Ecumenical foundations for a theology of peacemaking

Christians experience in denominational and ecumenical dialogue that agreement is more difficult as participants move from interpreting their historical legacy ("Faith and Order" discussion) to considering an embodied theology ("Life and Work" involvement) on matters of mutual consideration. This will surely be true for theological dialogue concerning peacemaking. As noted in the Peter and Paul illustration, peacemakers’ desire to experience and live in peace meets experiential conflict at the historical and confessional boundaries of established traditions. To illustrate, after World War II, M. R. Zigler [of the Church of the Brethren] proposed that the WCC confess that Christians would never again kill other Christians, their blood brothers and sisters in Christ. While Zigler’s proposal was met with little positive response, his question may contain the most profound aspect of a theology of peace-making .

Hints of what spirit/Spirit informs us, who exercises power and authority, are experienced by those on the receiving end as the terms of peace and limits of acceptable dissent are identified. Boundaries of what is identified as acceptable illumine both our identity as actors (what we hold ourselves to) and our view of recipients of our actions’ identity (what we expect of "them"). Distrust, dissent and hostility flourish when actors’ spoken rhetoric is betrayed or undermined by their actions. The internalized identity of persons and groups concerned with peacemaking indwells some boundaries and limits. Believers’ identity in turn informs their theology of peacemaking.

Zigler’s question was and is difficult because it presses us to probe beyond our belief or action into our deepest identity, e.g. into what spirit or Spirit moves us as we exert "our" power, authority, dominion, knowledge. Words, as actions, incarnate in communal social fabric whose spirit or Spirit informs our peacemaking theology. The boundaries and values by which we distinguish "us" from "them" bear witness to that spirit or Spirit we expect to guard and maintain our identity.

Dialogue calls for a willingness to be "we": to disclose our vulnerability so that connection with others may re-place the distance of self-protective, "objective" description. The god or God whose spirit or Spirit we call on and engage to support our identity and maintain our boundaries in this way embodies our understanding of that power, that god or God to whom we turn in times of stress. This turning gives direction and strength but does not remove danger or anguish – as witnessed by Jesus "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" – words spoken as he stayed the course that led to physical torture and death.

A Christian exercise of power is "Christological" in the sense that believers, like Jesus, enjoy and are challenged by two "natures." On one hand, our mundane or fully human identity is so real that, were we to become citizens of another country or convert to another faith, we to some degree retain what we internalized from our early experiences. Simultaneously our transcendent or fully divine identity is energized by whose we are, by the spirit or Spirit incarnate and embodied in our action.

We all exercise power and authority in varying degrees in different situations (in family, among friends or strangers, as a peer or official in community or politics or nation or economics). In all we say and do, we communicate our theology. This is particularly true of the scope we love and embrace or reject and [seek to] control in God’s name. Our behavior more than our theology illumines for our companions the nature of the God whose we are.

A theology of peacemaking arises in formative experience. Each church’s formative experiences helped shape its understandings, theology and traditions of peacemaking. Christians learn their church’s theology of peacemaking; they also experience how peace is sought in their family, among friends, in local and institutional church life, in their nation or culture. Particular Christians thus internalize their understanding of what peace requires and how it is to be sought in deeply personal and diverse ways. None of us readily relinquishes our legacy.

For example, it is difficult for the Church of the Brethren to relinquish our confession that "all war, and all participation therein, is sin." It is surely equally difficult for magisterial and reformation tra-ditions to relinquish the just war theory. It therefore comes as no sur-prise that it seems difficult for all Christians to embrace "other" Chris-tian traditions as part of our own legacy. Yet the just war tradition is a forbear of all churches, historic peace churches included. And the "historic peace church" tradition is a child and member of the Church. All Christian traditions exist in a world with experiences that deeply differ from those that historically formed that tradition or communion.

Contextually speaking (the "fully human" dimension of our two natures), leaders in all traditions recognize that no historical claim has "absolute" validity (for any absolute, believers "know," can but be idolatry, a mistaken god). So it was that after the atomic bomb was used by the United States in World War II, magisterial and reformation Christians began to ask whether any use of such weapons could be named "just." More recently, after hundreds of Latin Americans were "disappeared," historic peace churches began asking whether the only faithful response to hostilities is nonviolence.

Yet Christians bear witness in action and confession to God’s redeeming presence among us (the "fully divine" dimension of our two natures) by embodying, incarnating our faith. Incarnating our confession of faith witnesses to God’s abiding, eternal divine Mystery indwelling with goodness and enlivening with meaning our (and each) age and place. We find it difficult to discern God’s Spirit amid change or in unfamiliar, irritating, painful or loss-filled situations. Our "fully human" nature tends to mistrust or reject what is unfamiliar; our "fully divine" nature recalls our storied scriptural legacy proclaiming God’s "alien" presence that surprises, even dismays, believers. Confessing that God is everywhere present and at work, however, provides less concrete assurance and specific guidance amid difficulty and unfami-liar change than we readily follow. Theologians and believers alike are prone to "fear God" less than we fear rejection by our companions.

The distance between confessions that guide us and clarity about God’s real presence with and for humankind in various particular places, ages and moments, has challenged believers and theologians alike as far back as we can trace our history. The injunction against "idols" and "images" bears witness to the concern not to mistake beloved forms and appearances for what is divine. It is idolatrous to speak and act as if we "know the mind" of the transcendent God; and idolatry is no less real when the idol is a value so trusted (for example, pro-life or pro-choice) that believers measure their and others’ faith and action by it. A value or ideal referred to as universal truth reduces God’s transcendent mystery to norms we can predict, control and manage.

Faithful Christian peacemakers through the ages have thought theologically and embodied their faith from very different starting points, presuppositions, boundaries and expectations. Our differing Christian communal identities are akin to those of family siblings. Thus our fully divine confession bears witness that we are one in Christ – that, indeed, we are one with God’s whole created, beloved cosmos. At the same time, our fully human differences are real and important "dividing walls of hostility" to embodying our common identity in and as God’s real presence in Jesus’ risen body, the Church.

Foundations for an Ecumenical Theology of Peacemaking

Christian theology, long identified as "faith seeking understanding" is an incarnate, Christological reality. Taught theology is often presented and/or heard as a [culturally clothed] declaration of universally normative truth; by contrast, lived theology grapples to understand how the divine is present in reality and experience in tension with internalized teachings. Specific churches are called to grapple with the real and diverse social, contextual, historical and economic contexts of their faith formation, tradition, and current experiences.

Referring to theology as faith "seeking understanding" indicates theologians’ efforts to express faith in (and at times, painfully, reduce faith to) cognitive terms. Yet faith that seeks understanding is grounded in experience. Personal, even communal, experience may contrast sharply with taught theology – with declarations of faith learned in church or family. As active practice, faith is part of daily human activities and experiences, guiding behavior and eliciting questions about what one’s communal authorities taught. (In this regard, H. R. Niebuhr asked "Who are the unbelievers and what do they believe?")

Theological dissent and divergence may, then, reflect contemporary context and experience or be rooted in divergent theological teachings – themselves rooted in historical contrasting contextual experiences. "Faith" as a phenomenon is common to all persons and groups, and such experiential "faith" that guides human belief and practice illumines the community’s or persons’ convictions about reality. Believers often feel theological dissonance and conflict between their learned and lived faith.

Ecumenical theological dialogue about peacemaking consists largely of words; shared experience of the other’s lived-faith- in-context is limited. Theology as a cognitive effort to clearly and coherently articulate faith is then necessarily asymmetrical, removed from its daily embodied experience. Dialogue (in contrast to debate) about a theology of peacemaking therefore invites participants to know and honor both one another’s historical and contemporary experiential and their cognitively articulated faith. In dialogue, speakers seek to illumine their faith and practice so hearers may understand what informs and guides them, whether they agree with or dissent from the speaker’s faith and theological understanding. Correspondingly, hearers in dialogue seek to understand in what experiential fabric speakers’ confessions of faith make sense, particularly when convictions, practices and values diverge.

Christian theologians have long recognized and affirmed differences of practice grounded in contextual presuppositions. Our diverse heritages and legacies indicate that theologians would do well to live and work together as a preparation for, or at least in the process of, ecumenical dialogues on peacemaking – perhaps in the way as, after World War II, ecumenical "work-camps" brought together people from various faiths and contexts so that experiential engagement might break down the walls of hostility that national loyalty had helped establish. As God became human in Jesus and communicated across religious, national and philosophical boundaries, Christians would do well to root our communication in shared life and work in each other’s context – becoming "incarnate" in the socio- cultural legacy and reality of one another.

In as much as learned theology is [already present] faith seeking [reasonable, cognitive, communicable] understanding, [learned] theology necessarily reflects the particular incarnational legacy of specific formative identity communities. A more global theology of peacemaking would arise from a broader incarnational experience as the basis for ecumenical peacemaking dialogue. The divine power able to break down socio-cultural "dividing walls of hostility" between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female as "all are one in Christ Jesus" enables persons "in Christ" to disregard the prescriptions of their formative religious, social and gender boundaries in matters of living their faith.

In later generations, believers were moved to objectively identify boundaries of "the Christian" faith and practice to which ini-tially believers were drawn by subjective conviction. As time passed and Christianity spread, leaders in different places consulted and argued about "true" faith and practice. Boundaries of Christian faith were increasingly identified by (and with) objective confessions and/ or rules of faith and practice. Believers’ Christian and political (fully human and fully divine) identities are deeply entwined. Jesus died a Jew; Paul used his Roman citizenship as well as his Jewish religious legacy and Greek philosophical training. Faith legacies are simultan-eously essential to identity and easily confused with dogmatism.

Christian theologians in the twenty-first century are in one sense in a place similar to that of the first century; we are surrounded by and exposed to diverse, vital and culturally diverse "incarnations" of the Christian faith (as well as by many other faiths with which we co-exist). It is difficult to stand with Paul and disregard various dividing walls of hostility: to speak and live the confession that there is "neither Orthodox nor Baptist, Western nor Southern nor Eastern, homosexual nor heterosexual, male nor female." Our common faith is understood and expressed in ways various of us find not only uncom-mon, but unacceptable. Yet we live and consciously gather in splen-did, if confusing, incarnations of faith. In such a context, the question before theologians considering an ecumenical theology of peacema-king is "What foundations support a shared theology of peacemaking amid our differently embodied confessions of faith and practice?"

In the foregoing context, I offer the following observations and confessions regarding the foundations for an ecumenical theology of peacemaking. I hope they may provide a platform or starting point for an ecumenical dialogue on the theology of peacemaking .