Being a People of Peace and Reconciliation

January 13, 2010

I want to thank my friends from the Historic Peace Churches for the invitation to offer these brief remarks on “being a people of peace and reconciliation.”  In numerous other settings, including the “Heeding God’s Call” conference last January in Philadelphia (and sponsored by the HPCs), I have stressed my (informed) conviction that the ecumenical movement is, at its core, a movement for peace.  Scripture is clear that the followers of Christ are now entrusted with the message of reconciliation.  The insight added by modern ecumenism is that the church isn’t just the bearer of this message; it is the message embodied.  Or, at least, that is what we are called to be, which is why our hostility or indifference to one another is nothing less than a visible repudiation of the gospel and a visible denial of our vocation as reconcilers/peacemakers.  The HPCs have always claimed this; the rest of us are now catching on. 

You may want to discuss this claim during our time of conversation, but my remarks today will go in a somewhat different direction.  I want us to reflect on President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, delivered on December 10 in Oslo.  It is, I believe, one of the most significant statements on peacemaking made by a public official in recent years.  I would like us to ask: What challenge does the President put to us as ecumenical Christians, as people of reconciliation and peace?  And how might we respond to this challenge? 

The ethical framework for the President’s Oslo address, as David Brooks and others have observed, is a pitch perfect evocation of Reinhold Niebuhr’s “historical realism.”  Make no mistake, said President Obama, there is evil in the world, evil rooted in human nature which is constantly prone to the temptation of pride and power over others.  This leads to the “hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict,” and, thus, that the use of force is, at times, not only “necessary but morally justified.”  To say this, he argued, is not cynicism but realism—a recognition of  “the world as it is.” 

The President contended that two new developments further justify this stance of historical realism: 1) the upsurge of terrorism and 2) the resurgence of ethnic/sectarian conflicts within nations, often leading to “the slaughter of civilians by their own government.”  In other words, in the face of 9-11, as well as Rwanda and Darfur, potentially violent military response or intervention is warranted. 

At the same time, the radical character of evil also applies to us—which, mercifully, tempers the all-too-familiar tendency to self-righteousness.  We live, said the President, with “seemingly irreconcilable truths”: evil must be fought, including with arms, even though the fight itself will be corrupting.  Niebuhr could not have said it better. 

This, as you probably know, was the dominant paradigm for ecumenical social ethics from the Oxford Conference on Life and Work in 1937 up to the WCC’s Geneva Conference on Church and Society in 1966.  The key to Oxford’s social thought is the concept of “middle axioms” which scale down biblical mandates to an ethos needed for pragmatic moral decision making.  The guiding image or theme for these 30 years was “the responsible society,” with the churches urged to play their role by contributing to the most peace and justice possible in a radically sinful world.  During this period, the WCC was willing to affirm, at its first assembly in 1948, that “war is contrary to the will of God”—a position that rules out crusade (as did President Obama at Oslo).  But war was still seen as a necessary evil in a world filled with Nazis. 

I want to point out that the paradigm of historical realism—and its concomitant, “just war”—was widely endorsed during this period; but it was challenged by the HPCs, as seen, for example, in a famous exchange of essays between the Mennonite leader, Paul Peachey, and the Niebuhr disciple, Angus Dun.  But it wasn’t until the mid-1960s, when churches from outside the North Atlantic began to flex their muscle in the global ecumenical movement, that a new paradigm emerged.  The Geneva conference in 1966 was the first to insist that justice and peace will require not just social revision but real, systemic change.  Theologically speaking, Geneva marks a transition from historical realism to what is sometimes called “eschatological realism,” a paradigm that envisions the churches living in anticipation of God’s promised shalom (which, after all, is the “true reality” of our world).  Practically speaking, this has meant a shift within the ecumenical movement from attempting to influence those with power to participating in the struggles of those without it, from giving aid to history’s victims to standing in solidarity with them, from trying to keep wars “just” to arguing against the justice of all war, especially in a nuclear age. 

As I read the history of the ecumenical movement over the past 40 years, it strikes me that we have lived—often uneasily and even unconsciously—in the tension between these positions (which is why the President’s address may be a useful challenge for ecumenical bodies to achieve moral clarity).  Internal critics, such as Paul Abrecht and Ronald Preston, have long contended that the WCC in particular often responds to war or discrimination or environmental destruction with idealized slogans and utopian pronouncements.  On the other hand, the NCC has often been reactive to the world’s agenda, promoting reforms that, while important, leave the underlying status quo untouched.  (We have, in other words, not been nearly as “prophetic” as our critics like the IRD give us credit for!)  Please understand.  I do not apologize for our programs and resolutions aimed at, say, raising the minimum wage or reducing defense spending; but these are tweakings of the system and stop far short of a truly prophetic witness which engenders hope for a different way of living in human community. 

That is why, as General Secretary of the NCC, I have advocated for an ethical framework that the late Lewis Mudge termed “hopeful realism”—a realistic assessment of “the world as it is” coupled with a willingness to imagine alternative realities.  (To be fair, President Obama nodded in this direction when in Oslo he called for “the continued expansion of our moral imagination” in order to “reach for the world that ought to be”—but it was a minor theme.)  We see this tension at work in the NCC, for example, with our endorsement four years ago of the UN-generated “right to intervene,” which recognizes the last-resort possibility of nations intervening militarily in other nations to prevent genocide and other atrocities, alongside our endorsement of the “just peacemaking” paradigm as an alternative to “just war.” 

I want to flesh out the implications of “hopeful realism” by discussing a key theme of the President’s address: security.  The gospel, as articulated in ecumenical documents, suggests an understanding of security that is both realistic and fundamentally different from that offered by either political party. 

The key insight is expressed in a famous passage from Dr. King’s “Christmas Sermon on Peace”:  “…all life is interrelated.  We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny [as children on one Creator].  Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” 

Such interdependence means that true security is never won through unilateral defense but through attentiveness to the injustice that affects other children of God.  Israeli security depends, finally, on Palestinians having a stake in the development of the Middle East.  US security depends, among other things, on addressing the economic disparities that help fuel terrorist attacks. 

The Christian witness goes deeper.  Anxiety, which is what humans feel when we are insecure, follows from trusting in the wrong things to protect us.  (This, ironically, was one of the great themes of the Neo-Orthodox theologians, including Niebuhr, whose understanding of the faith was hammered out amid the insecurities of the Depression and two world wars.)  If, for example, our sense of worth and personal security is tied to the size of our bank account, then we will likely never have “enough”.  People who try to guarantee their own security without thought of others often find that the more they accumulate, the more insecure they become (see the parable in Luke 12). 

All of this, as you know, also applies to nations.  The assumption undergirding much of our public discourse seems to be that it is appropriate, or at least okay, for us (however “us” is defined) to have a hugely disproportionate share of the world’s goods, and that using force to get or keep it, if authorized by the state, is necessary and legitimate.  As someone once said, you cannot serve two masters.  If our choice is mammon, then we will need all the military power we can amass, all the walls we can build, to defend it. 

Hopeful realism.  We know that life is filled with human anxiety – about finding or keeping a job, about health care for ourselves and our loved ones, about the possibility of natural disaster, about safety for our children.  And, yes, we know the violence that can strike ordinary people even in this country.  But we will not be ruled by it, or allow our view of the world to be defined by it, because we also know another story about a love capable of bearing even the terror of the cross.   

Hopeful realism.  We cannot eradicate the evil toward which the President points.  The concept of such utopianism has itself fueled countless tyrannies.  But we also must not allow those responsible for present systems of war and injustice to define what is possible, because we are followers of One whose promise is not just for another world but this world made other. 

I hope that we are hopeful realists; but I know that we are a people of peace and reconciliation.  Thanks be to God!

Michael Kinnamon
General Secretary
National Council of Churches