Biblical Theology of Peacemaking

Glenn W. Barrett

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Framework for Waging Peace

Leslie Withers

January 19, 2003

Matthew 5:43-48

To give a human basis for peace is simple. I don’t want to suffer, and I don’t want others to suffer.

A Biblical theology for peacemaking is more complicated. That’s because there are a lot of wars in the Bible, many of them brutal. When the Hebrews entered the Promised Land, they were told not just to conquer the inhabitants but to annihilate them. The command comes from God. Violence and wars occur frequently in much of Bible history.

War is also a part of Bible liturgy, as in the Psalms. Psalm 24 begins majestically, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and those who dwell therein. But later the Psalmist asks, “Who is the king of glory?” The answer comes, “The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord might in battle.” That makes the creator of the universe a god of war.

What do we do with these passages? We can say that they are all right because war is a part of life. Or we can choose to ignore them and sort of pretend they aren’t there, like Thomas Jefferson who took scissors and paste and created a Bible to his liking by cutting out the parts he didn’t like.

There is another way. I learned it by attending a seminar on the Bible led by Tom McDaniel, a professor of Bible at Eastern Baptist Seminary, a relatively conservative American Baptist seminary.

Professor McDaniel began by saying that the Bible is a book of anthropology as much as it is a book of theology. As such, it tells us as much about man’s religion as about God’s revelation. And the Bible doesn’t tell us which is which. Hence, Professor McDaniel continued, the Bible has bad religion along with good religion, all in the name of good religion.

Mr. McDaniel fleshed this out by talking about exclusive and inclusive religion. For those familiar with the documentary hypothesis of the composition of the Pentateuch, the E writer tended to be exclusive. The J writer was more inclusive. I’m not enough of a Bible scholar to appraise that, but it is an intriguing thesis.

There are contrasts much easier to understand. When the Hebrews returned to Palestine after the Babylonian captivity, their leader, Ezra the scribe, learned to his horror that some of the Jews had married foreign wives. He ordered that this practice must stop. Moreover, the men who had married foreign wives must divorce then and send their children away.

At about the same time someone wrote the book of Ruth. It’s a lovely pastoral story that went back many centuries in Hebrew history. The nub of it came at the end. David, the renowned king of Israel, was the great grandson of Ruth, a Moabite woman, a Gentile! Ezra’s goal of ethnic purity had already been destroyed.

That’s just one example of the contrasts in the Bible between being exclusive and inclusive. I asked Mr. McDaniel, “If both of these points of view claim to be of God, how do we know which one is right?” His answer was as profound as it was simple. “That is a faith choice.”

Jesus chose to be inclusive. He could have been a zealot, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the Roman rulers. Instead he opened his heart to all kinds of people: a Roman centurion, a Canaanite woman, Samaritans. He even forgave the Roman soldiers who nailed him to the cross.

Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” The Bible doesn’t say that exactly, but it is the common wisdom of many cultures. “But I say unto you, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’” Jesus was teaching something different than the common wisdom. Why? Because of the nature of God. God makes the sun to shine on good and evil people; God makes rain to fall on the just and on the unjust. That runs counter to the theory of retribution that says God rewards good people and punishes evil ones. I have an image that God’s embrace of humankind is a perfect circle, without protrusions or indentations. We all know that God’s care may seem capricious, but, to coin a phrase, it is an even handed capriciousness.

Jesus said, “Be like that, like God.” In this way of looking at things, there is no neighbor vs. enemy, no insider vs. outsider, no us vs. them.

It’s pretty hard to fight a war that way. Wars depend on having enemies, dehumanizing people, taking away their sanctity. Otherwise we could never stomach what we do.

It’s hard to walk this different way. In a world of conflict it is hard to keep faith in nonviolence. How do we combat evil without having enemies? How do we live without war?

We know a lot more about waging war than we do about waging peace, to use Walker Knight’s phrase. But people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and others have shown us that structures of evil can be countered without violence. It has been done, but we need to learn more and go further. This is why we need peace groups -- to encourage us to hold to inclusive and nonviolent choices and to learn how to live them out.

Framework for Waging Peace

Leslie Withers

All of us are called to be peacemakers, as Glenn has pointed out. We want to follow Christ, who calls us to be inclusive, love our enemies and turn the other cheek.

But we are a diverse congregation in this, as in many things. How people hear God’s call to be peacemakers and how they respond varies widely. We have members who are on active duty in the military and those who are complete pacifists, with about as many persuasions in between as there are people at Oakhurst. Yet all of us can agree that we don’t want war to happen in the Middle East. We can pray for peace together.

The Peacemakers Mission Group will search for those things we can all do to “wage peace,” and share that information with the congregation, so that we can all exercise our calling as peacemakers. If in the coming months we come to feel that some official church action is appropriate, we will bring such matters to the congregation for discussion and vote. If we discern possible actions that only some of us are called to take, we will support one another and reach for understanding across our differences.

Our challenge is to be peacemakers within this beloved community, to make peace among ourselves even when we disagree, to find our unity in Jesus Christ. Then we will be able to support each other to be peacemakers in our diverse ways “out there” – in our neighborhood, our city, our world.

So the Peacemakers Mission Group has an internal mission – peacemaking and education within this church, and an external mission – waging peace in a troubled world.