A Just Peace Ethic Primer

Building Sustainable Peace and Breaking Cycles of Violence

Eli S. McCarthy, Eli S. McCarthy

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781626167575
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Religion

The just peace movement offers a critical shift in focus and imagination. Recognizing that all life is sacred and seeking peace through violence is unsustainable, the just peace approach turns our attention to rehumanization, participatory processes, nonviolent resistance, restorative justice, reconciliation, racial justice, and creative strategies of active nonviolence to build sustainable peace, transform conflict, and end cycles of violence. A Just Peace Ethic Primer illuminates a moral framework behind this praxis and proves its versatility in global contexts.

With essays by a diverse group of scholars, A Just Peace Ethic Primer outlines the ethical, theological, and activist underpinnings of a just peace ethic.These essays also demonstrate and revise the norms of a just peace ethic through conflict cases involving US immigration, racial and environmental justice, and the death penalty, as well as gang violence in El Salvador, civil war in South Sudan, ISIS in Iraq, gender-based violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, women-led activism in the Philippines, and ethnic violence in Kenya.

A Just Peace Ethic Primer exemplifies the ecumenical, interfaith, and multicultural aspects of a nonviolent approach to preventing and transforming violent conflict. Scholars, advocates, and activists working in politics, history, international law, philosophy, theology, and conflict resolution will find this resource vital for providing a fruitful framework and implementing a creative vision of sustainable peace.

PART I

FRAMING ESSAYS

1

A “MANUAL” FOR ESCAPING OUR VICIOUS CYCLES

Practical Guidance from the Sermon on the Mount for a Just Peace Ethic

GERALD W. SCHLABACH

The fresh reappraisal of war in the modern world that the Second Vatican Council called for is well under way.¹ In his 2017 World Day of Peace message, Pope Francis continued that process of churchwide discernment as he built on the work of predecessors while responding to Catholic peacebuilders and activists.² He thus recognized the role of policymakers and diplomats even as he urged that “active and creative nonviolence” become our “style of politics for peace.” Consistent with Pope John Paul II’s insistence that peacemaking is essential to the vocations of all the faithful,³ Francis not only identified “peacebuilding through active nonviolence” as “a programme and a challenge for political and religious leaders” but even included in that calling “the heads of international institutions, and business and media executives.” The virtues in Jesus’s Beatitudes of meekness, mercy, nonviolent peacemaking, purity of heart, and hunger and thirst for justice that open his Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3) must in all cases characterize “the exercise of their respective responsibilities.” After all—posited Francis in a theological move at once stunning and subtle—the “manual” that Jesus has given the church to guide its strategy of peace building at every level is the Sermon on the Mount itself.⁴

Francis’s move was stunning because so much reflection by Christian thinkers through the centuries has taken as given that a nearly insuperable chasm separates Jesus’s ethical teachings from the stubborn exigencies of modern politics (or indeed any worldly politics). The move was subtle because Francis’s unobtrusive choice of the word “manual” planted a flag reclaiming the far side of the chasm—where Catholic moral approaches such as “manualism” have sought to do moral casuistry by drawing on “natural law” reasoning with minimal reliance on biblical resources.

Still, insofar as centuries and cultural gaps do require a bridge to connect our own historic situations with that first-century mount on which the gospel writer placed Jesus’s sermon, Francis’s World Day of Peace message cast a sturdy plotline but left the faithful to complete the structure. Fortunately, exegetical and conceptual resources are newly available for doing so, as the burden of this chapter is to explain. Textual analysis by Christian ethicist Glen Stassen argues strongly that the Sermon on the Mount offers far more practical guidance than theologians have assumed; meanwhile, emerging insights from social psychology into the mimetic processes that have formed human cultures suggest why. Although these may not be classic sources in the natural law tradition, they take us within range by elucidating the dynamics that make just peacemaking practices effective.

The Reappraisal: A Progress Report

Against the backdrop of what Francis called a “horrifying world war fought piecemeal” across the globe, the pope insisted that violence cannot be a “cure for our broken world.”⁵ After all, it inevitably perpetuates cycles of suffering and retaliation even when used “at best” to counter other violence. In contrast, “When victims of violence are able to resist the temptation to retaliate, they become the most credible promoters of nonviolent peacemaking.” This is the courageous, life-giving, and creative nonviolence that Jesus lived and taught as the way to break free from chains of injustice. This active kind of nonviolence is not simply for some simpler first-century setting; after all, “Jesus himself lived in violent times.” Nor should it be falsely confused with “surrender, lack of involvement and passivity”; instead, it is a “radically positive approach.”⁶ Indeed, as his predecessor Benedict XVI had said and Francis now underscored, Christlike love of one’s enemies “constitutes the nucleus of the ‘Christian revolution.’” As such, and on the world’s stage, not just in Christian hearts, nonviolence is “more powerful than violence.”⁷

Highlighting the power of gospel nonviolence in this way indicated how far the Catholic Church had come in its reappraisal of war, yet Francis also pointed toward a continuing area for discernment as he affirmed a complementarity in the church’s work for peace: “Peacebuilding through active nonviolence is the natural and necessary complement to the church’s continuing efforts to limit the use of force by the application of moral norms; she does so by her participation in the work of international institutions and through the competent contribution made by so many Christians to the drafting of legislation at all levels.”⁸

Pope Francis was exercising the Vatican savvy that characterizes many church documents by alluding here to the possible use of “just war” criteria yet leaving the theory unnamed—for the moment, neither rejected outright nor defended. What Pope Francis did name instead is the space that the Vatican and Catholic moral traditions through the centuries have hoped the “just war” theory would fill. However, Francis was not done.

While affirming that the space for church engagement in international diplomacy and public policy work stands in a mutually supportive relationship with active nonviolence, what Pope Francis did next in his World Day of Peace message is breathtaking. For it is precisely here where he insisted that “Jesus himself offers a ‘manual’ for this [integrated] strategy of peacemaking in the Sermon on the Mount.” The full weight of the message’s title thus bears down: gospel nonviolence guided by the Sermon on the Mount is supposed to be a “style of politics for peace.” It is not just for the personal lives of particularly saintly Christians. It applies to the public realm.

This is the nub of the challenge for any just peace ethic that would ground itself in the biblical message generally, or the gospels in particular, or the Sermon on the Mount specifically. Because the entire biblical narrative witnesses to God’s yearning to heal relationships broken through domineering and fratricide (Gen. 3:11), Christian thinkers have been able to draw on numerous texts and themes in order to ground peacemaking and nonviolence according to varying approaches, which we can only begin to list: Leo Tolstoy’s rule-based reading of the gospels, like that of some “historic peace churches” before him, may have been overly literalistic, but it still helped inspire Mahatma Gandhi’s sophisticated development of active nonviolence.⁹ For proponents of the “social gospel,” liberation theologians, progressive evangelicals, and many others, Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom or Reign of God has offered a vision of just and peaceable human thriving—“shalom” in Hebrew—that beckons and pulls God’s people toward a new future. Recognizing the need for formation if this people is to respond well and faithfully to God’s call, Protestant and Catholic theologians alike have recovered the theory and ethics of virtue and found in Jesus’s Beatitudes the quintessential character traits that Christians need to become compassionate peacemakers living in solidarity, especially with the neediest.¹⁰

Nevertheless, any and all of these approaches will falter in the face of tough real-world situations if they seem only to offer aspirational ideals. Even the most virtuous of persons might have to look elsewhere for guidance after all, unless Jesus’s teachings are demonstrably practicable. This, as I say, is the nub of the challenge that we must face for any reappraisal of war to give way to a just peace ethic and gain traction.

Can the Gospel Really Be Our “Manual”?

Francis’s choice of the word “manual” is a most intriguing one. “Manualism” was the neo-scholastic mode of Catholic moral deliberation ascendant from the seventeenth century until the Second Vatican Council. Drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas’s carefully reasoned reflection on the natural law, the manualist mode sought to rival Enlightenment rationalism. Whatever its virtues, it tended therefore to de-emphasize biblical sources and thus offered a comfortable home for “just war” casuistry.¹¹ To now instead call the Sermon on the Mount the church’s manual for peacemaking cannot have been an accident.

One could trace centuries of ethical debate among Christian thinkers by following a thick central thread of contention over whether Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount can be such a straightforward manual for any tough moral issue. Among all such issues, the justifiability of killing and the possibility of enemy love has often been paradigmatic. Christians appealing to alternative authorities in order to give reasons why they might legitimately override the words and example of Jesus have most often turned to some version of “natural law” or a theological account of what is “realistic.” At its best the impulse for this move has been a desire to name shared moral norms that might be accessible to those in positions of public responsibility. In order to reappropriate Jesus’s teachings and live out the virtues he held up in his Beatitudes—even while “thinking with the church” as it draws on centuries of experience facing difficult moral issues—we need to accept that challenge and explore how Jesus’s radical call to a distinct way of being in the world might actually be realistic.

Historically, the Catholic Church may never have explicitly denied the applicability of Jesus’s teachings to public affairs.¹² It has not officially endorsed a view like that of the leading twentieth-century Protestant thinker Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr bluntly argued that while human beings might barely be able to practice Jesus’s ethic or “law of love” in a small face-to-face community or Gemeinde, Jesus’s teachings could never apply to complex, modern industrial societies—much less the international arena where the rough justice of a balance of power based on national self-interest is the best we can hope for.¹³ Yet the working Catholic tradition has in effect taught exactly that for centuries by long drawing almost entirely on natural-law categories to address public affairs and by sometimes relegating Jesus’s “hard sayings” to “evangelical counsels” for those with special vocations calling them to holiness.

By insisting on God’s “universal call to holiness,” the Second Vatican Council began to change this. That call came in the context of related developments. In the twentieth century, first amo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Fertile Moment: Context and Scope
• Part I. Framing Essays
• Part II. US Domestic Cases
• Part III. International Cases
• Conclusions and Next Steps
• About the Contributors
• Index