We are all one in Christ Jesus. Believers are called to attest this peace and also to convey it to the world. More properly, they are called to participate in the self-witness and self-mediation of the living Christ (participatio Christi). In his cross the world is reconciled to God, and is being reconciled to God. Through Word and Sacrament, through action and suffering, Christians are called to be his witnesses, by being his instruments of peace, until he returns in glory.
Here as elsewhere we walk by faith and not by sight. What Colossians says about our life — “You have died and your life is hid with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3) — applies to much else. It applies, for example, to our peace. In the time between the times, it too is hid with Christ in God. Though hidden, it is real; though real, it is yet to come. Its being hidden detracts neither from its reality nor from its future coming. This peace is attested and made available in the eucharist. The eucharist enacts the unity of heaven and earth, and of brothers and sisters, in Christ. It attests and imparts the Crucified King, the paschal Lamb, the Risen Lord, by whose blood all division, enmity and hatred is overcome, and whose life-giving flesh brings hope for the future of all things.
Christians live in the tension between the times. While the old aeon of sin, death and violence has been overcome, it still lives on in the present. While the new aeon of life, righteousness and peace breaks in even now, it remains the object of hope. If we lived only by the old aeon that has passed away, we would be enslaved to a culture of death. If we lived only by the new aeon that is coming and has come, we would live without coercion for the sake of peace. But we live between the times. No longer enslaved to death, we cannot secure peace on earth without resort to force.
Nevertheless, the Christian community has lived too much in the old aeon and not enough in the new. It has lived as if the impulse for peace must always be trumped by the old, defeated aeon. Hoping too much in violence, it has hoped too little in Christ. Too ready for war, it has neglected peace and the things that make for peace. The utter futility of most violence is minimized, as if no other means were effective. Nonviolence is discounted as an urgent necessity, as if its costly practice over the past 100 years had not continually been validated. (The great, but not the only, validating examples are the U.S. civil rights movement and the Solidarity movement in Poland.) The Christian “realism” that yields so readily to war and belatedly to peace is rarely seen for the crackpot realism that it is. Why is this matter so difficult to grasp? The untold destructiveness of modern weaponry and the grotesque distortions of governmental propaganda are left out of account. If the expansion of nonviolence is our only earthly hope, there are Christians who will be the last to know.
The just-war tradition has a role to play, under modern conditions, in the time between the times. But if it is to be responsible, it must be restricted. It must operate within the narrow straits described by just-war pacifism, on the one hand, and chastened non-pacifism, on the other. The strong presumption against violence that Jesus taught is codified, to some degree, in just-war principles. They provide an important test, in any particular case, of whether the reasons for going to war are justifiable, and whether a war is being conducted in a justifiable manner. These principles clearly rule out wars of aggression, for example, and such crimes as disregarding noncombatant immunity.
The war against Iraq fails on either count. It was not a just war when it started, and it is not a just war today. Founded on falsehood, it is perpetuated by deceit. Every death in this war is unnecessary, because the war was unnecessary; every death a crime, because the war is a crime of aggression. According to the Nuremberg judgments, a “preemptive” or aggressive war is the “supreme international crime” that includes all other crimes within itself. Included in this one are the more than 100,000 civilian deaths established by a careful study and shamefully ignored in our media. Iraq’s recent dubious election cannot justify the invasion, nor does it make the occupation popular. It was a defeat for democracy, a victory for Islamic rule, and threatens to plunge the country into civil war. (So far the U.S. has spent as much as $300 billion to achieve this result.)
Also included in the aggression, again woefully underreported, is the direct targeting of hospitals and cities. Destroying an entire city, as happened with Fallujah, is a form of terrorism, just as torture is a form of terrorism. Fighting terrorism by terrorism is at once immoral and futile. It has been clear at least since Abu Ghraib that the war cannot be won. The 14 new military bases planned for Iraq must be stopped along with building the world’s largest embassy (1300 persons) and the shameless profiteering. An early and orderly exit is the best way to support our troops, just as reparations are due to the long-suffering Iraqi people. To suppose that we must fix what we broke is myopic. It overlooks the unpleasant fact that because the occupation is illegitimate, it is the main cause of the insurgency not its solution, and will only bring more death and destruction. “The ‘pottery barn rule’ does NOT say that if you break it you have to destroy the whole store” (Harvey Cox).
And what of the churches? Are we going to be “German Christians” all over again? Or will we learn that silence is betrayal? Surely it is not a good sign when pious falsehoods are welcomed for their piety, key pulpits are awarded to the theologically illiterate, and presbytery meetings are conducted as if the Book of Order did not exist. How long do we think we can last with generations of uncatechized communicants who know the sports page better than the Bible? We have a Moderator who calls us to the way of the cross, and for that we can only be grateful. But to start down that road without counting the cost, and taking seriously what preparation it requires, is not an uplifting prospect.
GEORGE HUNSINGER is McCord Professor of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and coordinator of Church Folks for a Better America
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