Conversation peace: Matt Rosen’s Thought for the week
‘The challenge of remaining a peace church is really the challenge of understanding ourselves in a secular world.’
Early Friends, like Christ’s disciples, were no strangers to injustice. Their time was as turbulent as ours, and they suffered willingly, even joyfully, for their faith. They endured punishment by the state, and sang in the prisons. They knew war – many had been soldiers – and weren’t oblivious to the evil in the world as they testified.
As we struggle with the Peace Testimony in the wake of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, these Friends may have something to teach us. This is hardly the first unjust war in Quaker history, and our commitment to peace has been tested before. So why are we finding this commitment so hard to embrace? Partly, I think, because we now tend to identify ourselves as pacifists.
I’m not sure why we insist on calling ourselves pacifists, borrowing a word ill-suited to describing the texture and significance of a life of faith. Perhaps we’re afraid of being misunderstood. But our testimony to peace is deeply rooted in our experience of God over time, and we needn’t hide that. The earliest Friends testified in the first person, not counterfactually. This was grounded in worship, not a calculation of consequences. It was part of a God-saturated life, not a policy proposal. I worry that pacifism is at best a secularised translation of an aspect of our discipleship – our obedience to the Light. And I doubt it’s a good translation.
The challenge of remaining a peace church, it seems to me, is really the challenge of understanding ourselves in an increasingly secular world: making sense of faith without expressing it in principles or political slogans. The war in Ukraine raises the question of how we’re called to live, not which tragedy we can most imagine ourselves inhabiting. War is a tragedy. Killing is a tragedy. Each time, whoever it is. The lesser evil doesn’t become good by being lesser. That’s a starting point for discernment, not a policy to pass on to my MP.
When it comes to discernment, we have historically understood the question to be whether to live by the sword or the cross. This is no prescription. Neither looks particularly tempting. It has to be a matter of personal calling. The context for taking up our cross and following Christ, if that’s right for us, is worship. The disavowal of weapons begins in the heart, in relationship with the divine. After all, are any of us called to pacifism, or are we called to love those who persecute us? Are we called to a position in an argument, or to a life that speaks peace?
Calling ourselves pacifists creates the false impression that we face a choice between apparently unworkable principles and a surrender to militarism. We have misunderstood our own tradition if we think the Peace Testimony was ever a principle. I hope that the history of our Society won’t mirror that of the wider church, where a distance from Christ and his leadings allowed an early commitment to peace to be supplanted by the notion that war could be just. Jesus wasn’t much of a strategist; he just loved his enemies. Maybe that’s a lesson for us.
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