A Contemporary Theology for Ecumenical Peace

J. Will

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137397973
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Humanity's long history of intermittent conflicts and contemporary violence undermines Christian's (and their Jewish and Muslim fellow believers) religious confidence in and moral commitment to world peace. The principal issue is the ambiguity of God's presence and action in the world as we experience it. In A Contemporary Theology for Ecumenical Peace, this problem is addressed by relating biblical theology to contemporary philosophical and theological perspectives to motivate and sustain the practice of love and justice in the context of civil religion.

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History’s Ambiguous Tide toward Divine Peace

Abstract: A long historical process has been religiously experienced and symbolically imaged as a spiritual tide of divine guidance through an ambiguous history toward a destiny of divine peace. Writing from a Christian perspective, it is recognized that Christianity shares with Judaism and Islam a Mosaic prophetic tradition that began with Abraham and culminated with Jesus for Christians, and with Muhammad for Muslims. The three Abrahamic religions share Isaiah’s messianic promise of eternal peace and Jeremiah’s lament that there ‘is no peace’ as they move between faithful confidence and political pessimism. Philosophical and theological interpretation of a divine tide of inspiration toward ecumenical peace, sustained through violent historical undertows, is illustrated with personal memoir and contemporary experience.

Will, James E. A Contemporary Theology for Ecumenical Peace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137397973.0003.

Our divine destiny

Living through partial periods of relative peace and intermittent episodes of widespread violence, believers carry out their witness to divine peace alternating between faithful confidence and political pessimism. Will our human history end in the biblically prophesied divine peace, when “God will wipe away every tear from our eyes” (Revelation 7:17) or in catastrophic destruction, perhaps by a nuclear ‘bang,’ followed by a radioactive ‘whimper.’

Seeking guidance in the Scripture, even there Christians find themselves moving between the prophetic confidence of Isaiah’s messianic promise, “Of the increase of God’s government and of peace there shall be no end” (9:7), and Jeremiah’s historically realistic lament, “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying ‘peace, peace, when there is no peace’” (6:14).

Despite longer memories than Jeremiah’s of our too often unjust, sometimes violent, human history, Christian hope, despite intermittent lapses, has remained focused since its first century by St. Paul’s missionary preaching to his violent Roman (and our) world, “For Christ is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility . . . He came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father” (Ephesians 2:14–16). Many Christians therefore believe that they are divinely guided through an ambiguous history to a destiny of ecumenical peace, which following Jesus may rightly be called ‘the Kingdom of God.’

An ambiguous spiritual tide

This divine destiny, however, is given only through a long historical process that we can religiously experience and symbolically envision as a spiritual tide guiding us toward divine peace. Our culture sometimes degrades this tidal image to a mere misdirected social tide, like Shakespeare’s Brutus, who senses “there is a tide in the affairs of men” but finds it an undertow carrying him toward yet another Roman war. Christians, unhappily, also sometimes so entirely miss or terribly misuse God’s ‘tidal’ energies as to create an undertow befitting Jeremiah’s lament: “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly . . .” Recurrently caught up in these undertows, we are denied sure confidence in any historical claim or any present effort to bring this divine process to fulfillment, no matter how firm our faith is in its ultimate promise.

For some, and, perhaps, sometimes for all, a destiny of universal peace often seems too much and too good to be true. Thus, we must understand that the Spirit’s tidal process moves us toward historical peace only in and through the social confluence of many personal streams, carried in far vaster cultural, religious, and national rivers, affected by difficult cross-currents and unpredictable eddies. Sometimes these terrible undertows at their worst bring especially the young among us to kill and to be killed in wars with those God has given us as neighbors.

Especially in this day when our national and religious rivers increasingly, and sometimes turbulently, flow into each other we may become confused by the discovery that other religions also carry this prophetic witness to divine peace. The ideological conflicts of our era exaggerate this confusion when we are asked to believe that Islam is our world’s third Abrahamic faith, sharing with Judaism and Christianity the same monotheistic prophetic tradition that began with Abraham and culminated for Christians with Jesus and his apostles.

We must, and some already are coming to understand that Muslims are guided by such religiously inclusive verses in the Qur’an, “Say: We believe in God, and in what hath been sent down to us, and what hath been sent down to Abraham, and Ismael, and Isaac, and Jacob, and the tribes, and in what was given to Moses, and Jesus, and the Prophets, from their Lord” (Sura 3/Imran: 78). Some unfortunately, but perhaps understandably, ignore or discount such texts, because they do not believe that God’s revelation can move through any religion whose adherents are politically called enemy.

Some are coming to recognize, however, that all three prophetic faiths teach that the power and wisdom of the one God guides all of our human histories toward personal, social, and finally universal peace. Muhammad’s teaches (Sura 49/Apartments: 13) that the diversity of peoples and their religions has been created by the one God for the express purpose of our coming to know one another under God: “O Humankind! Verily we have created you of a male and a female; and we have divided you into peoples and tribes that ye might have knowledge one of another. Truly, the most worthy of honor in the sight of God is he who fears Him most. Verily God is knowing, Cognizant.” That is, the Qur’an teaches that what brings honor to any of our religions is not any claim to the superiority of our particular tradition, but authentic awe before the Creator who enables us to see that the religions of other peoples is also of God.

Discouraged by personal and historical evidence of the power of human sin, some Christians discount such interreligious faith in a divine peaceful tide as mystically utopian, and postpone any hope for genuine peace to a future heavenly paradise. Though the power of sin to distort human beings and societies must be recognized, many Christians retain their spiritual confidence in the possibility of ecumenical peace on earth because God graciously and patiently empowers them to become its cocreators here and now.

Though humanity too often misuses God’s gift of personal power to swim against the divine peaceful tide, and too many are sometimes caught up in society’s violent undertows, it remains true that we may and do know a continuing, gracious inspiration strengthening and guiding us toward world peace.

Personal experience of a peaceful tide

Beginning in the early years of a life that has now reached more than eighty years, I have experienced the historical power of this spiritual tide toward peace, which was sometimes shrouded with ambiguity. My first year in high school was deeply marked by America’s entrance into World War II. My father’s counsel on the evening of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, “Don’t worry son, the United States has never lost a war,” is a vivid memory. His typical nationalistic confidence was consoling for an anxious adolescent, but not sufficient for one beginning to look to his church for deeper counsel to navigate the undertows of history.

I completed my high school education—from 1941 to 1945—during World War II and joined the newly formed Reserved Officers Training Corp (ROTC) during my sophomore year. Second in command of its battalion when I graduated, I was given a brevet commission in the Illinois National Guard, which could have facilitated becoming an officer in the Guard if I had chosen to join. I did not!

My refusal was largely motivated by the spiritually powerful, though clearly ambivalent, influence of my church. Its spiritual power was enhanced by the congregational dialogue fostered by the ambivalence in our pastoral teaching. Our pastor as the war began quickly volunteered as an army chaplain, and was soon gone for reasons most of the church’s members understood. The younger pastor who replaced him was a devoted pacifist who opposed participation in any violence and all war. An earnest dialogue about how we should respond to the war we were then in, and really to all war, was ignited by the clear difference between these two authentic Christian teachers: It was not that the second sought peace and the first did not, but that our first pastor sought it through victory in what he and many considered a just war, while his successor sought peace through a countercultural victory gained by refusing any participation in all war.

Our church’s lay people moved with care and prayer through this renewed congregational concern for peace in the turbulence of World War II. The church school superintendent, with earlier experience in the navy during World War I, decided he must support a just war with his engineering competence, and joined the navy’s Construction Battalions (CBs). But he stipulated an unusual, and for him religiously significant, proviso: He would build, but would not injure or kill! When later assigned to military government of Pacific islands liberated from Japanese occupation, he fulfilled this new and different assignment with the same pacifistic proviso: he would help govern, but would not and did not carry a weapon.

The younger teacher of my Sunday school class was more ambivalent as he considered his pastor’s teachings and the example of his Sunday school leader: He first registered for the military draft as a conscientious objector, but later reconsidered and joined the navy. Such a powerful existential dialogue on crucial issues during a dangerous time in a loving congregation had a powerful formative effect on me and many others. God’s spiritual tide toward peace moved consciously and conscientiously in our souls.

Like others in my generation, I was providentially placed while still young in an enlivened spiritual and cultural process during a terribly violent time. Though my conscious experience was perhaps more religious than that of some of my peers, at that time I knew very little of the theology that I now think is essential to understanding what then began in my spirit. I hope to share in this book some of the theology I have learned through a lifetime of study to interpret the spiritual tide I began to experience then, and that many who read might experience now.

Other witnesses to God’s peaceful tide

My spiritual experience during World War II has been replicated by many, perhaps with more existential power because it came for them in the actual ‘hell’ of wars our country called them to fight. A telling example in my own generation is the remarkable commitment to solitude of the famous author J. D. Salinger, which he fictionally portrayed in Holden Caulfield, the teenage loner in his widely read Catcher in the Rye, and which reflected the actual lifestyle of Salinger during his long life. Many have wondered why this hugely successful author refused to enjoy publicly the plaudits of his fame? A persuasive answer recently has come in a biography, which tells the story of the young Salinger’s military service in World War II, when he already carried with him the earliest drafts of his later famous novel.

Though Salinger was always tight-lipped about his military memories, research uncovered enough of his combat experience to understand why he suffered a kind of nervous collapse at the end of the war. Salinger took part in some of the war’s fiercest combat, landing in Normandy on D-day, helping liberate Paris, and fighting in the months-long winter blood bath when his regiment advanced into Western Germany. Attached to counterintelligence, Salinger also experienced the horrors of Nazism up close as he interrogated many of them in the areas liberated from their domination.

Salinger allowed no intrusion into the richness of his inner life as he worked out his response to the horrors of war; yet it is clear to his biographer, Kenneth Slewenski, that by the 1950s Salinger “had become nothing less than a religious writer . . .” His inspiration, however, came less from Christian scriptures than from a devoted reading of Hindu and Buddhist texts. Besides enhancing our general readiness to recognize the varied sources of ecumenical peace and stimulate a greater readiness to participate in interreligious dialogue, which I have explored in a previous volume, the influence of Buddhist texts on Salinger enables us better to understand his literary and religious effort to portray and live out what we know to be an undeclared Buddhist form of spiritual detachment.

A recent example (reported in the N.Y. Times of February 23, 2011) is in the spiritual experience of Navy Midshipman Michael Izbicki, who graduated near the top of his class from the U.S. Naval Academy in 2008. His transformation from an officer in training to a Christian pacifist began with a question in a psychological exam taken shortly after graduating, when he was assigned to a submariner school preparing for a career in nuclear submarines. The fateful question to which he answered “no” was: “If given the order, would you launch a missile carrying a nuclear warhead?” The seeds for his negative answer had been planted in his study of just war theories in his junior year, and his conclusion that the training he received during his senior year did no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Historys Ambiguous Tide toward Divine Peace
• 2  Universal Creator and Historical Redeemer
• 3  Just Love: The Integral Relation of Love and Justice
• 4  The Ecumenical Church in National Civil Religion
• Index