Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence
toward the Truth: Internal Critique
amid Interfaith Dialogue*
Gerald W. Schlabach
precis
This article surveys theological debates over war and violence within the Christian
tradition in a way that assumes others—particularly Muslims—are listening in. It
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.
•
P
erhaps it is unwise to begin an essay in service of Muslim-Christian
dialogue by citing a controversial commentator weighing in on still
another controversy, but bear with me while I refer to an op-ed piece in September, 2006, by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman on “Islam
and the Pope.” Friedman actually said very little about the controversial
*This essay was presented with the title “Christian Peace Theology: Internal Critique and
Interfaith Dialogue” in two venues: the Nobel Peace Prize Forum, Faith and Peace Day (Minneapolis, MN, in March, 2014); and the Muslim-Christian Dialogue Center Symposium
(University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN, in November, 2014), with guests from Dokuz Eylul
University, Izmir, Turkey.
jour na l of ecumenica l studies
vol . 53, no. 4 (fa ll 2018) © 2018
542
Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 53:4
quotation concerning Islam that Pope Benedict XVI had included in a lecture two weeks earlier in Regensburg, Germany. Instead, Friedman used
the occasion to identify the kind of dialogue he considered most urgent—
not interfaith dialogue between different Abrahamic religions but intrafaith dialogue between believers within a given Abrahamic faith. I risk
citing Friedman, therefore, to direct his point back at my own faith tradition: Although Friedman directed his appeal toward Muslims, he could
just as easily have done so toward Christians.
The world certainly needs an honest and respectful dialogue between
Christianity and Islam, Friedman wrote, as well as an honest and respectful dialogue between Islamic-majority countries and Western ones. Above
all, “there needs to be a respectful, free dialogue between Muslims and
Muslims.” Despite many years as a Middle East correspondent, which had
allowed him to see “the compassionate side of Islam in action” repeatedly,
Friedman admitted that he was increasingly confused about what Islam
stands for today. And. if he was confused—he implied—no wonder that the
“Western masses” were, too. So, if the world is to avoid “the slow-motion
clash of civilizations that [Harvard political scientist Samuel] Huntington
predicted,” Friedman argued, then the dialogue we all need most urgently
is one between Muslims themselves. “What matters is not what Muslims
tell us they stand for,” in fact. “What matters is what they tell themselves, in
their own languages, and how they treat their own.”1
It is of the very nature of the case Friedman was making that Muslims
themselves must decide whether Friedman was right. I am not sure whether
he was or not; I cite him neither to chide him nor to chime in with him. If
Friedman had anything valid whatsoever to say about the urgency of intrafaith dialogue within the Islamic ummah or global community, that itself is
something for Muslims to decide, not I, or even he. Non-Muslims can only
elaborate by noting that Muslims must also be the ones to say where any
such dialogue is happening most fruitfully, which texts are most suggestive, which resources in the tradition are most helpful, and so on.
All of this offers a lesson for every dialogue, a lesson that we might easily
neglect in our heartfelt desire for progress in interfaith dialogue between
religions. The lesson here is two-pronged. Its first point is that intrafaith dialogue may well have an impact on interfaith, cross-cultural dialogue, and
1
Thomas Friedman, “Islam and the Pope,” New York Times, September 29, 2006.
Schlabach • Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence in Interfaith Dialogue
sometimes that impact will be momentous. Of course, the inverse is also
true: When other faiths or cultures pose new questions for our own traditions, the dialogues within our traditions become richer and better focused.
There is a second point to this two-pronged lesson: Even when all this
is so, it is no less true that every intrafaith dialogue must proceed according to its own integrity if it is to prove fruitful—and that is no less true
when others are listening in upon our intramural, intrafaith debates with
intense interest, hoping they will bear fruit beyond the confines of that
tradition.
Within Christianity, pacifist communities and advocates of nonviolence have been trying for centuries to play very much the role and elicit
very much the same debates that Friedman has called for among Muslims
today. Christians committed to nonviolence did this in one way within
their ancient Jewish, Greek, and Roman contexts. They have done so in
other ways over the last five centuries. One must always beware of anachronistic readings that would attempt to read a contemporary phenomenon
such as modern pacifism back into early centuries, of course, but this much
seems safe to affirm: By the witness of their words and very lives, nonviolent Christians have consistently posed a trenchant set of questions:
What do we Christians really stand for? Others are watching; are we confusing them? Jesus loved us when we were still in rebellion against God, nonviolent Christians observe, citing convictions basic to the simplest of
Christian pieties, and he taught us in turn to love even our enemies. Nothing
could do more, he said, to reveal the character of the God of Abraham. Do we not
then send a most confusing message when, far from loving enemies, the way we
treat even our own is violent and idolatrous? We make war against our brothers
and sisters for temporal goods and in defense of earthly kingdoms. How then will
unbelievers recognize the gospel of Jesus or the covenant faithfulness of the one he
called Father?
To recount this Christian tradition, even as we do so in the service of
Muslim-Christian dialogue, we must first let it proceed in its own “language,” appeal to its own texts, and begin from its own theological assumptions. Perhaps this will seem risky, because Christians debating other
Christians may well find that their strongest arguments rely on the most
particular of Christian beliefs and doctrines, which other faiths cannot be
expected to share. If nothing else, however, such a strategy is simply honest
and transparent.
543
544
Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 53:4
Larger lessons emerge, however. It is this very vulnerability—which a
Christian who seeks to renounce violence must learn from the very particular life and death of Jesus, but that emerged in the thought of Mahatma
Gandhi as well—that may have the most to contribute to interfaith dialogue. Whatever believers in other religious traditions might decide they
should learn from Christians as they listen in on intrafaith Christian ecumenical dialogue, practitioners of interfaith dialogue may find themselves
recognizing one of the first principles of their very discipline: 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.
A Case for Christian Pacifism,
from the Core of Christian Theology
We must state frankly that the strongest case for Christian pacifism may
well begin in theological convictions that Muslims cannot be expected to
share, unless by way of analogies that they, not Christians, may best identify. These are convictions evident in the very oldest of Christian creeds or
confessions of faith, embedded in New Testament texts: “Crucified and
resurrected for us” who are sinners, “Jesus Christ is Lord.”2
To discern the oldest and most basic core of the Christian proclamation or kerygma is, to be sure, a challenge that has occupied numerous biblical scholars for well over a century.3 Since Muslims believe that their
2
The late A. James Reimer likewise emphasized the need for Mennonites and other historic peace churches to ground their Christian pacifism in classical Christian theology of the
Trinity. See A. James Reimer, “Trinitarian Orthodoxy, Constantinianism, and Theology from a
Radical Protestant Perspective,” in S. Mark Heim, ed., Faith to Creed: Ecumenical Perspectives on
the Affirmation of the Apostolic Faith in the Fourth Century, Papers of Faith to Creed Consultation, Waltham, MA, 1989 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1991), pp.
129–161; idem, Christians and War: A Brief History of the Church’s Teachings and Practices, Facets
Series (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), pp. x, 33–34, 53–54, and 171–175; and idem,
Toward an Anabaptist Political Theology: Law, Order, and Civil Society, ed. Paul G. Doerksen,
Theopolitical Visions 17 (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), pp. 2–9 and 54.
3
For simplification of presentation in this interfaith context, I will rely on Peter’s sermon
in Acts 2. I am aware that no serious biblical scholars would consider the sermons in the Book
of Acts to be exact transcripts, and many would suspect that even if the author of Luke and
Acts were benefiting from accounts passed down through oral tradition (see Lk. 1:1–4; cf. Acts
1:1–2), he overlaid them with his own theological emphases. Nonetheless, Peter’s sermon in
Acts 2 gives enough signs of its primitive origins for scholars to use it as one among a number
Schlabach • Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence in Interfaith Dialogue
foundational text, the Qur’ān, came in a much more direct fashion, the
very need that Christians have to extract or de-embed their core beliefs
through “source criticism” might seem a bit of an embarrassment. Nonetheless, the fact that the Christian gospel is embedded within complex histories of people and texts is a necessary reflection of the Christian faith
itself. According to the faith of Christians and Jews before them, their texts
have a history because God’s very revelation is historical. Since Abraham,
God’s redeeming work has always required the creation of a people who
will live out a particular history as a transformative witness within all
human history—a people “blessed” not just for its own good but also to
be a “blessing to all the families of the earth” (Gen. 12:1–3). Even the
unique and uniquely revelatory event of Jesus is seen not to displace but
to fulfill the history of God’s faithful action of keeping covenant with the
Hebrew people while beckoning and cajoling them to become a “light to
the nations.” 4
Accordingly, on Pentecost, the very first day of church history, the
apostle Peter made sure to connect God’s new historical act with the ongoing history of the covenant people. Peter’s most immediate task was to
explain for public onlookers the prophetic outpouring of the Holy Spirit
(Acts 2). Citing the Hebrew prophet Joel, he insisted that God’s purpose
had always been to pour out the Holy Spirit not simply on prophetic individuals but on “all flesh”—on all manner of persons, young and old, men
and women, slaves as well as mighty—whom God was gathering from all
nations into a renewed people. Apparently, even the most dramatic of new
of key resources for discerning the outline of earliest Christian proclamation or kerygma.
(Taken in isolation from other New Testament texts, for example, the Acts 2:36 affirmation
that God had made Jesus both Lord and Messiah would seem to support an “adoptionist”
understanding of Jesus’ relationship to God that later Christian theology would soon find
inadequate. This provides strong evidence for its authentic antiquity.) For far more detailed
studies identifying the earliest and most basic core of Christian faith, based on texts from
throughout the New Testament, see Ben F. Meyer, “The Gospel Literature: Data on Jesus?”
chap. 3 in his The Aims of Jesus, with a new introduction by N. T. Wright, Princeton Theological
Monograph Series 48 (San Jose, CA.: Pickwick Publications, 2002), pp. 60–75; Larry W. Hurtado, At the Origins of Christian Worship: The Context and Character of Earliest Christian Devotion (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000), pp. 76–81 and 86–97;
and, above all, Larry W. Hurtado’s monumental work, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in
Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003), especially pp. 108–118, 179–184, and 650–651. I thank my colleague John Martens for help in reviewing this literature.
4
Is. 42:6 and 49:6.
545
546
Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 53:4
revelations descending directly from above through the power of God’s
Holy Spirit would be unintelligible apart from God’s ongoing work in
history.
What might merely seem a methodological aside concerning how to
retrieve the core Christian proclamation or kerygma, therefore, actually
has deeply theological and ethical import. It is completely of a piece with
the entirely orthodox Christian conviction that God’s strength reveals
itself most fully in apparent weakness.5 We refer in the first instance, of
course, to Jesus’ coming in the very weakness of human flesh, then crucified in the most gruesome and humiliating of deaths. In the cross Christians believe they recognize the very character of the God of the universe,
who consistently subjects the divine Word to the vicissitudes of human
history, not despite but because of God’s greatness and grace.
What Peter most needed to explain on Pentecost day, then, was God’s
unexpected vindication of an unlikely way of messianic liberation. You
encountered Jesus of Nazareth for yourself, Peter reminded his listeners.
Nazareth was a backwater town in an outlying province, an unlikely source
of greatness. Nevertheless, God had “attested” to him with “deeds of power,
wonders, and signs.” Jesus’ deeds of power—Peter’s listeners would have
recalled—were acts of healing and feeding and compassion for outcasts,
not military prowess. Even so, his ministry and teaching were threatening
enough that Jewish and Roman authorities had conspired to end his work
with the exclamation point of crucifixion.6 “But God raised him up, having
freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its
power” (Acts 2:24). Turning to texts from the Hebrew scriptures, Peter
argued that Jesus’ turning out to be the messiah should not have been so
altogether surprising. Still, Peter himself had required the vindication of
resurrection and illumination by the Holy Spirit to comprehend Jesus’
identity fully.7 Now, however, “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of
5
Cf. 2 Cor. 12:9, as well as Augustine’s Confessions, book 7, section 18.24 and ff.
Acts 2:32 has been used for antisemitic purposes, since it records Peter bluntly saying to
his Jewish listeners: “You crucified and killed [this man, Jesus] by the hands of those outside
the law.” However, this very verse conveys the responsibility that the Roman occupiers shared.
Crucifixion was their trademark technique of political execution, after all, and it is they who
are the ones outside the law or Torah whose hands were required for it to be carried out at all.
7
Peter’s difficulty in accepting Jesus as a messiah who would suffer—and his failure to
identify with Jesus as he neared death—is a prominent element in the drama of Jesus’ ministry
6
Schlabach • Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence in Interfaith Dialogue
us are witnesses” (Acts 2:31). The message of God’s act of vindication was
that God was showing “this Jesus” who had been crucified to be “both
Lord and Messiah” (Acts 2:36).
Kyrios Christos—Jesus Christ is Lord. This basic confession recurs at
the core of other early proclamations and hymns embedded in New Testament texts. Its simple formula may even constitute the earliest Christian
creed. In any case, it is prominent among a cluster of confessional affirmations that filled it out and gave it its intelligibility.8 Centuries of repetition
have now turned “Lord” into what might merely seem an honorific title, so
that we easily miss its revolutionary claim. In the Septuagint, the Jewish
translation of their scriptures from Hebrew to Greek, “Kyrios” was the
word that ancient Jewish scholars had used for “Elohim,” the word that
pious Jews spoke in place of the sacrosanct name for God, “YHWH.” Applied
to Jesus, the unmistakable resonance of the title Kyrios bespoke the ground
spring of what soon became orthodox Christian creedal affirmation—that
Jesus is not just from God but is God incarnate, the Word of God made
flesh, second person of the Trinity. Muslims may certainly find reason to
conclude, at the end of the day, after every interfaith dialogue, that such an
affirmation “associates” God, Allah, with another, thus verging on idolatry,
yet along the path of dialogue Christians also have reason to ask that Muslims recognize the thoroughly anti-idolatrous implication and purpose of
this claim.
To say—as Peter reportedly did on the day of Pentecost—that God was
acting in history to reveal Jesus of Nazareth as “both Lord and Messiah”
(Acts 2:36) was to make an extraordinarily powerful claim not only in its
Jewish context but in its Roman setting as well. It was to proclaim that
“Jesus Christ is Lord” meant that this one—crucified according to the most
gruesome and humiliating of deaths, a death reserved for traitors and thus
fraught with political overtones, but then vindicated by resurrection—is (of
all people!) the true Kyrios. It was to say that the idolatrous Roman emperor
whom his subjects called Kyrios or Caesar decidedly was not. To be sure,
and passion. See Mk. 8:27–38; 14:28–31, 66–72 and parallels in other Gospels.
8
I.e., that this man is the messiah and that such a messiah is Lord is all the more striking
because he really did suffer, die, and rise from the dead, all on our behalf. Again, see Meyer and
Hurtado for early and consistent evidence of these elements of Christian faith, proclaimed in
tandem.
547
548
Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 53:4
many Jews had been longing for God’s Messiah to displace the Roman overlord, not to demonstrate a new and paradoxically nondomineering form of
lordship. So, to say that this one was the Messiah or Christ was to say that
God was fulfilling the hopes and longings of the Jewish people in a way that
initially dismayed even Jesus’ closest disciples. None less than Peter himself, after all, had tried to dissuade Jesus when he began to warn his disciples
of his impending death; Peter and other disciples, too, were looking for a
military uprising that would install the Messiah Jesus as a conventional
ruler—with them as his lieutenants.9
For these Jewish disciples of Jesus to turn around, post-Pentecost, and
proclaim the crucified Jesus as Kyrios was to critique the potential idolatry
of their own nationalism wherein the cruelties of military occupation had
invited the understandable temptation (as with any oppressed people) to
relish the sacrifice of their enemies’ lives in a military victory, thereby
exalting their own identity over all others. The resurrection and outpouring of the Holy Spirit had opened their eyes; Christianity now moved out
into the gentile world, offering God’s faithfulness toward the children of
Abraham to all nations. As they did so, their very use of the confession,
“Jesus is Lord,” in turn became an affront to idolatrous Roman claims on
behalf of the emperor who also called himself Kyrios.
To argue, then, that the strongest case for Christian pacifism begins in
the core theological convictions of orthodox Christianity is not to dismiss
other arguments for the thoroughgoing renunciation of lethal violence, but
it is to locate them properly. Aided by the politically savvy development of
Gandhian nonviolence in the twentieth century among social scientists
such as Gene Sharp,10 pacifists have strong arguments to make about which
strategies of social change, peacebuilding, and security are most effective.
However, these are secondary supporting considerations, for Christian
pacifism does not finally rest on utilitarian arguments about “what works.”
Staking its ultimate claim on the character and ways of God, whose power
and wisdom the apostle Paul identified precisely with the cross that seems
so foolish to human beings (1 Cor. 1:18–25), Christian pacifism can also
make a kind of natural-law argument about ways in which “those who bear
9
Mk. 8:27–34; 10:32–45.
See Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, 3 vols., ed. Marina Finkelstein (Boston, MA: Extending Horizons, 1973); Gene Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, Extending Horizons Books (Boston, MA: P. Sargent Publishers, 1980).
10
Schlabach • Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence in Interfaith Dialogue
crosses are working the grain of the universe.”11 However, Christian pacifism is amenable to natural-law argumentation only if Christians take care
to interrogate “nature” and “reality” in the light of Jesus rather than subjecting Jesus to preexisting categories of the natural that we have developed autonomously, apart from Jesus.
Certainly, anyone who cares about victims of violence and oppression
must care about effectiveness in the pursuit of concrete results. According
to Luke 4, Jesus inaugurated his ministry in his hometown synagogue at
Nazareth by identifying himself with God’s promise in Isaiah 61 that the
anointed one would bring a message of truly “good news to the poor” and
would “proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Such
goals had their spiritual and transhistorical dimensions, yet were not
merely otherworldly. How then to achieve them in history? Jesus did not
even announce the goals of his ministry in Luke 4 until he had first faced
and rejected three temptations in the wilderness, which upon close examination turn out to coincide with the ordinary stuff of politics in its standard forms. The tempter’s suggestion that Jesus turn stones into bread was
not simply a way to stave off his own hunger but also coincided with the
option to promote his movement through a demagogic appeal to the
lowest-common-denominator of self-interest on the part of the populace.
The tempter’s suggestion that Jesus throw himself from the pinnacle of the
temple in Jerusalem and allow God to save him was not simply a misguided
test of faith, but it also coincided with the option to manipulate the public
through spectacle, thus winning a name that had more to do with shallow
celebrity than with faithful witness. When the tempter showed Jesus “all
the kingdoms of the world” in an instant and offered to give Jesus “their
glory and all this authority,” the problem was not only that Jesus would
have to bow down to one other than God. More than that, the very kind of
11
John Howard Yoder, “Armaments and Eschatology,” Studies in Christian Ethics, vol. 1,
no. 1 (1988), p. 58. Also see John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids,
MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994), p. 246; and note Stanley Hauerwas, With the
Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology, Gifford Lectures delivered at
the University of St. Andrews in 2001 (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001). Also, note the
ways that A. James Reimer both evoked natural law traditions and urged Mennonites to forge
a more adequate political theology as Christian pacifists by attending to theological convictions associated with it: Reimer, Christians and War, p. 54; and idem, Toward an Anabaptist
Political Theology, pp. 7, 9, 54, and 117–122.
549
550
Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 53:4
power that the tempter offered was incompatible with God’s Reign—the
violence of imperial conquest.
Luke and the other Gospels thus make clear that Jesus’ encounter in
the wilderness was only a preview of the very real political options that
would tempt Jesus throughout his ministry—when he miraculously fed
the people and they wanted to make him king, when he dramatically
entered Jerusalem to cleanse the temple, but did so on a humble donkey
rather than a war horse. Above all, right when his closest associates
expected him at last to marshal a violent insurrection, he refused to kill for
the justice of his cause and instead died for it.12 The reason is not that his
ministry was apolitical or unmoved by cries for justice and liberation but
that Jesus was opting for a qualitatively different kind of politics. His would
be a truly original revolution because it broke with the cycles of violence by
which one regime after another throughout history has promised justice
but recapitulated patterns of unjust domination as they sought their ends
through violent means.13
Jesus’ inaugural message at Nazareth also hinted at his intention to
open the gospel and its promise of liberation to all nations. Sooner or
later, that universal scope does lead to the question of natural law. Jesus’
hearers in Nazareth were initially quite glad to hear that the promise of
justice, vindication, and “the year of the Lord’s favor” was being fulfilled
in their presence. However, just as their acclamation surged, Jesus spurned
any assumption that they would automatically be its chief beneficiaries.
The prophet Elijah had aided a needy widow in Sidon, he reminded them,
and the prophet Elisha had cleansed a leper from Syria, even though there
12
Jn. 6:1–15; Mt. 21:1–17 and 26:51–53; Mk. 11:1–19; and Lk. 19:28–48.
For a fuller account of Jesus’ teachings as a guide for breaking out of cycles of violence,
see Glen H. Stassen, “The Fourteen Triads of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:21–7:12),”
Journal of Biblical Literature 122 (Summer, 2003): 267–308; Glen Harold Stassen and David P.
Gushee, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003); Glen H. Stassen, “Healing the Rift Between the Sermon on the Mount
and Christian Ethics,” Studies in Christian Ethics, vol. 18, no. 3 (2005), pp. 89–105; idem, Living
the Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Hope for Grace and Deliverance (San Francisco, CA:
Jossey-Bass, 2006); and idem, “The Sermon on the Mount as Realistic Disclosure of Solid
Ground,” Studies in Christian Ethics, vol. 22, no. 1 (2009), pp. 57–75. For a fuller elaboration of
the political implications of Luke 4, see John Howard Yoder, “The Kingdom Coming,” chap. 2
of his Politics of Jesus, pp. 21–59. The reference to “a revolution that would be truly original”
derives from the title essay in John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian
Pacifism, Christian Peace Shelf (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1971).
13
Schlabach • Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence in Interfaith Dialogue
were many with similar needs in Israel. Since both the widow and the
leper were foreigners, the most obvious lesson here is, no doubt, that Jesus’
unwelcome challenge to his hearers’ nationalism (and our own, whoever
we are) coincides with his teaching of nonviolent love for enemies.14 Yet,
Jesus’ expectation that all peoples were prepared to receive the gospel carried with it a further implication that would later prompt the Christian
tradition of reflection that we know as “natural law.” If some capacity to
receive the gospel is already present among all nations, there must also be
some common human capacity for faith and morality that is operative
through God’s creation already prior to Christ’s proclamation. It has been
the task of Christian philosophers and theologians in the natural-law tradition to name that capacity and the principles that all fair-minded human
beings ought to be able to recognize through its exercise, even apart from
revelation.
Still, in marking a place for natural law in this way, a Christian pacifist is
making the particular story of Jesus of Nazareth its lexical starting point,
not universal principles. The paradox here is not insoluble, because the
Jesus whom Christians believe to be fully divine they also believe to be
fully human, thus revealing true human nature as surely as he revealed
God’s—through the contours of his very particular life at a time and place
in history and culture. Looking backwards at the natural human realities
that have prepared us to encounter the revelatory person of Jesus Christ,
therefore, we may thus see dimensions of human nature and natural law
that we would otherwise have missed. However, the methodological or
epistemological order of proceeding here can be altogether decisive when
we come to hard questions of violence in the face of unjust aggression.
Take the crucial example of self-defense, which to most people seems to
be a self-evident natural principle.15 In hearing the call to follow Jesus,
Christian disciples have heard that they must “take up their cross daily,”
for “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their
life for my sake will save it.” If there is any self-evident right to self-defense
here, Jesus has turned it quite on its head, for, although Jesus does not reprimand wanting to save one’s life, he sets in motion a thorough reconsideration of what will actually, really, secure our futures.
14
15
Mt. 5:43–48; and Lk. 6:27–36.
Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I–II.94.2.
551
552
Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 53:4
The point is not that the power of the cross is merely supernatural or
anti-natural or that Christian hope resolves only in an otherworldly vindication. Quite to the contrary, the “wisdom of the cross” that first seemed so
foolish brings into focus features of nature and social process that have
always been present but that we in our sinful self-absorption might otherwise minimize or miss altogether. One of the twentieth century’s leading
theologians representing the pacifism of historic peace churches, John
Howard Yoder, pointed to numerous empirically verifiable ways in which,
as he put it, “those who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe.”16 Groups lacking access to the reins of power are often the true
agents of social change. The apparent powerlessness of their minority status allows them to forge creative pilot projects that demonstrate patterns of
equity and reconciliation or service for the common good that society at
large may later adopt. The success of these prophetic or creative minorities
is not guaranteed, of course; the very power of their witness may elicit a
reaction on the part of those who benefit from status quo structures of
power. However, to hold fast to the ways of justice without resorting to
violence in the defense of one’s cause, thus suffering unjustly, is to unleash
yet another recognizable form of power—the power of martyrdom—by
which the witness of a small committed group or even a single individual
will sometimes do more to turn the tide of history than all the battalions
arrayed to stifle them, by holding fast to their moral convictions even at the
cost of their own deaths. Even in times that do not immediately demand
moral heroism, the work of maintaining public order and true security
arguably belongs far less to warriors than to all the quieter, unobtrusive
actors who knit together and sustain bonds of social trust—based not on
the logic of scarcity or threat but of abundance and generosity.17
Still—the Christian pacifist must reiterate—these utilitarian and natural law arguments are finally not the decisive reasons for Christian pacifism. Jesus is. It is wise to insist on this point, because pacifism, especially
16
See note 13, above. For examples of Yoder’s elaboration on the social power of nonviolence, see Yoder, Politics of Jesus, pp. 38–39 and 240–241, and his extended list of ways that a
creative minority can be an effective change agent in history even if it renounces the temptation to force change upon history as it appears in “Christ, the Hope of the World,” in Yoder,
The Original Revolution, pp. 140–176.
17
On this final point, see Duane K. Friesen and Gerald W. Schlabach, eds., At Peace and
Unafraid: Public Order, Security, and the Wisdom of the Cross (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press,
2005), especially the three opening chapters.
Schlabach • Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence in Interfaith Dialogue
of the liberal or humanist kind, has too often discredited itself by seeming
to promise effectiveness in every case. Nor can Christian nonviolence
claim to come naturally except insofar as our sin-distorted natures are
being redeemed. To be sure, every kind of nonviolent practitioner does
have a right to turn the question of effectiveness back upon proponents of
violent military solutions. They not only make promises of success that are
empirically dubious, but they also operate from a worldview that depends
just as much on eschatological hope as any frankly religious one, only
covertly so.18 An honest debate over effective strategies of social change
and self-defense, after all, requires a single rather than a double standard.
People suffer and die in both military and nonviolent campaigns; the twentieth century has left us horrendous casualty numbers that hardly look
favorable for militarists. Nonetheless, the very dynamics of active nonviolence require the Christian practitioner to eschew short cuts in favor of
patient, ethically consistent living and acting, in the trust that God in
Christ has already won the decisive battle against evil on the cross—and
has done so nonviolently. The task of the Christian is therefore to live and
act accordingly, confident that we no longer need to secure our own futures
nor exact justice for ourselves, because God is at work bringing history to
its fulfilment in the gift of God’s Reign. Perhaps a Muslim will even want
to call such trust islam.19
18
Duane Friesen emphasized this point in “In Search of Security: A Theology and Ethic of
Peace and Public Order,” chap. 2 in Friesen and Schlabach, At Peace and Unafraid, pp. 48–49.
19
Harry Huebner, dean of Canadian Mennonite University, represented the Mennonite
Central Committee in the West Bank earlier in his career. He recalled his surprise at visiting a
Muslim cleric in Egypt in 1983 and hearing him begin his remarks by saying that “Islam is
inherently a pacifist religion.” Since Islam is about submitting our wills to Allah, he went on to
explain, “How can we submit to Allah and at the same time take the life of someone Allah has
willed to live?” To be sure, the cleric went on to argue in ways similar to just-war thinkers in
Christian and Jewish traditions that “the need for justice in Allah’s world . . . sometimes
required exceptions to pacifism.” Still, the encounter led Huebner to suggest that, in the context of interreligious dialogue, Christian pacifists might want to point out that “in some ways
we are as Islamic as Islam. I mean by this that we are pacifists only because we submit ourselves to God who is acting in our world even when we cannot think of how to get from injustice to justice without violence. So, for us to take matters into our own hands and destroy
another person’s life as a way of getting to peace is an act of defiance against God, inconsistent
with the reverent devotion due our life-giving creator. In other words, we are pacifist precisely
because we submit our wills to God. We believe that violence is an act of unfaith” (Harry
Huebner, “Reflections on Meeting with Ahmedinejad,” presentation to the MCC Peace Committee, Akron, PA, 2008, pp. 1 and 4).
553
554
Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 53:4
Christian Pacifism and Christian Self-Critique
To argue that the strongest case for Christian pacifism begins in the core
theological convictions of orthodox Christianity is also to name Christian pacifism as a centuries-long effort to do what Thomas Friedman has
called for—but among Christians. In other words, as important as interfaith dialogue is, we must echo his commentary on the need for intrafaith
dialogue among Muslims by insisting that “What matters is not what
[Christians] tell [Muslims] they stand for. What matters is what they tell
themselves, in their own languages, and how they treat their own.” Christian pacifism may have become numerically and sociologically marginal
since roughly the time of fourth-century Emperor Constantine, but when
lived out consistently it constitutes a lived argument for Christian selfcritique, for, it insists, from the core of Christian theology, that mainstream Christianity must repent of its historical recourse to violence if it
is to be true to its Sovereign.
Jesus himself set the pattern. As Yoder argued in his classic work on The
Politics of Jesus, when Jesus rejected the political options of his day, he was
not opting for an apolitical stance but was forging a coherent alternative to
what turn out to be the most recurring—even archetypical—political
options facing Christians and others down through the centuries. The Sadducee party that represented the first-century priestly aristocracy in Israel
cut deals with the ruling Roman overlords in order to insure the “domestic
tranquility” that they needed to continue the cultic life of the nation and
also to profit from the temple economy they controlled. The Pharisee party
was a renewal movement stressing inner piety based on studious fidelity to
the Mosaic Law; the Pharisees had little more hope than the Sadducees for a
change in the political structure imposed by Roman occupation, except
perhaps insofar as righteous devotion permeated Israel and thus prepared
the nation for God’s Messiah to intervene. The Essenes radicalized these
first two options as they withdrew into the desert; combining the Sadducees’ cultic emphasis with the Pharisees’ drive toward renewed purity, they
rejected the corruption they believed to center in the Temple of Jerusalem
and sought to form a purified community apart, dedicated to preparation
for a Messiah who would violently purge the nation of both foreign and
internally grown corruption. The Zealots, too, awaited a Messiah, but their
Schlabach • Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence in Interfaith Dialogue
preparation was to begin building him an actual army and to initiate guerrilla action against the Romans.
These four political options, then, have presented themselves to Christians throughout history: accommodation or working within the system,
inward religious withdrawal through private religiosity, outward religious
withdrawal through sectarian separation, and violent revolution. To be
sure, Jesus located himself in conversation with all of these options, yet he
broke especially with the ways that they all accommodated violence. He
was as centered in the worship of God as the Sadducean priests claimed to
be, but without their compromises; he preached inner renewal like a Pharisean rabbi, while embracing “sinners” who fell short; his proclamation of
God’s Reign shared with the Zealots an expectation of justice but was all
the more revolutionary for its nonviolence; and, key to all of these, Jesus,
like the Essenes, founded a distinguishably new community, yet without
withdrawing it from the larger society.
In idioms that sometimes seem strange to modern ears (but that actually speak in fresh ways to the requirements of Christian community in
our postmodern, globalizing world), leading thinkers in the formative
early centuries of the Christian tradition carried forward Jesus’ vision of
a qualitatively original politics that did not require weapons to sustain
the life of the community that embodied it. As these “church fathers” or
“patristic writers” made their case for the authenticity of the Christian
movement and the veracity of its gospel, one of their arguments was that
the prophetic visions of Is. 2:1–5 and Mic. 4:1–7 were being fulfilled in the
transethnic, transnational Christian church. As Irenaeus put it, when the
apostles preached God’s word throughout the known world, they “caused
such a change in the state of things, that [people from many nations] did
form their swords and war-lances into ploughshares, and changed them
into pruning-hooks for reaping the corn, [that is], into instruments used
for peaceful purposes, [so that] they are now unaccustomed to fighting,
but when smitten, offer also the other cheek.”20
20
Irenaeus, Against Heretics, book 4, ch. 34.4. See also Justin Martyr, First Apology, ch. 29, and
idem, Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 90; Tertullian, An Answer to the Jews, ch. 3; Origen, Against Celsus,
book 5, ch. 33; and Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, section 52. These examples stretch
from the second through the early fourth century of the Common Era. Pacifist scholars have
555
556
Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 53:4
The reconciled character of the Christian community, bringing
together people not only of different ethnicities and cultures but also of
different social classes, was unique enough that some observers began calling Christians a third genus or race, after the gentiles and the Jews. Patristic
writers hesitated to embrace the designation insofar as it undercut their
own embrace of a single commonwealth of humanity and additionally carried the pejorative implication that they were freaks.21 Nonetheless, still
other church fathers affirmed in various ways that Christians constituted
what we might call a transnational nation, living as resident aliens or exiles
who could be at home in every nation because they belonged to another
homeland.22 As an identifiable people, but one spread through the nations
as a diaspora people, they should be able both to transform history and to
preserve their identity without territorial control.23
Every social movement comes to a watershed if it actually wins, and its
leaders must decide whether and how to govern the changes for which they
have been calling.24 Christianity came to such a watershed in its fourth
century. Though the tributaries flowing through that watershed were complex, the name of a single historical figure often marks the entire era. When
the Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 c.e., inserted
himself in church affairs, and accepted baptism shortly before his death in
337, his policies required Christian bishops and theologians to rethink
both their relationship to state power and the question of whether Christians may properly wield its sometimes-violent tools. Constantine himself
may have delayed baptism in part because he continued to recognize the
sword-bearing responsibilities of an emperor as incompatible with Chrisnoted the suspicious fact that, after the Constantinian settlement, Christian apologists ceased
using this argument to vindicate Christianity. See Alan Kreider, The Change of Conversion and the
Origin of Christendom (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999), pp. 27, 52, and 64.
21
Tertullian, The Apology, ch. 38; Ad Nationes, book 1, ch. 8. More affirmatively, see Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, book 6, chs. 5–6.
22
Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus, chs. 5–6; Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Heathen, ch. 10; The Shepherd of Hermas, similitude no. 1; Origin, Against Celsus, book 8, ch. 75;
Pontius the Deacon, The Life and Passion of Cyprian, Bishop and Martyr, section 11; Gregory
Nazianzen, Oration 43.49, recounting the interrogation of Basil the Great; and Augustine, City
of God, book 19, chs. 17 and 26.
23
See especially references to The Shepherd of Hermas and Origen in the previous footnote.
24
Reimer has noted this dynamic and urged Christian pacifists to recognize the complex
dynamics in the fourth-century developments that Constantine represents. See Reimer, Christians and War, pp/ 63–64 and 75; and idem, Toward an Anabaptist Political Theology, pp. 60–61.
Schlabach • Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence in Interfaith Dialogue
tian faith and life.25 Yet, Christian leaders were soon saying otherwise—
celebrating the ascendancy of Christians into the ranks of civil authority
and rationalizing Christian participation in the military.
Christian thought has divided ever since over whether the Constantinian settlement constituted a victory or a betrayal. In Eastern Christianity, Constantine is a saint, and, though the Roman Church has never
canonized him, a feast day on the church calendar celebrates the basilica
in Rome that he offered to the church. Pacifist Christian traditions, however, often use the term “Constantinianism” as a pejorative for the close
cooperation of church and state that they consider a centuries-long mistake, if not an outright betrayal resulting in “the fall of the church.” If a
consensus exists, it is that Christianity was in fact steadily winning over
the Roman Empire and defeating the pagan religious ideology that undergirded it; the open question for debate, then, becomes what to do next at
such a juncture. Even those theologians who argue that it would be irresponsible of Christians to refuse to participate in governments that are
open to their influence often admit to the need for pacifist Christian
communities to continue offering what I have called their “lived argument for Christian self-critique.” According to this view, even when—or
especially when—the tragedy of human affairs requires an ethic other
than Jesus’ own, the morally rigorous witness of pacifists must continue to
pique the conscience of Christian rulers and soldiers who dirty their
hands making necessary compromises, thus inculcating the humility and
generosity toward adversaries that helps keep Christians loyal to Christ
rather than Mars, the god of war.26
The medieval period demonstrates both the need and the recurrence of
this Christian self-critique. The Constantinian watershed resulted in some
commendable reforms that could help to limit violence, but it also set the
stage for some of medieval Christendom’s most dubious exercises of violence. Christian emperors of the late Roman Empire outlawed the blood
sports for which ancient Rome remains famous, for example. They also
made Sunday a day of rest and discouraged infanticide by providing public
25
Alan Kreider, “Changing Patterns of Conversion in the West,” in Alan Kreider, ed., The
Origins of Christendom in the West (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2001), pp. 17–21.
26
For a particularly influential example of this approach, see Reinhold Niebuhr, “Why the
Christian Church Is Not Pacifist,” in his Christianity and Power Politics (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1940), pp. 1–32.
557
558
Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 53:4
funds for raising abandoned children.27 However, if Constantine had ushered in a period of religious tolerance by legalizing Christianity and lifting
persecution, once Theodosius actually made Nicene Christianity the
empire’s official religion in the 380’s state suppression of pagan practices
took its place and opened the door to persecution of Christian heretics.
Such later figures as Justinian in the surviving Roman Empire of the Eastern Mediterranean in the sixth century and Charlemagne in the supposed
restoration of a Holy Roman Empire in the West around the year 800
centralized power in ways that threatened to subordinate the witness of
the church to the interests of the state.28 Then there were the Crusades, in
which popes and mystics alike rallied knights and commoners from
throughout Christendom to push back against Muslim control of the Holy
Land. They also launched pogroms against Europe’s Jewish communities
en route and even sacked Christian Byzantium in 1204. Together with the
Spanish Inquisition especially, many people both inside and outside the
Christian community have now come to view the Crusades as the worst
examples of Christians’ use of violence. Christian pacifists would simply
add that such a phenomenon would be unimaginable without all of the
intermediate steps and rationalizations that began with Constantine.
Still, the medieval period itself also offered self-critical counterpoints.
Historians debate the extent to which the proliferation of monastic communities throughout this entire period constituted a deliberate protest
against the accommodations that other Christians were making to wealth
and worldly power. Through the disavowal of wealth and weaponry, however, monks and mendicants kept alive a vision of Christianity’s holding
true to the gospel model of Jesus and his teachings in the Sermon on the
Mount, intentionally or not. Monastic communities played a leading role
in what amounts to a medieval peace movement—the effort to limit
internecine violence among European communities by marking certain
places or populations as off-limits to fighting (The Peace of God) or by suspending fighting on an increasing number of holy days (The Truce of
27
Robert Louis Wilken, “In Defense of Constantine,” First Things, no. 112 (April, 2001),
p. 39.
28
Thus, Roman Catholics who celebrate Constantine and reject the pejorative use of the
term “Constantinianism” express analogous worries about the fusion of church and state when
they describe Justinian and Charlemagne as examples of the danger of “Caeseropapism.”
Schlabach • Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence in Interfaith Dialogue
God).29 Saint Francis of Assisi seems quite deliberately to have offered an
alternative to the Crusades when he and his brothers travelled to Egypt to
visit a Muslim sultan and demonstrate Christ-like love of supposed enemies by living with “the Saracens” at the very time when other Christians
were launching the Fifth Crusade.30 Evidence that the Christian conscience
remained uneasy about its accommodation to violence presents itself in
penitential practices that kept soldiers who had shed blood, even in a just
war, away from eucharistic communion for lengths varying from forty days,
to a year, to three successive Lents, to one year for every person killed.31
As the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation reconfigured the
Christian tradition, advocates for nonviolence reemerged. At the hinge
between late-medieval Catholicism and the Reformation, the Catholic
humanist Erasmus called Christian princes to a kind of cosmopolitan pacifism. Though he wrote eloquently and influenced many, Erasmus nevertheless founded no church or movement. Such a movement did emerge from
the radical wing of the Reformation among the so-called Anabaptists or
“re-baptizers,” who voiced a renewed critique of any Christian use of “the
sword.” Some of the very earliest Anabaptists did participate in the Peasant’s War of 1525, and in later decades an apocalyptic edge to the movement
occasionally erupted in violent ways that discredited its heirs for centuries.
However, if anything, those very experiences helped forge the consensus
that eventually earned the Anabaptist family of churches—Mennonites,
Amish, and Hutterites—the title of “historic peace churches.” The other
two groups most commonly listed as historic peace churches are the Society of Friends (or Quakers) and the Church of the Brethren (or Dunkards),
which emerged in later centuries with at least some influence from the
Anabaptists. The most obvious impulse for the Anabaptists’ embrace of
29
Ronald G. Musto, The Catholic Peace Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986),
pp. 71–75.
30
J. Hoeberichts, Francis and Islam (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1997), pp. 4–5, 42–59, and
68–75. Francis may well have hoped to preach and convert the Muslims he encountered,
although Hoeberichts sees development in Francis’s thought as he and his brothers actually lived
in Muslim communities. Even if that remained his goal, however, by proceeding nonbelligerently through friendship, he offered a witness not only to them but also to crusader Christians.
31
See Musto, Catholic Peace Tradition, pp. 57–59; along with primary source documentation in Ronald G. Musto, Catholic Peacemakers: A Documentary History, vol. 1: From the Bible to
the Era of the Crusades, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1993), pp. 306–309 and 384–390.
559
560
Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 53:4
nonviolence was their own direct reading of the New Testament, according to a radicalized version of Martin Luther’s principle of sola scriptura—
the authority of the Bible over the pronouncements of any intervening
tradition. The social and political context in which they read Christian scripture afresh not only helped shape their reading; it also forged key questions
with which Christian pacifists have grappled and debated throughout the
modern age.
This was the time when modern nation-states were centralizing power
and competing with one another for territory and hegemony, after all,
while all kinds of national, economic, and ethnic groups struggled to assert
their claims upon justice and maintain their group identities. By severing
the tacit bond that had developed in medieval Europe between baptismal
and civic identities, the Anabaptists were proposing a polity to sustain
group identity that relied on voluntary commitment according to the free
exercise of conscience, rather than on the control of territory. Because this
polity meant taking their communities back into a kind of diaspora existence, the Anabaptists actually had to address civil authorities and their
questions quite regularly—sometimes under interrogation, sometimes
through appeals for religious tolerance, and sometimes through direct
negotiations. As a result, they also faced regularly the question of whether
a principled ethic of nonviolence disqualified Christians from any role in
the governance of society at large. Although many Anabaptists agreed that
principled nonviolence and participation in government were incompatible, other Anabaptist leaders seem to have held out hope that a prince or
magistrate might act as a true Christian. Quakers have been even more
optimistic. The entrance of William Penn into their movement afforded
them the opportunity for a “Holy Experiment” in nonviolent government.
The pacifist son of a British admiral, Penn inherited the land that became
the colony and then the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Quakers governed Pennsylvania for seventy years in a period characterized by decades
of peaceful relations with the Indians and a policy of religious toleration
from which Mennonites and other groups benefited.
The continuing debate among Christian pacifists over how far they can
take consistent practices of nonviolence into public realms might largely
remain at an impasse were it not for the witness of a Hindu who found
inspiration in Jesus and guidance in his Sermon on the Mount, but who
rejected Christianity. Famously describing his development of nonviolent
Schlabach • Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence in Interfaith Dialogue
philosophy and strategy as “experiments with truth,” Mahatma Gandhi’s
commitment to principled nonviolence led to politically efficacious
methods of nonviolent struggle in the first half of the twentieth century,
as he sought to win minority rights in South Africa and independence for
India. His example thus broke through the impasse between the gospel
and politics in ways that Christians are still digesting, for, if principled
rejection of violence and principled respect for adversaries actually creates political power instead of withdrawing from it, then no one—Christian or otherwise—may need to choose between sectarian faithfulness
and political efficacy at all. It is of course to the Christian community’s
shame that it needed a Christ-like Hindu to learn this lesson, both
because mainline Christianity had failed to heed the internal critique of
nonviolent Christian traditions and because those traditions have sometimes been reticent to extend that critique by developing their practices
in politically operative ways.
Thankfully, leaders of diverse Christian traditions have been willing to
learn the Gandhian lesson. Two of the most prominent are the AfricanAmerican Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., and Pope John Paul II.
King not only brought Gandhian techniques and philosophy into the civil
rights struggle of the 1950’s and 1960’s, but he also inspired a succession of
antiwar movements and entirely reshaped the political discourse of mainstream Protestant churches. John Paul’s leadership was critical in what
seemed unimaginable until the cascading events of 1989, which dismantled
the Soviet empire and ended the Cold War. The revolution of 1989 was no
doubt a complex phenomenon with many geopolitical causes, but John
Paul himself credited the power of active nonviolence above all others.32
Debates among Christian pacifists and with nonpacifist Christians certainly continue, yet John Paul II demonstrated the impact that historic
peace churches and other nonviolent Christians have had on the larger
Christian tradition. As the year 2000 approached, the pope saw an opportunity to call all Christians to repentance and proclaimed it a year of
Jubilee. Chief among his concerns was that “the sons and daughters of
the Church must return with a spirit of repentance” to review the “painful
32
Pope John Paul II, Centesimus annus [On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum], encyclical letter (1991), nos. 22–23; also see nos. 5, 25, and 41; available at http://w2.
vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_cen
tesimus-annus.html.
561
562
Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 53:4
chapter of history” in which Christians have acquiesced, “especially in
certain centuries, to intolerance and even the use of violence in the service of truth.”33 In a dramatic and unprecedented liturgy at the Vatican on
March 12, 2000, the first Sunday of Lent, the pope and leading cardinals—
including his eventual successor Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—led prayers
asking forgiveness for actions such as the Inquisition, those against the
Jewish people, sins against the dignity of women, marginalization of the
poor, and the Crusades.
Meanwhile, pacifist Christians have increasingly found themselves collaborating with just-war Christians in recent decades as both have opposed
particular wars and militaristic policies. In a striking sign of movement
from the just-war direction, Vatican officials such as the future Pope Benedict XVI signaled that “today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit
to admit the very existence of a ‘just war.’ ”34 At least three major factors are
responsible for a growing convergence between just-war and pacifist Christians. For one thing, the lethality of modern warfare in the twentieth century led many Christians who would otherwise agree that some wars
might theoretically be justifiable to ask whether modern wars can ever
really meet stringent requirements such as noncombatant immunity. For
another, the Gandhian development of politically efficacious nonviolence
likewise leads many to ask whether nations must invest far more in civilianbased methods of self-defense before any claim to have met the requirement of last resort can be serious. Finally, one implication of modern
participatory democracy is that all citizens share responsibility for their
governments’ policies and must have the right to selective conscientious
objection when they believe a war or potential war to be unjust, even if
they are not absolute pacifists.
Far from requiring Christian pacifists to withhold cooperation from
fellow Christians who remain ready to contemplate exceptional circumstances in which warfare might be justifiable, a nonviolence based in Jesus’
33
Pope John Paul II, Tertio millennio adveniente [As the Third Millennium Draws Near],
apostolic letter (1994), no. 35; available at https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/
apost_letters/1994/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_19941110_tertio-millennio-adveniente.html.
34
ZENIT News Service, “Cardinal Ratzinger on the Abridged Version of Catechism”
(2003); available at https://zenit.org/articles/cardinal-ratzinger-on-the-abridged-version-ofcatechism/. Also see Civiltà Cattolica, “Modern War and the Christian Conscience,” tr. Peter
Heinegg, in Jean Bethke Elshtain and David E. DeCosse, eds., But Was It Just? Reflections on the
Morality of the Persian Gulf War (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 107–125.
Schlabach • Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence in Interfaith Dialogue
person and teachings should have the resources not only to welcome their
help in the common work of peacebuilding but also to invite their perspectives and mutual critique.35 At its most basic, the impulse that animates
Christian nonviolence is Jesus’ call to love our neighbors and extend such
love even to enemies. Love of needy and vulnerable neighbors must welcome all good-faith efforts to reduce violence, whether down the street or
around the world. Furthermore, love of enemy must include vulnerability
to the claims—including the truth-claims—of those very “others” with
whom we most differ or from whom we are most estranged. A Christian
pacifist who is altogether impervious to the arguments and concerns of
those working from just-war assumptions is acting more ideologically than
nonviolently—as is the Christian who is impervious to the claims of interfaith dialogue partners in dialogue. In other words, the lessons of intrafaith
dialogue between Christians with divergent perspectives on war and violence loop us back to the task of interfaith dialogue. Paradoxically, a Christian nonviolence that begins in the particular narrative of Jesus and the
claims he makes upon his followers may actually be more, rather than less,
prepared for honest interfaith dialogue—in the present case with Islam—
than a theological or philosophical position that thinks it must first construct a supposedly neutral arena of discourse or a supposedly universal
framework for dialogue before either may begin.
Looping Back: Authentic Dialogue as
Nonviolence toward the Truth
Perhaps it seemed at first that Christian pacifism would be less accessible
to Muslim interlocutors if we grounded its explanation in particular theological convictions that Muslims cannot be expected to share—such as
the full divinity of Jesus Christ, as understood through the doctrine of the
Trinity, coupled with his Incarnation in human life and history, to the
point of vulnerability to a very real death by crucifixion.
35
For further examples of convergence, collaboration, and mutual critique between pacifist and just-war Christians, see Glen Stassen, ed., Just Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing
War, 1st ed. (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1998); and Gerald W. Schlabach, ed. and lead
author, Just Policing, Not War: An Alternative Response to World Violence, with Drew Christiansen, et al. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007).
563
564
Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 53:4
Many assume that the way to promote peace between religions and
civilizations is to minimize our differences in order to highlight our commonalities and identify a few universals upon which all must agree. That
assumption marks a family resemblance between otherwise divergent proposals for social and, indeed, global concord. Historically, Stoic and Catholic efforts to identify universal principles of natural law have offered one
version. Philosophical liberalism, attempting to construct agreed-upon
groundrules for political discourse without relying on metaphysics, has
offered another version. Calls to recognize religious diversity as not just a
descriptive reality, the unassailable fact of “plurality,” but instead as a normative requirement, “pluralism” precisely as an -ism, offer yet another version. These proposals are not without merit, but they regularly falter
insofar as each turns out to constitute yet another tradition, rather than a
neutral space that is free of all tradition. Covertly, each requires its own
kind of conversion away from other worldviews to its own. Such are the
conundrums that may arise whenever we sense such an urgent need for a
new polity of tolerance, inclusion, and respect that we become proselytizers ourselves, seeking to convert those who fail to see the glorious light of
pluralism while growing intolerant of those intolerant ones whose intransigence prevents them from acknowledging the equal validity of other faiths.
Whether Christian or Gandhian, a nonviolence that offers alternatives
to lethal physical struggle also offers a mode of epistemology and discourse
capable of transcending the conundrums we face here. Let us call this
mode nonviolence toward the truth.36 In Gandhi’s view, willingness to suffer
for the truth already offers persuasive evidence of truthfulness, yet nonviolent practitioners also assume their own fallibility and are fully prepared
to allow opponents to prove them wrong.37 For the nonviolent Christian,
36
Gerald W. Schlabach, “Augustine’s Hermeneutic of Humility: An Alternative to Moral
Imperialism and Moral Relativism,” Journal of Religious Ethics 22 (Fall, 1994): 302, 320, and
322–327. Behind the notion of “nonviolence toward the truth” lie suggestions by John Howard
Yoder. Chris K. Huebner has systematically teased out Yoder’s pacifist epistemology in section
two of his book, A Precarious Peace: Yoderian Explorations on Theology, Knowledge, and Identity
(Waterloo, ON: Herald Press, 2006). Also see Gerald W. Schlabach, “Anthology in Lieu of
System: John H. Yoder’s Ecumenical Conversations as Systematic Theology,” a review essay
on John Howard Yoder and Michael G. Cartwright, eds., The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, in Mennonite Quarterly Review 71 (April, 1997): 305–309.
37
Farah Godrej, “Nonviolence and Gandhi’s Truth: A Method for Moral and Political
Arbitration,” The Review of Politics 68 (Spring, 2006): 287–317. One might also consult Erik H.
Schlabach • Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence in Interfaith Dialogue
additional reasons for such a stance come from trust that God’s strength is
made perfect in weakness and that we save our lives only by preparing to
lose them for Christ and others. Thus, we can also be confident that vulnerability to the truth-claims of others need not threaten but instead will
strengthen our groundedness in the truth of God and of God’s world. Even
a frank proselytism need not be ruled out of court, therefore. The point is
not just that the practice of nonviolence may aim for the moral conversion
of opponents. Rather, the point is that if our goal is a polity of mutual
respect, then nonviolent practitioners should remember that their commitment to aligning ends with means requires them to begin with themselves.
They may frankly wish to convince others of their own truth-claims concerning nonviolent respect for all human life, but they will not fully have
lived according to such a truth until they have made themselves so vulnerable to the truth-claims of those others that they cannot rule out the possibility that they will be converted instead.
Philosophies of moral relativism and religious pluralism turn out to be
surprisingly disrespectful in comparison, whenever they merely or even
grudgingly tolerate other views, without necessarily requiring themselves
to listen hard. After all, relativism or pluralism alone actually tends to trivialize the very claims they claim to respect, for they allow others to say
almost anything except that their beliefs are actually true and potentially
binding. In any case, a nonviolent mode of epistemology and discourse
does not require dialogue partners to construct any new forum for dialogue or to agree to yet another worldview—even a nonviolent one. It simply invites them to begin talking to one another, face to face, as they are,
with no preconditions, one conversation at time.38
So we can be honest. In our present context—that of Muslim/Christian dialogue in particular, and dialogue among all three Abrahamic religions more generally—we both can and should recognize honestly that the
faith and legacy of Abraham may be a source of unity but may also be a
Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York: W. W. Norton,
1969), pp. 412–414.
38
In addition to the explicitly nonviolent thinkers to whom I make reference in the previous two footnotes, I must cite as deeply influential here the thought of Anglican bishop,
ecumenist, and missiologist Lesslie Newbigin, above all in his article on the “The Basis, Purpose, and Manner of Inter-Faith Dialogue,” Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 30, no. 3 (1977),
pp. 253–270.
565
566
Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 53:4
source of contention. We gather around Abraham in a shared hope of finding common ground, but we nonetheless profess rival Abrahamic narratives. Muslims and Jews have sometimes understood themselves to be
contending over whether the promise to Abraham flows primarily through
the children of Ishmael or of Isaac. Between Jews and Christians lies a
basic contention over whether God raises up new children of Abraham
from gentile stones (as John the Baptizer hinted) through faith in Jesus the
“Messiah” of Israel or through bloodlines and fidelity to the Mosaic Law.
Between Muslims and Christians there is a basic contention over whether
the prophetic message revealed through Muhammad now purifies and
supersedes even the universal invitation of Christianity by returning to the
unalloyed faith of Abraham himself and offering it to all humankind.
Will it help or complicate this rivalry if a Christian pacifist offers a further gloss on Christianity’s own rival Abrahamic narrative?39 That gloss
goes something like this: God’s call to Abraham, at least as we find it in
Genesis 12, not only launched the drama of salvation history; it also
charted the continuing plot of that drama by structuring a creative tension
into it from its foundational beginning. Blessed with a divinely graced calling, Abraham and his children have a heritage of faith to celebrate and an
identity to preserve—but they are also expected to be a blessing to all
nations thereby. Excruciatingly and paradoxically, this is an identity they
can lose by veering in either of two opposite directions—holding tightly to
it in an exclusionary siege mentality, or dissipating it by so assimilating
that they act little differently than do the nations around them. Much of
the drama of the Hebrew scriptures comes, by its own account, as Israel
struggles to receive liberation and the land of promise without becoming
new oppressors (Deuteronomy 8–9), to find security in a king without forgetting that the Lord God is truly their king (1 Samuel 8 and 12), to preserve
their identity in exile while seeking the shalom of the city in which they
find themselves (Jeremiah 29), and to return as a vulnerable remnant to
39
For earlier explorations of the meaning of “Abrahamic community,” see Gerald W.
Schlabach, “Beyond Two- Versus One-Kingdom Theology: Abrahamic Community as a Mennonite Paradigm for Engagement in Society,” Conrad Grebel Review 11 (Fall, 1993): 187–210;
idem, To Bless All Peoples: Serving with Abraham and Jesus, Peace and Justice Series 12 (Scottdale,
PA: Herald Press, 1991); and idem, “Deuteronomic or Constantinian: What Is the Most Basic
Problem for Christian Social Ethics?” in Stanley Hauerwas et al., eds., The Wisdom of the Cross:
Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,
1999), pp. 449–471.
Schlabach • Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence in Interfaith Dialogue
the land without either depleting themselves through unguarded interchange with surrounding communities (Ezra and Nehemiah) or diminishing their account of God’s greatness through an ethnocentric prejudice
that resents God’s grace toward other nations (Jonah). Seeing this drama
coming to a climax in Isaiah’s vision of a faithful servant of the Lord who
liberates and brings justice through his own suffering, Christians have
concluded that Jesus was not only this servant but has thus reinvigorated
God’s ancient calling to all Israel.
Thus, the nonviolent cross of Jesus offers a resolution to the creative
tension that comes with being blessed to be a blessing, but it also impresses
that tension anew upon the life of the people called church. According to a
nonviolent, non-Constantinian ecclesiology (or understanding of the
church), Jesus has set into motion his new and original politics by seeking
to reconstitute Israel as a reconciled and reconciling people or ummah of
peace. Such a people will live in diaspora among all the nations, offering
the blessing of Abraham to every family on earth. If such an account risks
anew the old supersessionist triumphalism by which Christians first called
themselves the “New Israel,” recall that the proposal here is not that we
repress the reality of rival Abrahamic narratives but, rather, that we conduct our rivalry in the way of nonviolent service. What is wrong about the
triumphalism by which Christians have called themselves the “New Israel”
is not so much the claim itself but the failure to accept fully the responsibilities of any such designation. Those responsibilities require all of us to
assert our claims to be chosen children of Abraham—not by holding the
blessing of Abraham tightly, obnoxiously, or violently to ourselves, but by
living out the responsibilities of chosenness as a people for all peoples,
blessed to be a blessing, preserving our identity best by placing it at risk.
When Islam, in turn, makes supersessionist claims vis-à-vis Christianity,
nonviolent Christians will not need to respond defensively, but they can
invite Muslims to convince them in exactly this way, through arguments
embodied in practices of blessing.
In other words, I doubt that the Abrahamic narrative I have just laid
out will entirely satisfy rival narrators from the other Abrahamic faiths—
but I also doubt that such a thing is necessary. For a healthy discourse
between the Abrahamic faiths, we surely do not need a decisive claim as to
who are the chosen ones. Neither do we need a covertly intolerant “tolerance” that further alienates rival claimants by disallowing their most deeply
567
568
Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 53:4
held convictions of chosenness. Rather, we need a clearer recognition that
the paradoxical test of chosenness is a track record of living as a blessing to
all families of the earth, beginning with service to the other two communities of Abrahamic faith. As the author of the New Testament Letter to the
Hebrews put it, “let us consider how to provoke one another to love and
good deeds” (10:24). Similarly, the Qur’ān encourages us that God could
have made us all into one community but chose not to do so, “in order that
he might test you according to what he has given you; so compete in goodness” (5:48). May we thereby evoke the best of one another’s traditions. A
rivalry that competes in this way is not to be avoided but welcomed, in fact,
for it will itself be a blessing to all other families of the earth.
In sum, if the tradition of Christian pacifism has sought to be a
centuries-long embodied critique of Christian accommodation with violence, we may also express the hope that its witness can be a blessing to
other families and faiths as well. In the context of interfaith dialogue,
Christian pacifists have this proposition to add: While every effort to dialogue our way toward a reduction of global conflict and violence is welcome, a commitment to nonviolence is not so much the goal of our
dialogue as it is the beginning we must already have made in order to dialogue at all. Let us then recognize the nonviolent principio or starting point
that is making dialogue possible and embrace it consistently.
Gerald W. Schlabach (Roman Catholic and Mennonite) is a professor of theology at
the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN, where he has taught since 2000 in both the
Theology and the Justice and Peace Studies departments. He previously taught history and religion at Bluffton (OH) College (1996–2000) and was an instructor at both
Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, IN, and the University of Notre
Dame (IN), during 1994–95. He worked with the Mennonite Central Committee in
Nicaragua and Guatemala and edited its Newsletter on the Americas, 1987–89. He holds
a B.A. from Goshen (IN) College, an M.A.T.S. from Associated Mennonite Biblical
Seminary, and a Ph.D. (1996) from the Theology Dept. of the University of Notre
Dame. Most recent of his three books is Unlearning Protestantism: Sustaining Christian
Community in an Unstable Age (Brazos, 2010), and he has co-edited or edited six books.
He has published nearly twenty articles in peer-reviewed journals (including J.E.S.),
and more than sixty in popular journals or as book chapters or online. His fifty-some
conference presentations have taken place in Rome and throughout North America.
Schlabach • Christian Peace Theology and Nonviolence in Interfaith Dialogue
He has been on the steering committee of Catholic Peacebuilding Network USA since
2016 and on the advisory board of the Muslim-Christian Dialogue Center at the University of St. Thomas since 2008. Executive Director of the Bridgefolk movement for
Catholic-Mennonite dialogue and grassroots unity in 2001–07 and 2009–12, he has
been general editor of Pandora Press’s Bridgefolk Series since 2004. He has also served
as moderator and co-convener of the Mennonite- Catholic Theological Colloquium
since 2000.
569