‘If in times of war we as Friends are to testify to the possibility of nonviolence, it is important that we take responsibility for our God.’ Photo: Franz Jägerstätter, by Michael Connor
Theology and witness: Religion of peace in time of war by Michael Saunders
‘In a religion of peace, God is no longer a “supernatural means to our secular ends”, but is rather “the all-sufficient goal”.’
I have written before of the work of the Anglican Quaker Graham Shaw (‘Help in hand’, 17 December 2021). I have recently had cause to return to his work because of the careful attention he pays to the ways in which appeals to God can enable an evasion of responsibility. Shaw’s two books, The Cost of Authority (1983) and God in Our Hands (1987) seem to me to speak a prophetic word to our current moment, one in which religious authority and language has so often been employed in the service of military endeavors.
Shaw suggests that one of the primary functions of God in a ‘religion of power’ is that this God allows us to deny our responsibility for the things we say and do. In The Cost of Authority he writes: ‘A God objectively or supernaturally conceived connives too easily with our attempts to evade responsibility for our constructions, which are thus removed from the possibility of criticism.’ That is, if we appeal to the will of God, to divine authority, then we no longer have to take responsibility for our own words. We are responsible to, but not for, a God of power.
The appeal to a God of power disguises the very fact that this God is working to secure our own privilege and power. An objectified God becomes, Shaw says, a ‘supernatural means to secular ends’. Elsewhere, he puts it this way: ‘The appeal to God distracts attention from the human speaker. Heaven is silent, and when [people’s] attention is directed towards it, we easily fail to notice that human lips are moving. This is not to dismiss all talk of God as deceit, but it does suggest that we fix our eyes most carefully on the human speaker, and treat with caution any confusion of identity between [people] and God. Wherever a [person] cannot speak in [their] own name, but buttresses [their] speech with divine authorship, suspicion is certainly in order. Is the human speaker benefitting by this device, and if so, how?’
One lesson, then, of Shaw’s theology is this: if God is invoked by religious or political authorities to, for example, legitimise a war or condemn one’s enemies, then we should ‘fix our eyes most carefully on the human speaker’ and attend to the ways in which they may be benefitting by this device. In order to avoid our religious language becoming a means of evading responsibility, we must deny the existence of a God of power, the God that would license this evasion: The power of God is also the privilege of humans, or more precisely the advantage of some humans over others. Only by denying the existence of such a God and refusing the blandishments of such power can we be certain that our religion is not a form of disguised domination, encouraging human beings to seek privilege and shun solidarity. The God of power can only use the language of love as a rhetoric to silence dissent and conceal aggression. The radical denial of such a God is necessary if the language of love is ever to be credible on the lips of religious people.
For Shaw, this critique of the religions of power is not a philosophical critique; in God in Our Hands, he works to defend himself against the charge of atheism. Instead, he claims, this critique is religious: ‘I believe that theology can without inconsistency be self-critical. My confidence is based on the criticism contained explicitly and implicitly in the story of Jesus. The most radical critic of the religion of power did not abandon talk of God, he transformed it.’
This is, I think, a second lesson offered to us by Shaw, one that speaks with some urgency to current concerns within the Religious Society of Friends. The risk we run as Friends is that if we abandon the word ‘God’, we lose the transcendence made possible by the invocation of this word, by its ‘uniquely precious’ function, as Shaw puts it – the very transcendence that would allow us to challenge the ways in which God is manipulated and put to use in the religions of power. As he goes on to explain: ‘The debate is not between theologians who still wish to affirm divine transcendence and those who have surrendered that claim. It is between those who believe that only a traditional metaphysic of divine being can adequately do justice to the transcendent, and those who understand transcendence in terms of the human use of language. On such a view it is in prayer and worship alone that transcendence is achieved, and it is a human achievement. The word “God” is precious not because of some abiding reality to which it refers, but because of the possibility of transcendence which is discovered in its use.’
A religion of peace, need not, should not, relinquish this word to the religions of power. To abandon the word ‘God’, to abandon the scriptures, is to lose a gospel of freedom and peace. If in times of war we as Friends are to testify to the possibility of nonviolence, then it is important that, without abandoning the word ‘God,’ we take responsibility for our God – deny the existence of a God of power and recognise that God that lives in our hearts.
Towards the end of God in Our Hands, Shaw writes that: ‘If we have no difficulty in using the word “I”, we should have no difficult in using the word “God”. Both have their existence in the imagination of the living. Both are imagined constructions which gain their content in the use of language in our imaginative life. In that particular sense, God exists, just as I do. The only power which such a God can represent is the energy within our consciousness, but that is not to be despised. It may not be the force that moves the stars, but moral courage is not a negligible quality. With the psalmist I can still say – “O Lord, in thee have I trusted; let me never be confounded” – but the place for such language is the unobserved prayer of the heart, not a Te Deum for victory in St Paul’s Cathedral.’
What moral courage is made possible by the God in our hands? I believe that we can think here of the Austrian pacifist peasant Franz Jägerstätter. Jägerstätter, a devout Catholic, refused to swear of an oath of loyalty to Hitler, refused to fight in an unjust war. Remarkably, he did this against the recommendation of his local bishop. Because of his conscientious objection, he was taken away from his family and imprisoned; his request to serve as medic in the medical corps was rejected. He was beheaded on August 9, 1943.
A feeling of profound intimacy with God sustained Jägerstätter’s moral courage and nonviolent witness. The Vatican’s remembrance of him includes this note: ‘The prison chaplain was struck by the man’s tranquil character. On being offered the New Testament, he [Jägerstätter] replied: “I am completely bound in inner union with the Lord, and any reading would only interrupt my communication with my God.”’
If at the heart of Shaw’s revisionist theology is the contention that God lives in the hearts of those who pray, then, on this understanding, it was the God who lived in Jägerstätter’s heart that allowed him to transcend a context that seemed to deny the very possibility of affirming the ‘highest human values’: ‘kindness, generosity, commitment and love’. Through using the word ‘God’, through the unobserved prayer of his heart, Jägerstätter was able to transcend his situation and bear nonviolent witness to a God of peace. In a religion of peace, God is no longer a ‘supernatural means to our secular ends’, but is rather ‘the all-sufficient goal – the joy of the soul’. I must imagine that in his prison cell, Jägerstätter discovered this joy. Even if there was no God ‘out there’ to vindicate his faith, no God of power, a God of peace lived in his heart. Jägerstätter’s life bears witness, then, to the possibility of a religion of peace.
To refuse to objectify or ontologise God – to make God into a being – is to recover the possibility of a God of peace, a God that is made incarnate in our lives, in our vulnerable affirmations, in our prayers. To pray to a God of peace is at the very same time to make possible the real existence of a God of peace. This God of peace lives in our hearts. And yet, I would like to suggest that this is the very same God that is presented to us in the Gospels: a God that is given over to us, a God that is lifted down from a cross and into our hands. The eschatological hope made present in this holding is that there is no necessary delay to the coming of the kingdom of heaven because it is a kingdom of this earth, because we hold this kingdom in our hands, because it is all around us and inside us. It is the hope that if we can lay down our arms, then perhaps we will find that we can hold God in our hands. This, at least, is the vulnerable affirmation of a religion of peace.
