Threatened with resurrection -Apr 29, 2006

When Christian peacemakers Norman Kember, Jim Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden were freed after four months captivity at the hands of a militant group in Iraq, they and their supporters probably expected some criticism.

But the outpouring of anger, resentment and even hatred which they faced in many quarters of the media probably exceeded most expectations.

Kember and his family received vile messages. Some commentators said the men should have been ‘left to die’. (One of their number, Tom Fox, had indeed been killed and dumped on a rubbish tip).

Fellow-Christians, too, rushed in to patronise or condemn. With little apparent effort at understanding, a former ecclesiastical aide, a theological ethicist, a church journalist and several chaplains accused CPT of a range of culpabilities: ‘irresponsibility’, ‘stupidity’, ‘carelessness’ – even ‘neo-fascism’.

Why? Because they had knowingly entered a situation of bitter conflict with an organisation dedicated to refusing the use of violence, declining military protection, and building civic and religious bridges between enemies and rivals.

Of course arguments can and should be had about the responsibility, tactics, strategy, and politics involved in such a venture. That is only reasonable, and in the case of the Iraq four difficult questions remain, even after the misrepresentations have been cleared.

But the anger and bitterness occasioned by the CPT Iraq hostage saga seems to go well beyond such legitimate concerns – and into the territory of emotions exceeding the rational.

Somehow a notion has got deep into our consciousness that active non-violence is even more dangerous and destabilising than armed might.

To question the orthodoxy of military intervention and the rule of force is to be regarded as almost insane in the modern world.

The constantly reinforced orthodoxy is that might is rightful, and that the antidote to violence is yet more violence – but of a ‘redemptive’ kind.

In an age of ‘pre-emptive intervention’ and ‘humanitarian force’, armed action has increasingly moved from being a reluctant necessity to a regular instrument of policy.

Our daily culture – of TV, films, games and magazines – is also steeped in the images and ideology of salvific war and sacrificial killing.

It is no accident that much of the language used to reinforce and justify such a world view is religious in character and derivation. For, as Rene Girard and others have pointed out, some of our most basic spiritual impulses and rituals are based not just on bonding and mimesis, but on the repeated need to find scapegoats to ward off the evil which we would otherwise have to confront in our midst.

So could it be that, pragmatic arguments aside, the deepest cut of our anger towards those who pursue non-violence comes from our desire to make them responsible for the horrors they expose in us?

The alternative to such revulsion would, after all, mean examining our own complicity in a violent world, asking questions about the injustice that sustains it, and confronting the lie that one more military adventure will do the job.

What’s more, if we were to admit that in the broader frame violence doesn’t ‘work’ – and the evidence of history is that even when it undeniably quells horror, the horror emerges again in new and different forms – what or who could possibly save us?

For many in the Western world, that is now an unaskable question. Having decided that religion is nothing more than an illusory reflex of dependence for the simple or the weak-willed, we have abandoned a pain-bearing God for mortal superheroes of our own creation – those who ‘save’ by slaughtering and subduing.

Sure, the gods have lost their thrall. And there is no threat in that, because the Holy One of classic Jewish, Christian and Muslim formulation is not some object among objects, or a human projection on eternity, but the beyond-in-the-midst who is found at the heart of life and love.

No, the real challenge, buried in arcane arguments about religion, is that of a Gospel which refutes the promise of victory through death – and replaces it with the threat of resurrection.

What the death of Jesus tells us is that our faith in salvation by killing is redundant. And what the resurrection tells us is that the life of God, unlike instruments of death, is beyond our control.

To be “threatened by resurrection”, suggests Guatemalan poet and theologian Julia Esquivel, is to be paralysingly afraid to love life – and to bow instead to the power of death.

This is what Christian Peacemakers and other non-violent activists (of all faiths and none) blatantly refuse to do, whatever their fallibilities and faults. They seek instead to act outside of the domain of death. And for most of us, this is horribly worrying.

The context out of which Esquivel wrote her famous poem in the 1980s was that of government-backed death squads in Latin America. But her spiritual memory was of those in St Mark’s Gospel who first heard that the tomb could not contain Jesus. They were not thrilled – they were stark afraid.

A love beyond favour which calls us to live without defence is not the kind of Good News a heavily armed consumer society understands. Nor is it one which a suicide bomber raised on a cult of death and glory wants.

What we actually understand and want, when the going gets tough, is what we have been trained to trust by nature, nurture and Nietzsche. And that is the survival of the strongest.

By contrast, what the Gospel of Jesus offers is the opportunity to place ourselves in the larger context of God’s capacity to renew life, thereby receiving the ability to live ‘beyond our means’ – from resources derived outside an economy of warriordom.

The dangerous genius of Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder was to recognise that, for Christians, inheriting the peaceable kingdom relies not upon arguments about religious texts, but upon the way the Word made flesh revolutionises our comprehension of God.

“Christian pacifism that has a theological basis in the character of God and the work of Jesus Christ,” Yoder wrote, “is one in which the calculating link between our obedience and ultimate efficacy has been broken, since the triumph of God comes through resurrection [the gift of life] and not through effective sovereignty or assured survival.”

Christians peacemakers cannot guarantee that non-violent action in Iraq will ultimately be effective. They cannot promise worldly security. The only thing they can do is to witness to the way, the life and the truth which exists over and against the lie of redemptive murder.

This carries its distinct dangers, to be sure. After all, it condemned Jesus to a cross. But its risks are ones people choose to bear in the company of others who choose likewise. They are not ones imposed by force.

To put it another way, the Gospel of peace requires a community of faith (lived trust) not because it is irrational, but because its rationality depends upon that which goes beyond natural calculability – namely the love of God.

Viewed one way that does indeed make Christian peacemakers (in addition to their human failings and faults) inherently ‘unstable’, ‘subversive’ and ‘irresponsible’, as the critics allege.

But viewed another way, it makes them unlikely sacraments of the only hope that would truly enable us to be human to each other’s benefit rather than at each other’s expense – the hope of redemption beyond killing.

This also points us to the only real antidote for one of the greatest threats in the world today – what many call ‘toxic religion’, a bitter blend of inflexible dogmatism, self-certainty and collective anger.

Religious toxicity crosses most known confessional boundaries – from the anti-gay hate propaganda of Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas right through to the Islamist zeal of those who flew planes into the World Trade Centre.

All faiths and ideologies have been touched in some way by such lethal rage. And while it is always possible to distance ourselves from the hate-mongers, the reality is that we all have the responsibility to search our hearts and allegiances for the roots of hatred within – not just outside – the fold.

To embark on a spiritual path is to undergo just such a process of detoxification. It means seeking a love beyond our proprietorial control, for the God who gifts life rather than death.

This has political as well as personal implications. Part of what seems to have led to the establishment of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) in 1984 was a self-critical awareness of the way in which Christianity has often been hijacked to perpetuate oppression in the name of God.

CPT also arose out of the desire of Americans and Canadians in the peace church (Mennonite, Quaker and Brethren in Christ) traditions to find proactive ways of making change based on solidarity and friendship instead of self-aggrandisement and violence.

Now an ecumenical venture, Christian Peacemaker Teams began by asking: “What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to non-violent peacemaking that armies devote to war?”

To confront such a question is to begin a journey away from imperial religion and the love of power towards a vulnerable faith in the power of love.

It also involves tough choices. Part of the criticism that CPT has endured is certainly a result of the decision to confront divisive powers that justify themselves on religious grounds – even, perhaps especially, when such activities are carried out in ‘our’ name by ‘our’ government.

This includes policies of racial domination, military force, imprisonment, economic oppression, torture and land occupation – all of which entail treating human beings as something other than the image of God and colluding in structures based in inequity and iniquity.

Christian Peacemaker Teams is no paragon. Its supporters would be the first to admit that. But if those of us who look on feel angry about what people like Norman, Tom, Harmeet and Jim do and represent, maybe that is for good reason. Because what they have done is not just to reveal their weakness, but ours too.

They have threatened us with resurrection.

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) is co-director of Ekklesia. His background is in journalism, adult education, politics and theology, and his weblog is: http://faithinsociety.blogspot.com