Rethinking our Peace Testimony
Gordon Matthews considers early Christian pacifism and active nonviolence
Jill Allum is right to call for fresh thinking about our peace testimony (21 January). As the context in which we live changes, so we need to change the ways in which we express our peace testimony. This requires renewed discernment as well as fresh thinking. Thinking will not help, without the discernment that has to come first. Our peace testimony springs from the heart of our faith. Our starting point is ‘the spirit of Christ, by which we are guided’.
We need to get to know Christ, the prince of peace, and Jesus, the peacemaker. We can meet Christ, the prince of peace, in a gathered Meeting for Worship. And we can get to know Jesus, the peacemaker, by intelligent reading of the gospels. The keys to our understanding of Jesus are his Sermon on the Mount and the ultimate sacrifice of his life on the cross. Jesus lived in an occupied country in which ordinary people suffered injustice and oppression. He was faced with two alternatives. He could have led a violent uprising. Or he could have quietly gone about healing people, without challenging the unjust system. He chose a third way: active nonviolence as a means of overcoming violence and injustice. Read Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way by Walter Wink.
Jesus was probably speaking rhetorically when he told his disciples ‘if anyone has no sword, let him sell his cloak to buy one’. Later, in Gethsemane, when Peter cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant, Jesus rebuked him. ‘Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.’
The early church understood Jesus’ way of peace and was pacifist for 400 years until Constantine made Christianity the state religion.
It took time for the peace testimony to emerge amongst early Quakers. George Fox, Isaac Penington and others changed their views over the years. In 1693 William Penn wrote: ‘A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it… Let us then try what Love will do.’ (Quaker faith & practice 24.03)
In accordance with Jesus’ exhortation to ‘love your enemies’, Quakers have developed nonviolent means of dealing with violence and responding to conflict. Some contemporary Friends have made peacemaking their vocation, including at least three Swarthmore lecturers: John Lampen (1987), Simon Fisher (2004) and Helen Steven (2005).
I am a Meeting house warden. If an armed person were to appear during Meeting for Worship, I hope I would use my imagination to find a way of preventing them from using their weapon. If the intruder continued to be threatening, I might ring the police, if that were possible to do without provoking an attack. But I would be appalled if the intruder were killed rather than arrested.
I hope Friends know the story of how the Quakers in a Meeting for Worship in New York State in 1775 escaped being massacred by ‘Indians’ who were terrorising the European settlers.
It is to be welcomed that the international community is recognising a responsibility to protect people from genocide. But war (‘military intervention’) is not the answer.
‘Let us not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.’ (Romans 12:21) Let us not abandon our peace testimony, but find ways of reaffirming it in today’s world.
