The logic of war as a solution is very powerful indeed. No matter how many tens of thousands are killed, someone will always pop up to say “the war worked”. In limited protection, maybe. But in commission, prevention, or in the longer view of history with its many bloody twists, victims and deep, unfolding consequences?

What or whom are we trusting when we trust to the sword? This was a question which came to haunt the Hebrew Prophets, and it resonates from Jesus’ own last recorded command to his followers – which was to put away their swords when they were tempted to raise them in his defence as he was arrested and taken away for trial on charges of sedition.

In The Church Times newspaper, Peter Selby, who was until recently the Anglican Bishop of Worcester and is now President of the National Council for Independent Monitoring Bodies for Prisons and Immigration Removal Centres, explores “war as a solution” with hopeful realism.

He writes: In the case of Iraq, the entail of war goes on and on, as it does also in Afghanistan. Northern Ireland reminds us that the Troubles lasted 30 years, and that it took a full decade from the Belfast Agreement to the point where a shared administration for Northern Ireland could come into being.

The conflict and the peace process that provide this month’s anniversaries are themselves part of the entail of previous resorts to violence — the Iran-Iraq war, the division of Ireland — battles still remembered, still endowed with the capacity to bring hurts to the surface, and bring further resorts to violence in the future.

I recall Peter being interviewed on BBC Radio 4 some years ago, I think in relation to the Balkans. As a Christian bishop he was speaking out and questioning a particular bombing strategy. He was asked, “what’s the alternative?” The alternative, he suggested, was not bombing! The interviewer was more than a little taken aback.

The serious and very substantial point Peter went on to make was that when bombs are dropped certain objectives may arguably be achieved, but much destruction takes place and a whole range of possibilities is cut off for a time, maybe for ever. When bombs are not dropped, what appears to be a quicker route to resolution is denied, but other possibilities remain on the table, other courses of action that would be destroyed by the bombs are there for us to pursue.

Even within the pragmatic logic of political calculation, the use of violence throws up as many problems as it offers avenues to ‘success’. What of the Gospel in relation to all this? How does it measure effectiveness? Is its concern success, or something more rich and complex shaped by faithfulness?

The way of the Cross

Contrary to some popular Christian teaching, the way of the Cross is not marked by the justified infliction of violence, but its absorption and transformation in the person of Jesus, who is God’s person for us. Likewise, the Gospel’s anticipated vindication is not apocalyptic fury but the life-giving of God alone, which is called resurrection.

In reality, this is as difficult, if not more difficult, for Christians to believe in practice (in the way we live our lives) as it is for anyone to believe in theory (as a matter of intellectual debate).

The way of the sword, by contrast, looks like the kind of ‘realism’ we need when faced with terror, threat and injustice. But realism of what kind? The issue as to whether and how the God of eternal peace features in our picture of what finally constitutes reality becomes crucial at this point. Religious leaders often seem unable to contemplate that possibility as they make their calculations, showing by default that whatever is being believed in, it is not, it seems, the ‘weak power’ of the crucified and risen one.

Inviting others to accept a gospel which does not seriously change our options or put into question the destruction upon which we base our security is, it seems to me, more than a little problematic.

But the church I am part of (the Church of England) mostly does not seem to think so. It still views the refusal of violence in the name of Christ as an exotic option, not a core identity marker. In so doing it proclaims a Jesus whose claims are still considered needful of judgement at the bar of a political ‘realism’ which does not believe in resurrection.

It is not the business or constitution of elected governments in plural societies to believe in God’s ability to raise the dead, of course. It is the business of Christians, gathered into Christ’s body, to do that. We cannot and should not expect others (let alone the state) to “do it for us”. Nor should we accept the idea that our capacity for action and decision is or can be circumscribed by those who do not follow the way of the Cross, but the way of the sword.

A new ecclesial foreign policy?

Of course, neither the way of the Cross nor the way of the sword are in any sense easy. Both involve considerable courage and sacrifice. Neither is morally straightforward. How then do we decide between them? The church has historically often argued that we do not have to.

But that is fundamentally to misunderstand the issue of trust and the nature of redemption at stake in the Gospel, or the church’s calling to be “a holy nation”.

Even in what we call the Old Testament, the endemic tradition of ‘holy war’ (which has some pretty horrific manifestations in Judges and Joshua) came gradually to be about the limiting of violence and moving away from “trust in chariots” as distinct from trust in “the Sovereign One of hosts”.

Jesus took this profound internal critique to another level and another conclusion when he called on his followers to live a life of disarmed and disarming truth.

A church that finds its interests too tied up with the state finds it very difficult to live without sanctioning and blessing the sword. It sees its ‘social responsibility’ as needing to involve the offering of religious comfort to those who have decided that the the way of the military security is, in reality, the only one. Any other kind is ‘spiritual’ and belongs to ‘another realm’. All very nice if you believe that sort of stuff, but nothing to do with real life, thank you very much.

But the whole point of the existence of the church as the Body of Christ (rather than simply another religious institution) is to show that this is not so. Life is of a piece and of a goodness beyond manipulation, or it is not finally life-giving, except in a fairly episodic and temporary sense.

The agenda of the church needs urgently to be changed. Instead of asking how it can keep the social order together, inject a bit of niceness, make sure that we pay lip service to being “a Christian nation” (one in which Christians can sit easy) it needs to be about raising questions concerning the tenability of our global reliance on wealth, might and ecological exploitation.

In this different vision, the church’s ‘foreign policy’ is not about raiding parties into enemy territory to claim beleagured souls, or attempts to make its writ the law of the land (backed up by the state’s sword). Rather it asks “how do we help create an alternative social ethic as followers of Jesus, those who trust in his cross and risen life?”

The hopeful agony of Christ’s peace

In the church that recruits people to this radically different political option, new paths emerge. Peacemaking, forgiveness, hospitality without borders, loving enemies. These will never be easy because they are about witness, not control; vulnerability, not might; God’s grace, not heroic human isolation.

But as the Mennonite theologian Ron Sider once asked: “What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?”

The answer is not that people would not die, that injustice would not continue, that everyone would join the church, or that the world would suddenly become nice. It is that a new kind of possibility, that of deep redemption, would begin to reshape our understanding, our action and our priorities.

As it happens, Christian Peacemaker Teams – who aim to “get in the way” of cycles of violence in conflict zones, using peaceful tactics – emerged in part from Sider’s observation. So change is possible, often in small ways. War is not a final solution, the peace embodied in Christ is. But it is by invitation, not force of arms; not against those of different faith or of ‘good faith’, but with and for them in the struggle to be truly human.

What God’s peace does is to pose in stark terms the question of where salvation really lies – in “the Lamb who was slain”, or in the tactics of those who slay lambs? Then it invites us on a journey of discipleship, as part of a Body of wounded healers. This involves the extremely difficult business of learning how not to kill. Yes, that’s right, learning. For not killing, not wounding, does not come easily or naturally, and it involves pain and setbacks.

This is the Easter journey I believe the churches must take if they are to have any real saving purchase on the world of endemic violence (and, specifically, religious violence) we live in. It is authentic living in the way of Christ that has the power to change us, not a hectoring from pulpits of power or from positions of prestige. Overbearing Christianity, Christendom, inoculates us and those we address against the Gospel.

Likewise, the “difficult peace of Christ” is not a woolly, soft or romantic pacifism. Nor is it politically disengaged, quietest or negatively sectarian. It is, nonetheless, a very hard road indeed. But it is the way of the Cross, and if we have no intention of following it other than as a charming symbol or a matter of personal spiritual comfort, I really do wonder whether there is any point in being Christians at all.

There most assuredly is, of course. On the road to Easter – which is God’s doing, not ours.

See also:

Willard Swartley, Covenant of Peace: The Missing Peace in New Testament Theology (Eerdmans, 2006) – http://books.ekklesia.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=1756 [One would think that peace, a term that occurs as many as one hundred times in the New Testament, would enjoy a prominent place in theology and ethics textbooks. Yet it is surprisingly absent. Willard Swartley’s Covenant of Peace remedies this deficiency, restoring to New Testament theology and ethics the peace that many works have missed. In this comprehensive yet accessible book Swartley explicates virtually all of the New Testament, relating peace — and the associated emphases of love for enemies and reconciliation — to core theological themes such as soteriology, Christology, pneumatology, eschatology and the reign of God. No other work in English makes such a contribution.]

‘Resurrection is no Easter conjuring trick’ – http://ekklesia.co.uk/node/6938

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(c) Simon Barrow is co-director of Ekklesia. He blogs on http://faithinsociety.blogspot.com. His website is: http://www.simonbarrow.net . His fortcoming book is entitled Threatened with Resurrection: The difficult peace of Christ.

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So let’s get straight to the heart of the matter. What does it mean to speak, as Christians should do, of the “bodily resurrection of Jesus”, the wounded and crucified healer, as the very basis of our life? Given our fairly lazy habits of mind in this area, the answer isn’t easy or obvious. But nor is it entirely unobtainable or inscrutable. In essence the claim of the resurrection is not that bunnies come out of hats, that dead people carry on, or that corpses magically reassemble. This is the stuff of fantasy. Note the playing with this theme in the latest episodes of the TV series ‘Torchwood’ – as Owen wrestles successfully with death, and then lives on into the future as a ‘dead man walking’, claiming at one point to be risen like Jesus. Not quite, Owen, mate! [1]

Rather, to confess that “God raised Jesus” is to believe that everything of substance in the life of Jesus, the human person who is indissolubly God’s person, is dynamically taken up and made eternally available in, through and beyond death into the life of God – a quality of living and a form of life that affirms, but also transcends, anything we can currently mean by the term ‘life’. This is not any old life but “new life”, says the New Testament, in a variety of ways. It is, if you will, God’s unconditioned love recreating possibilities for emergent life that we thought had been lost, sinfully destroyed, denied, wasted, gambled away or blocked off. Not some vague post-mortem assimilation into the Godhead, but a new order of being.

It is important to note that this way of speaking about resurrection, which I believe is both consistent with the Gospel vision and workable as the context of a contemporary understanding, does not make its sense by fitting conveniently into our existing ways of looking at things, but by reframing our vision completely. For the awkward but essential fact is this. God is God and we are not God. Among other things, this means that, rationally, the essence of the risen life made manifest for us as God’s vindication of the crucified Jesus cannot be captured or defined by physics, metaphysics, empirical procedure, ecclesial interest, pious doctrine or positivistic logic. It can only be received as gift – “by the power of the Spirit”, as we say. And since its concern is not some Platonic, separate, disembodied life, but the real, substantial, ambiguous, messy and bloody kind we think we know (but often get horridly wrong), the gift can only be received “in the Body”, as we seek together to live the risen life in the material world of suffering and injustice. It is not a kind of arbitrary fiat that absolves us from the reality of either life or death. That is its hope and its threat. [2]

To believe that “Christ has been raised” is to live in a new way, sustained by God rather than our own efforts alone, as if the order of death had no final determination. Among other things, it is to refuse killing as an instrument of policy, as an untruth not just a moral outrage. This is why resurrection, the non-violent, non-vengeful and utterly gracious (‘given’, not made or claimed) form of eschatological living, is the ultimate threat to Caesar and his empire – which finally can only rule by death and its thrall, because it knows of no other possibility that would allow it go on being what it is. Deadly. That is why the first Christians were accused of seditiously saying “we have another king, Jesus” (Acts). Easter is about regime change, the destruction of powerful power by weak power – “not by might, not by force, but by my Spirit says the Lord of Hosts” (Zechariah).

Hold on, though. What does that “as if” mean? It means that we live by faith. Not by a denial of material evidence (as that word is popularly misrepresented these days), but by an awareness that the life of God which we believe we have tasted in the resilience of a love that faces, absorbs and challenges suffering, cannot finally be pinned down by what we are capable of bringing to the table of investigation. It is of a quality that demands more than we can get by putting things under a microscope. It resides in the kind of liberating epistemic humility that comes from recognising that God is the ground of our life, rather than the other way round. So we do not and cannot “know” in some forensic way, but only by an awkward act of “lived trust” – or, rather, by a whole series of acts of lived trust sustained by prayer (a reaching out to receive God’s ways, recognising that they are not ours) and by the fabric of our common life. The ‘frame’ for this way of living in and as the Body of Christ in the world, Christ’s crucified and risen presence in fragments, is baptism.

In baptism we are invited to a burial. Our own. Passing into the water we are taken down into death, and emerging from the water we recognise that in this, and in everything, we are inseparably joined to the life of God, to those who are also baptised into that risen life, and to all who resist the power of death in this world. As those baptised in Christ we live with a constant reminder of our mortality and of an immortality which is not ours but God’s alone, and in which we may fully participate only when we have let go of deathly living, when we have been prized out of the tomb to which we cling with such fervour. For short of that of which baptism speaks, the life we crave is avoidance of death and the death we crave (and we do) is an avoidance of the pain of living. For we have been, in Julia Esquivel’s words, “threatened by resurrection”. [3]

What then, of the molecules of Jesus, which everyone wants to reduce the issue to these days? Reading between the lines, as well as along them, St Paul is quite clear that “the new body” which God’s raising of Jesus creates is not simply a reassembling of bits of stuff, a reanimation, a “conjuring trick with bones” (as Bishop David Jenkins once correctly characterised the popular caricature of resurrection). [4] What the “new body” is is bound to be beyond our ken, because it is the work of God, who is not a human being writ large, but Life giving life. In talking of Jesus’s “life beyond living and dying” St Paul therefore “coins a phrase”. He writes enigmatically of the risen Jesus as having “a spiritual body”. By this he does not mean a less-than-real one, an ethereal one, a ‘vain spirit’, but the embodied power, presence and personality that is Jesus made substantial in God, rather than in any type of material which decays or corrupts. He also means Jesus’s life made available to us in an unlimited sense (unlike that which is possible in “our mortal bodies”) through the Spirit, the Disturber. [5]

Language, being our language, naturally and unavoidably runs out of words and phrases to describe this, because description – an account of what we have seen, touched and mapped with our senses – is not fully possible when it comes to the resurrection. Christianity is founded on a missing body, or more accurately one that looks as if it is mis-placed and turns out to have been re-placed. [6] Metaphor not measurement is what is needed to be grasped by this, poetry more than prescription.

Faith, by which I also mean “facing everything that is in the light of God”, [7] remains the inescapable (but painful) form of the logic needed to comprehend risen life. Nothing less will do. When it comes to the unconditioned life of God there can be no other way of “seeing” except through a glass darkly, because the order of being to which we refer keeps on going beyond what we can specify. It is the shadow of this light (if I may use a deliberate paradox) in which “we live and move and have our being”. If that makes sense it is only because in some sense we have tasted it – something unquenchable in the midst of that which is clearly vanquished, like the women facing those death squads in Guatemala, to whom Esquivel’s poem partly refers. In embracing death through the cause of life they threaten the regime of death with resurrection. With life in God’s hands.

St Paul again: “For if Christ is not raised, your hope is in vain, and you are above all people to be pitied.” [8] The stakes could not be higher. How then, shall we live, and by what or whose power? That is the Gospel’s unavoidable Easter challenge. At the end of the day, it is alarmingly practical. That may prove an even bigger disincentive than getting our heads round the theology, frankly. [9]

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NOTES

[1] This point was made to be by Dr Pete Phillips. Thanks to him and to others who have commented upon, and helped improve, this sermon.

[2] Bonhoeffer makes this point powerfully from his prison cell in Nazi Germany, and in the shadow of his execution.

[3] See also: Simon Barrow, Threatened by Resurrection: The Difficult Peace of Christ (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, due October 2008).

[4] Dr Jenkins, who moved from being Professor of Theology at the University of Leeds to the Anglican Bishopric of Durham, and is now retired, is still misrepresented as someone who “doesn’t believe in the resurrection” (he most certainly does, though not in the simplistic way it is usually affirmed or dismissed) or who “said it was a conjuring trick with bones” (his point was precisely the opposite – namely that the kind of life God offers is not reducible to magic but is about a thoroughgoing transformation in and beyond the material world as we think we know it.)

[5] To grasp fully the coherence of this argument it is necessary to understand it in relation to the Christian experience of God as a whole. See: ‘Three Ways to Make Sense of One God’ – http://ekklesia.co.uk/node/5312

[6] This point is elucidated in William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) http://catholicanarchy.org/cavanaugh/

[7] A definition in the same family as those generated by Nicholas Lash. See my: ‘What Difference Does God Make Today?’ – http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/4921

[8] Romans 15. 13-15.

[9] For the social and political implications of all this, see, ‘Why the church needs a new foreign policy’ – http://ekklesia.co.uk/node/6941

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© Simon Barrow is co-director of Ekklesia.

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