Peace and Holiness: WHAT'S PEACE GOT TO DO WITH HOLINESS? AND VICE VERSA?

Friday, December 17, 2004

WHAT'S PEACE GOT TO DO WITH HOLINESS? AND VICE VERSA?

“Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord.” Hebrews 12:14

I want to understand what this means…and live it.

Two words. Peace. Holiness. Are they worlds apart?

Does international disarmament, interpersonal nonviolence, racial reconciliation, and pursuing peace have anything to do with personal piety and Christian holiness?

My name is John Hay, Jr. I’m a Christian minister in the Wesleyan/holiness tradition seeking to explore peacemaking as a lost spiritual and ethical heritage.

Honestly, I find hardly anyone within my “holiness” faith tradition talking about peace other than a “Jesus gives me peace” personal experience. We don't talk about it as a social imperative of the Gospel.

I was raised in a faith tradition called “holiness.” We Free Methodists, Nazarenes, Wesleyans, and Salvation Army folk talked about peace of heart but not about peace in the world. Our diminished outlook could be summed up with a bumper sticker: “No Jesus, No Peace; Know Jesus, Know Peace.”

We thought it possible to live in peace with close relationships and local toughs because of inward grace. We just didn’t think that applied on an international or global scale. In fact, we were suspicious of those who talked about world peace; we linked such talk to anti-Christ. Following the declaration of “peace and safety” sudden destruction could be expected.

Sound macabre? Welcome to the theological milieu of my upbringing. It was not uncommon among evangelicals.

I think we sold ourselves short. We were onto something. The holiness part, that is. But we thought only in personal pietistic terms. We didn’t let our hearts range far from our little experience. We asked for peace in the midst of our personal storms, but that was far from expecting peace in the midst of international conflicts. We surrendered everything but our politics and prejudices to Jesus.

The experience of holy love filling one’s heart is no mere illusion. At times it has translated into an outgoing, collective, fervent love that transforms social fears and hatreds—holy-fired folk advocated for the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor relations, and rights of the poor. Donald W. Dayton and Timothy L. Smith make this clear. Holiness of heart can translate into holiness of life at both personal and community levels.

They say there is a peace tradition within my own Wesleyan/holiness theological and church tradition. They say it’s there, somewhere, I just haven’t yet found it. If it’s there, whatever significance it had in history has apparently not translated into contemporary faith and practice of any Wesleyan/holiness churches or associations of which I am aware. If it is there, I will find the strain and amplify it.

But it is possible to explore the implications for peace and witness as part and parcel with the holiness ethic without having historical precedent. We are not called to be mimickers of the ways of our forebears so much as we are called to be witnesses to present grace as it intersects the issues that confront our generation.

There may not be a more critical witness of holiness in this generation than that of peace. Perhaps this is a test of the relevance of the ethic for the present and future.

I don’t know much about peace. But I am going to learn. You’re welcome to look over my shoulder as I do. I must learn quickly. There is urgency to learning and applying what I discover. Think of this as a project in process. I will post what I am discovering about peace and holiness. You’re welcome to contribute what you know and discover.

1 comment:

lindsaylobe said...: It is good to maintain life and futher life. Itis bad to to destroy life. And this ethic, profound,universal has the significance of a religion. it is religion. it brings peace and holiness by the adpotion oof arevernce for all life -not just human life.; 6:44 AM

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PEOPLE OF PEACE

“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.” -- Timothy L. Smith

FIND THE HABITS OF PEACE

"Christians are prohibited from ever despairing of the peace possible in the world. We know that as God’s creatures we are not naturally violent nor are our institutions unavoidably violent. As God’s people we have been created for peace. Rather, what we must do is to help the world find the habits of peace whose absence so often makes violence seem like the only alternative. Peacemaking as a virtue is an act of imagination built on long habits of the resolution of differences.... The great problem in the world is that our imagination has been stilled, since it has not made a practice of confronting wrongs so that violence might be avoided. In truth, we must say that the church has too often failed the world by its failure to witness in our own life the kind of conflict necessary to be a community of peace. Without an example of peacemaking community, the world has no alternative but to use violence as a means to settle disputes.” -- Stanley Hauerwas

PEACEABLENESS

"What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money." - Wendell Berry

THE END OF VIOLENCE

"Violence is immensely compelling. Those who witness spectacles of violence can be seduced by its logic even when -- perhaps especially when -- they are morally scandalized by it. Violence is labyrinthine. It turns back on itself in serpentine ways. The paths that seem to exist from its madness so often lead deeper into its maze. Violence is literally a-mazing. The traditional way of resisting evil causes the contagion of evil to spread, perpetrated by those who are most determined to eradicate it. How to resist evil in ways that prevent its spread is now history's most fundamental dilemma..... Both Christianity's scriptural sources and its creedal formulae pivot around a public execution, an act of official violence regarded as legally righteous by the political authorities and as a sacred duty by the religionists. The Christian Scriptures and creeds make the outlandish assertion that because of this public execution the grip of sin has been broken, the human race has been offered a new lease on life and, at the same time, placed in grave peril if it refuses the offer..... By moral effort alone one cannot free oneself from the grip of the sacred and the logic of violence. The logos of conventional culture consists of so pervasive a web of conditioned reflexes that we remain largely oblivious of its influence. If we are to be freed from it, something from outside the cultural mix must break in on us. Structurally and anthropologically speaking, there is only one thing truly outside this matrix: the victim whose expulsion brought the system into being in the first place, the stone rejected by the builders of all culture, the Lamb slain since the foundation of the world.... The spiritual and anthropological revolution set in motion by the crucifixion is a glacial process the driving force of which is the 'Spirit of Truth,' -- the Paraclete (John 16:7-8). It was to be the task of this Spirit of Truth to gradually 'accomplish' historically what was 'accomplished' in the hearts of Jesus' disciples at the crucifixion and in the days that followed it.... From the moment of the crucifixion onward, the Paraclete would be at work in the world, slowly giving the victim's voice the ability to sweep away the logic of the mind, the logic of history, the logic of politics, and whatever contemporary myths might lend violence a momentary aura of righteousness. However formidable the structures of the sacrificial system might be, however beguilingly and discretely these structures might resort to their scapegoating mechanisms, relentlessly the Paraclete would 'show the world how wrong it was,' gradually leading humanity to 'the complete truth' (John 16:8, 13)." - Gil Baillie in Violence Unveiled