. For if he is right that the sermon is organized around a consistent succession of triads in which Jesus first named “traditional righteousness,” then diagnosed a “vicious cycle,” then presented a “transforming initiative” for escaping that cycle, then the relationship between just war and pacifism can be reconceived in entirely fresh ways.
Research Interests:
To judge from some of its wildest critics and enthusiasts alike, Gaudium et spes and its friendly engagement with the modern world would almost seem to have made the Church as a body superfluous. The Council fathers certainly called for... more
To judge from some of its wildest critics and enthusiasts alike, Gaudium et spes and its friendly engagement with the modern world would almost seem to have made the Church as a body superfluous. The Council fathers certainly called for partnership with all people of good will and gave fresh recognition to the vocations of the laity in secular spheres. But the English title for the document has always been “The Pastoral Constitution for the Church in the Modern World,” not merely “people of good will” in the modern world or even “Catholics” in the modern world. Still, the challenge is to envision the Church acting as a body at work for the common good without evoking either a pre-conciliar confusion of “the Church” with the hierarchy alone, or a contemporary specter of faithful Catholics as triumphalistic culture warriors. In this paper I will argue that together Popes Paul, John Paul, and Francis have projected a more winsome though perhaps more difficult vision of the Church moving together as a global people of peace in the modern world. Buried in Pope Paul’s Evangelii nuntiandi is a critical clue to the social posture of churches as communities of witness. Central to John Paul’s vision of a civilization of love is a communitarian political theory that coordinates respect for local identities with networks of global solidarity. Francis’s Evangeli Gaudium pulls these threads together with four key principles for peacemaking, which make clear: Not only are evangelization and social engagement integral to one another, they find their unity in the tasks of building up a people whose very presence in the world is a peacemaking witness among the nations. After all, for Francis, peace-building is people-building, and vice versa.
Research Interests:
Editor's note: "In this issue we offer a conversation between Mennonite scholars (plus one Lutheran who is active in Lutheran-Mennonite dialogue) and the Catholic theologian George Weigel. We thank Dr. Weigel for permission to republish... more
Editor's note: "In this issue we offer a conversation between Mennonite scholars (plus one Lutheran who is active in Lutheran-Mennonite dialogue) and the Catholic theologian George Weigel. We thank Dr. Weigel for permission to republish the essay "Moral Clarity in a Time of War," which first appeared in the religious journal First Things (December 2002). We are especially grateful for his thoughtful response to the Mennonite comments in this issue. Duane Friesen concludes the dialogue with a reflection on Weigel's statements as well as the Mennonite responses."
Chapter 5 in A Faith not Worth Fighting for: Addressing Commonly Asked Questions About Christian Nonviolence, eds Tripp York and Justin Bronson Barringer, The Peaceable Kingdom Series, no. 1 (Eugene OR: Cascade Books, 2012).
Research Interests:
Chapter 19 in in At Peace and Unafraid: Public Order, Security and the Wisdom of the Cross, eds Duane K. Friesen and Gerald W. Schlabach (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2005), 405-422.
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Conrad Grebel Review 26, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 50-60.
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Conrad Grebel Review 28, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 73-88.
Research Interests:
Might Christians who have long been divided along just-war and pacifist lines agree some day that just policing—and only just policing—is legitimate? In an essay first written as a resource for the first international dialogue between... more
Might Christians who have long been divided along just-war and pacifist lines agree some day that just policing—and only just policing—is legitimate? In an essay first written as a resource for the first international dialogue between Mennonites and Roman Catholics, the author offers a thought experiment on what would be necessary for war eventually to cease to be a “church-dividing” issue. The category of policing is distinguishable from warfare in its psychosocial dynamics and accountability to the rule of law; however, it has received surprisingly inadequate attention within both pacifist and just-war traditions. Historic peace churches and just-war-affirming churches can continue to converge by exploring shared ways of understanding the ethics of just policing and its extension into international policing. To do so convincingly, however, both must embody their arguments through far wider pastoral and social practices.
Journal of Ecumenical Studies 41, no. 3–4 (Summer-Fall 2004): 409-430.
Journal of Ecumenical Studies 41, no. 3–4 (Summer-Fall 2004): 409-430.
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Research Interests:
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Scholars have been recognizing that Augustine's attention to "concupiscence" grew from a complex analysis of the sources of all human behavior. The same pattern of analysis should extend to Augustinian "continence," which Augustine... more
Scholars have been recognizing that Augustine's attention to "concupiscence" grew from a complex analysis of the sources of all human behavior. The same pattern of analysis should extend to Augustinian "continence," which Augustine presented as key to the righting of all human relationships. Continence shapes the deep grammar of all Augustine wrote about Christian love. Love is the hand of the soul, Augustine once said. For false and problematic loves, Augustine consistently used verbs whereby people acquire the objects of their love through operations of grasping, which close in upon and control those objects. In contrast, loves that are right and true open wide the "hand of the soul" in an act of clinging to God, to Christ, to the truth, and to wisdom -- none of which one can control or manipulate. Love for friends and neighbors also is properly a love that clings rather than grasps.
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Response to Benjamin W Goossen, "Why 500 Years?: A Critique of Anabaptism’s Upcoming Anniversary Celebration"
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“Capitalizing Church: On Finding Catholicism Inevitable.” Conrad Grebel Review 34, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 284-302. Writers have a problem, editors have a problem, and theologians have a problem. But it is a problem to which Mennonite... more
“Capitalizing Church: On Finding Catholicism Inevitable.” Conrad Grebel Review 34, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 284-302.
Writers have a problem, editors have a problem, and theologians have a problem. But it is a problem to which Mennonite thinkers and others in “Free Church,” Pentecostal, as well as many Protestant traditions generally have not paid much attention. The problem is how and when to capitalize the word “church.”1 This problem may seem small to the point of trivial—the sort of question over which only an English teacher who has never been to a party would obsess. But even if small, it is only so in the way that a map is small in comparison to the land it represents. As a writer, editor, and theologian who has been trying all my life to identify with all that God is doing to form a global pilgrim people, the search to learn how to capitalize “church” turns out to map with much of my spiritual and intellectual journey.
Writers have a problem, editors have a problem, and theologians have a problem. But it is a problem to which Mennonite thinkers and others in “Free Church,” Pentecostal, as well as many Protestant traditions generally have not paid much attention. The problem is how and when to capitalize the word “church.”1 This problem may seem small to the point of trivial—the sort of question over which only an English teacher who has never been to a party would obsess. But even if small, it is only so in the way that a map is small in comparison to the land it represents. As a writer, editor, and theologian who has been trying all my life to identify with all that God is doing to form a global pilgrim people, the search to learn how to capitalize “church” turns out to map with much of my spiritual and intellectual journey.
Research Interests:
Vision: A Journal for Church and Theology 17, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 19–26. Recounts 20-year theological struggle over the ethics of same-sex relationships, guided by a commitment to stay in relationship with people who disagree on the... more
Vision: A Journal for Church and Theology 17, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 19–26.
Recounts 20-year theological struggle over the ethics of same-sex relationships, guided by a commitment to stay in relationship with people who disagree on the issue from all sides.
Recounts 20-year theological struggle over the ethics of same-sex relationships, guided by a commitment to stay in relationship with people who disagree on the issue from all sides.
Research Interests:
This paper surveys theological debates over war and violence within the Christian tradition in a way that assumes others – particularly Muslims – are listening in. It will presents Christian pacifism as the sort of internal critique that... more
This paper surveys theological debates over war and violence within the Christian tradition in a way that assumes others – particularly Muslims – are listening in. It will presents Christian pacifism as the sort of internal critique that representatives of any faith tradition must honestly do in order to dialogue well with others in the service of peace. Practitioners of interfaith dialogue might thus recognize in this case study one of the first principles of their very discipline, namely, that nonviolence toward the truth is a commitment so basic to ecumenical and interfaith conversation that it may not be a goal at all but, rather, the beginning we must already have made in order to dialogue at all.
Presented at the Nobel Peace Prize Forum, Faith and Peace Day. Minneapolis, MN, 1 March 2014.
Also presented at annual Muslim-Christian dialogue with theologians of the Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey and the University of St. Thomas Muslim-Christian Dialogue Center, 1 November 2014.
Presented at the Nobel Peace Prize Forum, Faith and Peace Day. Minneapolis, MN, 1 March 2014.
Also presented at annual Muslim-Christian dialogue with theologians of the Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey and the University of St. Thomas Muslim-Christian Dialogue Center, 1 November 2014.
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What is so wrong with the just-war theory? The answer lies in the way it overlooks and even undermines alternative approaches. The core, unassailable claim of the April 2016 conference in Rome on "Nonviolence and Just Peace" was that by... more
What is so wrong with the just-war theory? The answer lies in the way it overlooks and even undermines alternative approaches. The core, unassailable claim of the April 2016 conference in Rome on "Nonviolence and Just Peace" was that by focusing its teaching, pastoral counsel, chaplaincy, and advocacy on “just war,” the church has paid a huge opportunity cost, to the detriment of its own nonviolent practice.
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Gerald Schlabach first started thinking about peace and violence in the mid-1980s. He and his wife worked for the Mennonite Central Committee in Nicaragua during a time of ongoing civil revolution. A member of the Mennonite church at the... more
Gerald Schlabach first started thinking about peace and violence in the mid-1980s. He and his wife worked for the Mennonite Central Committee in Nicaragua during a time of ongoing civil revolution. A member of the Mennonite church at the time, he was tasked with figuring out how the historically pacifist church should respond to the violence.
“This was a situation where a lot of Christians had said, ‘Our backs are against the wall. We need to resist the tyranny of the Somoza dictatorship (known for their brutality and human rights violations) through violent revolution,’ ” he explains. “And here I am, 27 years old and tasked with speaking up for nonviolence.”
The experience convinced Schlabach that nonviolence is always a worthwhile goal, even if violence seems never ending. There are always people willing to respond with violence but never enough peacemakers.
When asked if war is ever justified, Schlabach says, “I hate that question. If you start asking if there’s ever any exceptional cases where violence is justified, then the exception starts to become the rule. We have to do less work on justifying the violence and more work on making sure we have the skills to make active nonviolence our first, second, and 15th resort.”
In 2004 Schlabach joined the Catholic Church and became, as he describes it, a “Mennonite Catholic.” Part of bridging these two identities for an ethicist meant promoting dialogue between the faiths’ visions of peace and justice. The Roman Catholic tradition holds the idea of a “just war”—the belief that under some circumstances violence is justified. On the other hand, Mennonites are among a group of “historic peace churches” that believe violence is immoral, no matter the situation. Their ideas may seem opposed, but Schlabach hopes they will find some common ground in their shared practices.
“This was a situation where a lot of Christians had said, ‘Our backs are against the wall. We need to resist the tyranny of the Somoza dictatorship (known for their brutality and human rights violations) through violent revolution,’ ” he explains. “And here I am, 27 years old and tasked with speaking up for nonviolence.”
The experience convinced Schlabach that nonviolence is always a worthwhile goal, even if violence seems never ending. There are always people willing to respond with violence but never enough peacemakers.
When asked if war is ever justified, Schlabach says, “I hate that question. If you start asking if there’s ever any exceptional cases where violence is justified, then the exception starts to become the rule. We have to do less work on justifying the violence and more work on making sure we have the skills to make active nonviolence our first, second, and 15th resort.”
In 2004 Schlabach joined the Catholic Church and became, as he describes it, a “Mennonite Catholic.” Part of bridging these two identities for an ethicist meant promoting dialogue between the faiths’ visions of peace and justice. The Roman Catholic tradition holds the idea of a “just war”—the belief that under some circumstances violence is justified. On the other hand, Mennonites are among a group of “historic peace churches” that believe violence is immoral, no matter the situation. Their ideas may seem opposed, but Schlabach hopes they will find some common ground in their shared practices.
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Commonweal 144, no. 1 (6 January 2017): 11–13
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Commonweal 143, no. 16 (7 October 2016): 11–13
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America 214, no. 4 (8 February 2016): 15–18
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America 211, no. 19 (22–29 December 2014): 20–24
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Christian Century 131, no. 22 (29 October 2014): 22–27
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“Just Policing, not War,” America 189, no. 1 (7–14 July 2003): 19-21.
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Review of The Story of Original Sin (Cambridge, U.K.; Eugene, Oregon:.James Clarke & Co.; Pickwick Publications, 2013), in Augustinian Studies 46:2 (2015), pp. 303-306.
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Catholics and Mennonites need each other. This is the conviction that animates the ecumenical group Bridgefolk, in which Doris Murphy was an enthusiastic participant. On October 4th, Dr. Gerald W. Schlabach will share lessons from... more
Catholics and Mennonites need each other. This is the conviction that animates the ecumenical group Bridgefolk, in which Doris Murphy was an enthusiastic participant. On October 4th, Dr. Gerald W. Schlabach will share lessons from Mennonite-Catholic dialogue at the 8th Annual Doris H. Murphy Memorial Lecture at St. Bridget Catholic Church in River Falls, Wisconsin. His talk, entitled “Pilgrim People of Peace: Looking for a Map,” will conclude with his vision for how Catholics can heed their call to be peacemakers by being the “pilgrim people” that the Second Vatican Council envisioned. The lecture will begin at 6:00 p.m. CDT.
This lecture series was established in 2014 in memory of Doris H. Murphy (1937-2011), a former Faith Formation Director at St. Bridget Church and a teacher, writer, lecturer, and mentor who had a passion for catechesis, social justice, scripture study, liturgy, the Eucharist, Vatican II, and Environmental Spirituality. In her own words, most of her work was “trying to put together theology and the people of God.” 2021 is the 10th anniversary of Doris’ death.
This lecture series was established in 2014 in memory of Doris H. Murphy (1937-2011), a former Faith Formation Director at St. Bridget Church and a teacher, writer, lecturer, and mentor who had a passion for catechesis, social justice, scripture study, liturgy, the Eucharist, Vatican II, and Environmental Spirituality. In her own words, most of her work was “trying to put together theology and the people of God.” 2021 is the 10th anniversary of Doris’ death.
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To work faithfully on immigration reform, Christians must understand their own immigration status – going “all in” on immigration to the point that we reform our own sense of citizenship and learn how to be guests. The Church is by... more
To work faithfully on immigration reform, Christians must understand their own immigration status – going “all in” on immigration to the point that we reform our own sense of citizenship and learn how to be guests. The Church is by definition a people that lives in diaspora, a transnational nation that crosses borders and lives among many peoples. Globalization forces us to recognize what it was always supposed to mean to be a global catholic people: Christians' primary loyalty is to be to Christ rather than the nation-state where Christians reside. Their solidarity with one another should transcend ethnic and nationalist loyalties. In this view, the practice of hospitality begins not from a position of hosts who are in control, but in recognition that we too are guests.
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“Do reject the glamour of evil?” This striking question from the Catholic rite of baptism for adults has received surprisingly little attention from theologians. One might summarize all Benedictine values and practices as answering this... more
“Do reject the glamour of evil?” This striking question from the Catholic rite of baptism for adults has received surprisingly little attention from theologians. One might summarize all Benedictine values and practices as answering this question by turning from the merely glamorous toward quieter, deeper joys. The puzzle for Christian educators is how to make such inherently self-effacing joys attractive when the culture of glamour and celebrity competes so well.
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Explains the origin and meaning of a motto that has guided the work of Bridgefolk, the grassroots movement for dialogue and unity between Mennonites and Roman Catholics.
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"What is surprising me today is how relevant some of the things that biblical fundamentalists taught me are proving to be – though maybe not in the way they expected." Available at:... more
"What is surprising me today is how relevant some of the things that biblical fundamentalists taught me are proving to be – though maybe not in the way they expected."
Available at: https://collegevilleinstitute.org/bearings/things-learned-fundamentalists
Available at: https://collegevilleinstitute.org/bearings/things-learned-fundamentalists
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"Imagine what would happen if Christians in the U.S. really believed with Luther that God loves them, that Christ’s saving work is sufficient, and they need not prove themselves in God’s eyes? It may be hard to learn from the Reformer’s... more
"Imagine what would happen if Christians in the U.S. really believed with Luther that God loves them, that Christ’s saving work is sufficient, and they need not prove themselves in God’s eyes? It may be hard to learn from the Reformer’s insights, however, if we no longer recognize works-righteousness when we see it. That may be especially hard if, as I think, works-righteousness is taking a different shape than it did during Luther’s day. Let’s call it justification by team loyalty—a bedeviling hybrid of empty works and ideological belief."
Available at: https://collegevilleinstitute.org/bearings/works-righteousness-virtue-signaling
Available at: https://collegevilleinstitute.org/bearings/works-righteousness-virtue-signaling
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"For Christians to respond to this numbingly complex set of interconnected set of issues – no, to even locate themselves within it – we need to go all in on immigration reform.... To go “all in” on immigration reform, Christians should... more
"For Christians to respond to this numbingly complex set of interconnected set of issues – no, to even locate themselves within it – we need to go all in on immigration reform.... To go “all in” on immigration reform, Christians should re-form our very sense of citizenship, loyalty, and solidarity. We should recognize that the people called Church are, by definition, ones that live in diaspora as a transnational nation that crosses borders and resides among many peoples and nations. To take our baptisms seriously is to embrace life in diaspora and own our immigrant status within every wider society."
Available at: https://collegevilleinstitute.org/bearings/exiles-all
Available at: https://collegevilleinstitute.org/bearings/exiles-all
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"All Christians would do well to develop an interior monastery of the heart. Call it mindfulness. Call it trust. Keep its doors of hospitality open, and in so doing remain ready to walk out to act in the world. But always remember, as a... more
"All Christians would do well to develop an interior monastery of the heart. Call it mindfulness. Call it trust. Keep its doors of hospitality open, and in so doing remain ready to walk out to act in the world. But always remember, as a friend and mentor used to say, “We just work here.” The long game is God’s."
Available at: https://collegevilleinstitute.org/bearings/playing-the-long-game
Available at: https://collegevilleinstitute.org/bearings/playing-the-long-game
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A response to Peter Dula’s critique of Unlearning Protestantism in “For and Against Hauerwas Against Mennonites” (Mennonite Quarterly Review July 2010)
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Also includes follow up blog post: "Yoder and the limits of Matthew 18"
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The author of this book needs no introduction in the world of Islamic scholarship, having taught Islamics at the Sorbonne for many years until his recent retirement. Arnaldez's main concern here is to distinguish between faith and... more
The author of this book needs no introduction in the world of Islamic scholarship, having taught Islamics at the Sorbonne for many years until his recent retirement. Arnaldez's main concern here is to distinguish between faith and the general practice of religious rituals. He is ...
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Do you reject the glamour of evil? This striking question from the Catholic rite of baptism for adults has received surprisingly little attention from theologians. One might summarize all Benedictine values and practices as answering this... more
Do you reject the glamour of evil? This striking question from the Catholic rite of baptism for adults has received surprisingly little attention from theologians. One might summarize all Benedictine values and practices as answering this question by turning from the merelye glamorous toward quieter, deeper joys. The puzzle for Christian educators is how to make such inherently self-effacing joys attractive when the culture of glamour and celebrity competes so well. Dr. Gerald W. Schlabach is professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, where he teaches Christian ethics and recently served as chair of Justice and Peace Studies. On sabbatical this year as a research fellow at the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Studies, Schlabach is currently writing a book on peace theology in the context of Catholic social teaching. He is a member of the American Benedictine Academy, and is one of the co-founders of the grassroots ecumenical group of Mennonites and Catholics, which has its home here at St. John’s Abbey. Schlabach has been a Benedictine oblate since the late 1990s and a Roman Catholic since 2004. His book Unlearning Protestantism: Sustaining Christian Community in an Unstable Age won praise from Fr. Terrence Kardong OSB, editor of the American Benedictine Review, who called the book “by far the most profound study of stability that I have ever seen.” Schlabach holds an M.A. in Theological Studies from the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, and a Ph.D. in moral theology from the University of Notre Dame
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Review of The Story of Original Sin (Cambridge, U.K.; Eugene, Oregon:.James Clarke & Co.; Pickwick Publications, 2013), in Augustinian Studies 46:2 (2015), pp. 303-306.
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considers the extent to which the teachings of Jesus might have had something to do with the creation of Christian values. When he is fully free-associating, Brent leaps gaily over standard chronological and methodological barriers, as... more
considers the extent to which the teachings of Jesus might have had something to do with the creation of Christian values. When he is fully free-associating, Brent leaps gaily over standard chronological and methodological barriers, as when he cites third-century texts to illustrate changes he posits for the early second century (227) or the late and suspect Acta Callisti for proof of the link to Elagabalus (325). Despite all of its reliance on trendy sociological jargon, moreover, there is one sense in which Brent’s study constitutes a major step backward: where earlier scholarship faulted traditional religion for its lack of theology or dogma, Brent now praises imperial cult for precisely these traits, leaving the reader to wonder whether the thesis of contra-culture has also required the projection of such categories onto religious systems that we had finally learned were able to subsist quite well without them. I usually ignore typographical errors in a review, but since traditionalists have so little else to admire in this book, I must point out that Brent does live down to Brill’s traditionally appalling indifference to such nuisances and even manages to take it to a new low, going beyond mere misspelling (as the consistent use of “lead” for “led”) and incomplete sentences to the exotica of added (or missing) words that result in contradictory assertions (e.g., p. 2, contra-culture is “a kind of reversed mirror image” and p. 101, “is not a mirror image”) and outright howlers that the most minimal standard of copyreading should have corrected (see, for instance, p. 87: “The suovetaurilia at Rome in 9 b.c. that had followed the lustrum of 8 b.c.”—a convenient, but by no means the most egregious example). H. A. Drake, University of California, Santa Barbara
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Scholars have been recognizing that Augustine's attention to "concupiscence" grew from a complex analysis of the sources of all human behavior. The same pattern of analysis should extend to Augustinian... more
Scholars have been recognizing that Augustine's attention to "concupiscence" grew from a complex analysis of the sources of all human behavior. The same pattern of analysis should extend to Augustinian "continence," which Augustine presented as key to the righting of all human relationships. Continence shapes the deep grammar of all Augustine wrote about Christian love. Love is the hand of the soul, Augustine once said. For false and problematic loves, Augustine consistently used verbs whereby people acquire the objects of their love through operations of grasping, which close in upon and control those objects. In contrast, loves that are right and true open wide the "hand of the soul" in an act of clinging to God, to Christ, to the truth, and to wisdom -- none of which one can control or manipulate. Love for friends and neighbors also is properly a love that clings rather than grasps.
Research Interests: Philosophy, Love, Augustine, Early Christian Studies, Grammar, and 3 moreSoul, Doctrine, and continence
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... table, as they exchanged chocolates, cigarettes, a sample of their rations, and the ritual ofimprovised soccer ... It is the core reason, and the one that simply refuses to go away. ... promise of hospitality to strangers, a sharing... more
... table, as they exchanged chocolates, cigarettes, a sample of their rations, and the ritual ofimprovised soccer ... It is the core reason, and the one that simply refuses to go away. ... promise of hospitality to strangers, a sharing of peace, a taste of God's generosity, a breaking that opens ...
Research Interests: Political Science and War
Editor's note: "In this issue we offer a conversation between Mennonite scholars (plus one Lutheran who is active in Lutheran-Mennonite dialogue) and the Catholic theologian George Weigel. We thank Dr. Weigel for... more
Editor's note: "In this issue we offer a conversation between Mennonite scholars (plus one Lutheran who is active in Lutheran-Mennonite dialogue) and the Catholic theologian George Weigel. We thank Dr. Weigel for permission to republish the essay "Moral Clarity in a Time of War," which first appeared in the religious journal First Things (December 2002). We are especially grateful for his thoughtful response to the Mennonite comments in this issue. Duane Friesen concludes the dialogue with a reflection on Weigel's statements as well as the Mennonite responses."
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All these considerations compel us to undertake an evaluation of war with an entirely new attitude. Vatican II (1) Defining effective international government in this way is of course setting an idealistic goal; but it is less idealistic... more
All these considerations compel us to undertake an evaluation of war with an entirely new attitude. Vatican II (1) Defining effective international government in this way is of course setting an idealistic goal; but it is less idealistic than the idea that military action could be truly an instrument of justice. John Howard Yoder (2) If the best intentions of the just-war theorists were operational, they could allow only for just policing, not warfare at all. If Christian pacifists can in any way support, participate, or at least not object to operations with recourse to limited but potentially lethal force, that will be true only for just policing. That, in a nutshell, is the twofold thesis of the "Just Policing" proposal. While its title relies on word play to anticipate that twofold thesis, its subtitle attempts a more steely precision. Driving this proposal is a thought experiment. It does not claim that we are upon the threshold of Christian unity vis-a-vis war quite yet. Rather, it is an exercise in imagining the "conditions for the possibility" of reaching that threshold. It seeks to chart how just-war and pacifist Christians might converge sufficiently that a new horizon would come into view, wherein we might then see more clearly how war could cease to be a church-dividing issue. Some such convergence may be possible if together we explore a conceptual territory that longstanding debates between pacifists and just-war thinkers have left surprisingly unmapped. Joint examination of policing, I suggest, may point us toward conditions for the possibility of agreement vis-a-vis war. While the events of September 11, 2001, and debates in the months following prompted this thought experiment and crystallized its arguments, the principal occasion for its drafting was the international dialogue between representatives of the Mennonite World Conference and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Church Unity, which was roughly midway through its initial five-year cycle at the time. While casting an eye to other conversations among other Christian traditions, the concerns and contributions of the Mennonite and Roman Catholic faith communities inevitably receive the greatest attention. (3) I. War: Can We Have It Both Ways? Virtually every Christian tradition is trying to have it both ways about war. This may be a sign of honest puzzlement, or it may be a sign of diplomatic fudging, but it is surely one sign of an unfinished agenda. The Roman Catholic Church has long been custodian of the Christian tradition of just-war deliberation, which began when Saints Ambrose and Augustine used arguments from such Roman thinkers as Cicero in order to justify some wars while disciplining all wars. Since Vatican II, however, the Catholic Church has also given a new level of recognition to vocational pacifism, at least. In the early 1980's, U.S. Catholic bishops writing on The Challenge of Peace explicitly paired the traditions of just war and pacifism or active nonviolence as legitimate Christian responses to war. (4) Historic peace churches (Mennonite, Church of the Brethren, Society of Friends) certainly do not recognize the legitimacy of just-war thinking with an easy reciprocity that would mirror statements by "mainstream" Christian traditions. Yet in their own way, peace churches have found that they, too, must "have it both ways" by acknowledging the need for someone, somewhere, to use potentially lethal violence to preserve order in a fallen world. In the formative years of the sixteenth-century Radical Reformation, the Schleitheim Confession of 1527 gave this recognition classical expression for Mennonites by speaking of "the sword" as "an ordering of God outside the perfection of Christ"; accordingly, "secular rulers are established to wield" the sword that "punishes and kills the wicked" but "guards and protects the good." (5) Though conservative rather than activist Mennonites are more likely to quote the Schleitheim Confession today, many of the very Mennonites who most sought to oppose the "war on terrorism" looming in September and October of 2001 found themselves reflecting the logic of Schleitheim, nonetheless, as they called for alternative, international, judicial responses to terrorism that would still require some military or police force to apprehend the criminals. …
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Scottdale103 p.: 19 cm
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The author of this book needs no introduction in the world of Islamic scholarship, having taught Islamics at the Sorbonne for many years until his recent retirement. Arnaldez's main concern here is to distinguish between faith and... more
The author of this book needs no introduction in the world of Islamic scholarship, having taught Islamics at the Sorbonne for many years until his recent retirement. Arnaldez's main concern here is to distinguish between faith and the general practice of religious rituals. He is ...
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The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical. By John Howard Yoder. Edited by Michael Cartwright. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans. 1995. Pp. 388. $22.99. Throughout his career John Howard Yoder has eschewed the construction... more
The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical. By John Howard Yoder. Edited by Michael Cartwright. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans. 1995. Pp. 388. $22.99. Throughout his career John Howard Yoder has eschewed the construction of "timeless" theological systems that would presume to anticipate (and thus preempt) the discernment that communities of Christian disciples must do to be faithful to their Lord in each new historical situation. Yoder has rigorously pursued what he judges to be the more properly biblical role of theologians--to help faith communities test the presuppositions of their confessions and practices in respectful, vulnerable and permanently open-ended conversation with other communities, figures and truth-claims. And if the alternative to a "timeless" system is an always-local conversation, then the alternative to the genre of a summa, which organizes "a systematic theology" into a few-volume summary, would seem to be the genr...
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This paper surveys theological debates over war and violence within the Christian tradition in a way that assumes others – particularly Muslims – are listening in. It will present Christian pacifism as the sort of internal critique that... more
This paper surveys theological debates over war and violence within the Christian tradition in a way that assumes others – particularly Muslims – are listening in. It will present Christian pacifism as the sort of internal critique that representatives of any faith tradition must honestly do in order to dialogue well with others in the service of peace.
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All these considerations compel us to undertake an evaluation of war with an entirely new attitude. Vatican II (1) Defining effective international government in this way is of course setting an idealistic goal; but it is less idealistic... more
All these considerations compel us to undertake an evaluation of war with an entirely new attitude. Vatican II (1) Defining effective international government in this way is of course setting an idealistic goal; but it is less idealistic than the idea that military action could be truly an instrument of justice. John Howard Yoder (2) If the best intentions of the just-war theorists were operational, they could allow only for just policing, not warfare at all. If Christian pacifists can in any way support, participate, or at least not object to operations with recourse to limited but potentially lethal force, that will be true only for just policing. That, in a nutshell, is the twofold thesis of the "Just Policing" proposal. While its title relies on word play to anticipate that twofold thesis, its subtitle attempts a more steely precision. Driving this proposal is a thought experiment. It does not claim that we are upon the threshold of Christian unity vis-a-vis war quite ...
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Can monasticism really ever be new? So claims the “New Monastic Movement” that has emerged during the last decade among a group of youthful evangelicals who not only find inspiration in Anabaptist models—as a previous generation of... more
Can monasticism really ever be new? So claims the “New Monastic Movement” that has emerged during the last decade among a group of youthful evangelicals who not only find inspiration in Anabaptist models—as a previous generation of Christian intentional communities did—but also in ancient monastic models? We certainly should hope so. For Christ’s church always needs its renewal movements. It needs serious lay Christians who long to incorporate into their families and work life the kinds of practices traditionally assumed possible only amid celibate communities. Meanwhile many old monastic communities (if we must call them that) face demographic challenges that could lead them to welcome new models for sustaining their charisms and apostolates into the new millennium. Still, the ironic reserve of an ancient Greek proverb may be appropriate here. “Call no man happy,” said the Greeks, “until he is dead.” Likewise, we may not be able to call “New Monasticism” new until it is old. Renewal movements within Cristianity have obviously emerged before, attempting to live lives more faithful to Jesus’s teachings, more aligned with the shared life of the earliest Christians, more present among the poor, and less captive to the imperial powers and cultural seductions of their age. What is new about the recent case is the presence of young, postmodern, and most often evangelical Christians who see themselves doing all these things not so much by rejecting tradition as by reappropriating it. What makes them an intriguing case study, in fact, is the special attention many of their leaders have given to the Benedictine tradition in particular, and with it the implications of a vow of stability. For until stability has proven itself, well, stable, for a time, it is not at all.
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Final version of this draft now available at https://rdcu.be/bfWNE. Although the Catholic Church has never made an explicit claim like that of Reinhold Niebuhr to the effect that Jesus’ ethical teachings are irrelevant in public affairs,... more
Final version of this draft now available at https://rdcu.be/bfWNE. Although the Catholic Church has never made an explicit claim like that of Reinhold Niebuhr to the effect that Jesus’ ethical teachings are irrelevant in public affairs, centuries of appealing exclusively to natural-law principles in matters of war and peace constituted a functional equivalent. What then are we to make of Pope Francis’s claim in his 2017 World Day of Peace message not only that nonviolence should be our “style of politics,” but that the Sermon on the Mount should serve as the Church’s “manual” for peacemaking at every level, including domestic policy formation and international diplomacy? The late Glen Stassen’s well-received exegesis of Jesus’ sermon, as organized around a series of fourteen triads (not dyads or antitheses), points to a way of receiving and developing Francis’ teaching. What at first may seem like a technical matter of literary analysis shows Jesus not to be providing impossibly “hard sayings,” but pointing the way to escape our vicious cycles through practicable transforming initiatives. Mimetic theory as developed both by classical social psychology (G.H. Mead) and the emerging field of neuroanthropology (Merlin Donald et al.) suggests the potential of transforming initiatives to change social dynamics and counters the Niebuhrian assumption that enemy-love is necessarily politically irrelevant. The ten verifiably realistic “normative practices” that Stassen and others highlight in just-peacemaking theory all draw upon these dynamics in various ways.
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Both within and among churches that have traditionally held to just war teaching, various formulas in the last fifty years have allowed for the recognition that Christian pacifism is a respectable tradition alongside just war. It is not... more
Both within and among churches that have traditionally held to just war teaching, various formulas in the last fifty years have allowed for the recognition that Christian pacifism is a respectable tradition alongside just war. It is not obvious, however, how historic peace churches can officially reciprocate with the same kind of ecumenical generosity by recognizing the legitimacy of the just war tradition. To do so, after all, would seem to require giving up their very claim to the confessional status of nonviolence, thus undermining their very identities as historic peace churches. Glen Stassen’s well-accepted exegesis of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount opens up an unexpected path out of this impasse. If he is right that the sermon is organized around a consistent succession of triads in which Jesus first named “traditional righteousness,” then diagnosed a “vicious cycle,” then presented a “transforming initiative” for escaping that cycle, then the relationship between just war and pacifism can be reconceived in entirely fresh ways.
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Earlier versions of Gerald Schlabach's chapters appeared as Just Policing: How War Could Cease to be a Church-Dividing Issue, in Just Policing: Mennonite-Catholic Theological Colloquium 2002, ed. Ivan J. Kauffman, Bridgefolk... more
Earlier versions of Gerald Schlabach's chapters appeared as Just Policing: How War Could Cease to be a Church-Dividing Issue, in Just Policing: Mennonite-Catholic Theological Colloquium 2002, ed. Ivan J. Kauffman, Bridgefolk Series, no. 2 (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, ...
To work faithfully on immigration reform, Christians must understand their own immigration status – going “all in” on immigration to the point that we reform our own sense of citizenship and learn how to be guests. The Church is by... more
To work faithfully on immigration reform, Christians must understand their own immigration status – going “all in” on immigration to the point that we reform our own sense of citizenship and learn how to be guests. The Church is by definition a people that lives in diaspora, a transnational nation that crosses borders and lives among many peoples. Globalization forces us to recognize what it was always supposed to mean to be a global catholic people: Christians' primary loyalty is to be to Christ rather than the nation-state where Christians reside. Their solidarity with one another should transcend ethnic and nationalist loyalties. In this view, the practice of hospitality begins not from a position of hosts who are in control, but in recognition that we too are guests.
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“Do reject the glamour of evil?” This striking question from the Catholic rite of baptism for adults has received surprisingly little attention from theologians. One might summarize all Benedictine values and practices as answering this... more
“Do reject the glamour of evil?” This striking question from the Catholic rite of baptism for adults has received surprisingly little attention from theologians. One might summarize all Benedictine values and practices as answering this question by turning from the merely glamorous toward quieter, deeper joys. The puzzle for Christian educators is how to make such inherently self-effacing joys attractive when the culture of glamour and celebrity competes so well.
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Response to Benjamin W Goossen, "Why 500 Years?: A Critique of Anabaptism’s Upcoming Anniversary Celebration"