A CHRISTIAN SHALOM. Amid the beginnings of America’s attack on Iraq, and while on a plane from Kansas City to Indianapolis, I began reading Perfect Love and War. The 1974 book published by Evangel Press is a compilation of papers presented at a symposium on the topic among holiness theologians and thoughtful practitioners. I’m grateful to Stan Ingersol for putting me on to the book. It includes a history of holiness advocacy for peace by Donald W. Dayton and a piece by Timothy L. Smith titled: “A Christian Shalom.” The following are a few excerpts from Dr. Smith’s article:
A BROADER DEFINITION OF 'SHALOM.' 'Peace' – 'shalom' – cannot, for us, even us who believe afresh in an imminent Second Coming, denote merely otherwordly hope in Christ’s apocalyptic settlement of the world’s strife. We recognize, rather, a responsibility to advance the alternatives to war which human beings can realistically hope for now.”
PEACE AMID CONFUSION. “The shalom which [Jesus] pronounced was a promise that His grace could make them disciplined disciples, able to obey His call to personal holiness in a world of sin. His ‘peace be unto you’ was a confirmation of what He had declared on the eve of Calvary. Their hearts need not be troubled; they believed in God, they could also rely on Him. You can rest at ease, He said on that dark night of confusion and betrayal; your souls can be secure; you shall indeed live for Me and walk in the way I have charted for you.”
SET TO PEACE-BRINGING. “Eternal life began in a special sense for them that Easter night, in the grace of shalom, in the gift of the Holy Spirit, Who would abide with them forever. Temporal holiness and everlasting salvation thereafter were two sides of the same priceless coin… The cross, and the resurrection which triumphed over it, had brought them a shalom which the world could neither give nor take away. It would heal their wearied and sin-bound spirits, and set them to bringing peace on earth and good will among men.”
WAGE WAR ON WAR. “What we set about when we began following Jesus was to become radically Christian persons linked in Christian compassion to a world of great evil… We really can’t find anything better to declare than ‘the peace of God that passeth all understanding.’ His shalom can fill those who trust in Him with the spiritual resources which will enable them to wage war on war, and provide them with weapons which by their peaceableness partakes of the nature of the kingdom for whose coming they both pray and work.”
A MORAL GAUGE. “Jesus’ words become for us who live in a war-cursed world a moral gauge of political action and conviction… We are trying by our professions of love to share with all mankind those hopes which our personal experience with Christ makes valid… The model of faithfulness, of peaceableness, of shalom, which exists within the Christian community is the ideal toward which we must try mightily to move the world.”
ETHICS OF PEACE TO INFORM OUR ACTIONS. “Though [the disciples] might not expect to see a completely peaceable society in their time – nor we in ours, so intractable are the political structures and social conventions by which men order their lives – yet, so as we are friends of Jesus, living in and caring for the world, the ethics of peace must inform our every political act and conviction.”
WAR AS EVIL. “My own existence as a person of peace, and the witness which I must bear to all mankind about spiritual as well as political shalom, depend on my rejection of war as basically evil. Being evil, it impoverishes all of a nation’s moral resources, weakens all of a people’s tendencies to gentleness, truthfulness and thoughtfulness, and frustrates the hopes which all political ideologies nurture.”
STRIFE IS DESTRUCTIVE. Smith concludes: “Jesus is trying to say to us that strife, considered both as the fruit of an egotistical will to power and as a customary way of securing it, is fundamentally destructive of the best which is in human beings.”
3 comments:
Reverence for life is a principle thst will guide us through these troubled times.Any religion or philosophy which is not based upon a respect for life is not true religion or philiosopy.
Hey,
I agree with you that war is sin and the very expression of spiraling evil. As a conscientious objector during Viet Nam, both as Alternative Service and Navy Corpsman, I saw the aftermath of war, and there is no good thing about war. Even in WW2, the victors only won by becoming more vicious than the Nazi's and the Japanese. Remember Dresden and Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
The war of the US against Viet Nam is still killing people of both sides with Agent Orange exposure. Many babies were spontaneously aborted by Agent Orange ingestion during the war.
The US and the American "Church" have not yet repented for what they did and approved during Viet Nam. Now they are piling up their sins with their more recent wars.
Christians who approve of war are not disciples of Jesus, which means they are not Christians, except in the national sense.
As an aspiring Wesleyan wannabe, the refusal of the Wesleyan Church to denounce war is keeping me out of the Wesleyan Church and makes me very suspicious of their claims to be a holiness church. I am seeking sanctification and holiness in my own life and can't say I have experienced that grace yet. So far, most of the Wesleyans I have met are just talk and not much show about what is important-the life of Shalom, the Gospel of Peace, and the God of Peace.
Thanks for listening,
Gary Cummings
Virginia
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