The 2001 Quaker Peace Roundtable:

WORKSHOP: What Can the Bible teach Us About Peacemaking?  -- 3

Ron Mock 

IV.  The Biblical Message on Peacemaking

              The Bible addresses peacemaking in all three aspects of our lives: coercive areas such as governments, exchange points including markets, and areas of affiliation which we are calling “communities.”  When we catch the Bible’s drift on this fuller vision of peacemaking, we will find that the way before us, far from being passive, pulls us into action on fronts in every arena of life.  The compleat peacemaker is a listener, creator, visionary, activist, and culture builder who finds ways to nourish shalomist peace in every arena of life.

              Most of the Biblical studies of peacemaking and pacifism take a detailed, passage-by-passage approach.  Done poorly, that approach descends to the level of proof-texting, picking and choosing among the verses that support one’s position.  Some books do better by including discussion of the “problem” texts – the ones that proof-texters for military service might pick out. The good text-by-text studies help us stay connected to the Bible as the Word of God.  They reproduce in Bible study the close attention Friends give to individual comments people make in open worship. One cannot know God’s voice without listening to it closely.

              But I want to join those who take a different approach.  In this paper I almost ignore individual texts, to try to capture the broadest themes in the Bible.  Partly this is a concession to time and space.  Partly it is a concession to laziness. But my principle justification for this approach is the one I alluded to earlier.  To know what the Bible teaches, and even to find a way to harmonize individual passages in tension with each other, we have to step back and try to see the entire Biblical text as a whole.

              The Bible has many themes.  But when it comes to teaching us about peacemaking, it seems to have at least these six:

        1. God is the omnipotent Creator

        2. God is love

        3. God is truth

        4. God is merciful and just     

        5. Everything is God’s

        6. The world is fallen but redeemed and the people in it are of infinite value 

These may seem like obvious points, pretty standard Christian theology.  But their implications have some interesting impacts on how we might understand peacemaking. Taking all six together lets us build one upon the other in exciting ways.   

    1.  God is the omnipotent Creator

 God, who created the universe, cannot be confined to it. Things can happen which do not follow our settled (and sometimes dismal) expectations.  That is, miracles are possible. Bible believers should expect them, at least once in a while. Biblical peacemakers look beyond appearances for that of God in every reality.

     2.   God is love. 

 If God is love, and loves us (and the rest of creation), what does this mean?  There are a lot of ways to describe love.  Some of them are pretty extravagant.  For our purposes I am ready to settle for a rather skimpy definition of love: wanting the loved one to have a way to meet her needs. Some may not be satisfied with this definition of love. Couldn’t we ask for just a little bit more in our definition of the kind of love a Creator and redeemer would have for us? Even George Bailey, before he was ready to confess his love for Mary,  was already prepared to promise her the moon. 

 Maybe we could say more about God’s love than “wanting us to have ways to meet our needs.”  Go ahead, be more expansive if you wish.  But the skimpy version is more than enough to lead us directly to some rather eye-popping conclusions, as we will see directly, so I am a little nervous about using a richer conception of God’s love.

 What if we join the first theme (God as omnipotent) with this theme (God loves us)?  The first theme tells us that anything God wants is possible – God couldn’t very well be omnipotent if this were not true.  The second one tells us that God want us all to have ways to meet our needs.  Put them together, and it adds up to this: in any situation, God wants us to have ways to meet our needs, and what God wants is possible.  Thus, no matter how desperate the conflict seems, there must exist some way for all needs to be met.

 This is not the same as saying all needs are always met.   According to the Bible, God has left us free to make choices, to both err and succeed. Each time a poor choice is made, opportunities are lost.  We sometimes miss opportunities, even deliberately sometimes.  But they were there; they are there still if time has not run out.

 The biblical peacemaker is caught in a wonderful trap called Hope.  Believing the Bible’s depiction of a loving omnipotent God, she can at the minimum come to any situation confident that God has a way in mind for all needs to be met. Like the boy looking for the pony in a room full of manure, the Biblical peacemaker knows there is that of God even in the middle of a fight.

 The Biblical peacemaker will never settle for leaving anyone out with no way to meet their needs.  To do so would be to despair, to disbelieve in God. Instead, she will take risks and embody hope.  

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