Religion, war and peace -A Christian contribution to an interfaith event

Last night, I was one of the speakers at a Voices of Faith event where a Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist also presented their own takes on the topic. I used a prezi to navigate through the 15 minute presentation. I thought I'd give a write-through of the content (bearing in mind I had to abbreviate my presentation to fit into the time available so this is a filled-out version with a bit more background and explanation in it. the prezi is here.

First off 

[dove image made up of weapons' silhouettes), a note that this approach to war and peace is my own reading of the Christian tradition, it is also one that takes a rather different 'tack' to what might be expected in the interests of trying to make a proposal which could be more than a simple exposition of a Christian 'take' but rather something that invokes the nature of Ultimate Reality to invite us to consider how our respective faiths construe that in relation to the issue of violence. So I'm interested not just to give a basic exposition of Christian scriptures and framing them within the development of Christian thinking over the following centuries, but rather to seek something that opens out what I take to be the theological deep-structure in relation to human history.

Christmas Truce 

 [Picture of WW1 Christmas Truce handshake with swapped soldierly parapernalia]. Christmas Eve 2014 sees the 100th anniversary of one of the most remarkable events in the history of warfare: the unofficial Christmas truces of 1914. They commonly began with German soldiers and officers putting up Christmas trees, shouting or writing Christmas greetings, and singing songs recognisable to their British counterparts such as Stille Nacht (Silent Night). From these beginnings troops met in no-man’s land to bury their dead, exchange gifts and souvenirs, share festive food and drink, give cigarettes and cigars, sing and entertain each other, swap names and addresses, conduct joint Christian services, and even, it is rumoured, to play football. These were not isolated incidents but were widespread right down the front from the North Sea to Switzerland, made possible in part by shared traditions of Christian celebration. It was a hopeful moment of recognition of common humanity and a rejection of the cruelty of industrialised warfare pursued by rulers in a deadly game of global imperial competition for territories and resources. It was quashed by orders backed by threats, and by replacing troops with men ‘untainted’ by the Truce (including soldiers from the Empire who didn’t share a tradition of celebrating Christmas).

WW1 was a war arising from Imperial ambitions clashing -principally those of Germany on the one hand and Britain and France on the other. It was precipitated by a failure of the deterrence supposedly offered by huge military alliances and offers of mutual aid in literal co-belligerence. At the heart of it were supposedly Christian nations -the next picture frame focuses on the German troops' belt buckle with the words "Gott mit Uns" which means 'God with us' and while the British didn't have a direct equivalent in terms of clothing it is clear that many British propagandists and opinion-formers held a similar view -that God was keen for the British to win because they were the guardians of Christian civilisation against German barbarism. The mirroring of each others' official 'theologies' of war and nationhood is tragic and would be laughable if it weren't what actually happened with such dire consequences. Obviously, they couldn't both be right.

My question in this forum is how they ('we') arrived there? How did two supposedly Christian countries both with good civilisational credentials end up demonising each other and slaughtering one another and claiming it was God's will? Worse yet, we should recognise it's not just Christians implicated in this. In an interfaith understanding event, we should also understand that troops on both sides held different faiths and also secular and atheist views. On the British side, one of the means to put a stop to the informal truces at Christmas in 1914 was to draft in other-faith troops from parts of the Empire that didn't share the Christian sentimentality about Christmas.

A Myth and a riposte [picture of an Ancient Near Eastern deity and a piece of art depicting a visual interpretation of the seven days of Genesis 1-2:4]. Here I press on into the unusual turn of my exposition, looking at something more ancient that most of our religious traditions.

There were two ways of viewing humanity in relation to our purposes on earth and relatedness to deity in the Ancient Near East (ANE). Both deal with origins, ostensibly: chaos and order; what is the human place in the cosmos; what are we humans here to do; what is authority in human affairs? But each have a rather different message for us as humans.

Ancient Near Easter myths:

[picture of ANE deity in full armour holding thunderbolts] though these varied in characters and the detail of plot lines, they tend to tell stories which indicate that order is created out of chaos by the might of the gods and that order is establish and maintained by violent actions. Human beings are, in this kind of schema, made out of the offal of the slaughtered defeated god (who represents chaos) and are made in order to do the work that the gods don't want to be bothered with. So we're getting a picture of humans not being high in the value and dignity stakes -we're almost afterthoughts made from disrespected  materials to slave for the gods and their representatives on earth (the kings and priests). For our purposes though, we should note that the created order is violently produced: ultimate reality is violent, 'agonistic'.

Genesis 1-2:4

[picture of seven thin panels hinting at the 7 days of creation] seems (to me) to be telling a counter-story emphasising that creation is founded in an original peace rather than violence, and that we humans have a dignity since we all image God -a view which automatically flattens hierarchy and deligitimises kingly and priestly claims of privilege. We are also created for rest as well as to participate in the work of God.

So there are two world views on offer, and I would argue that these are still a fundamental choice set before us. Do we believe ultimately reality is about love, peace, co-operation, dignity and so on or do we believe it is ultimately about self-assertion, violence, hierarchy, winners and losers. Every time we claim that there is no choice but to do violence, we are in effect asserting that ultimate reality is about violence rather than co-operation: division rather than relationship.

Moving from ANE to Jesus

 [picture of figure on cross with dove alongside a sunrise photo], we consider the specifically Christian dimension.

[focus on picture of figure on cross offering a dove] Jesus's teaching is heavy with love of neighbour, love of enemies, forgiveness. His ministry is full of reaching out to the despised and the hated, and his last earthly week is full of choosing not to offer violence but rather to absorb the hatred and violence offered. For these reasons the church of the first three to four centuries consistently teaches that Christians may not be involved in violence.

There occurs in the fourth century a growing rapprochement of the Roman Empire with its Christian minority which eventually leads some Christian theologians developing just war theory

[see green table labelled 'Just War Theory'] which sought to allow Christians to participate in the defense of civilisation while maintaining moral limits and building in mitigations. This is consolidated by the emperor Constantine who supposedly has a vision [see picture of sunrise]

probably prompted by a sun-halo like in the picture. But overlaid by hearing a voice

[close in on next picture -red cross and words]  saying in hoc [signo] vinces -'Conquer by this sign'. Constantine then put the sign of the cross on his army's armour and went on to win the battle. He politically then makes Christianity a licit religion and sets the Roman Empire on a course to absorb Christianity and the Church to legitimise the Empire (and its violence).

The next thing we know on this trajectory is that not only is the Church giving comfort for the doing of limited violence but developing a holy war theology which creates the possibility of crusades -violence as a way to extend the church's mission. By this point it becomes obvious that the limited allowance of deadly collective violence by the just war theory was indeed the top of a slippery slope into warfare as an instrument of policy for the church. In effect overturning the teaching and example of Christ. And that is how we end up with troops killing and maiming each other each side in the name of Christ, justice and 'peace'. Truly, the decision to offer any kind of justification for violence is likely to be increasingly loosened in scope and ways are found to express reasons for taking up arms in terms that look like they might be 'just'.

On not feeding the four horsemen.

[Painting of the four horsemen of the apocalypse]. The ANE creation myth is essentially a myth of redemptive violence: a way of proposing that violence is what effects important change and brings about good, the goodies must employ violence to make sure that their 'good' values prosper and prevail. It is a myth that is propagated in many -most- Hollywood films. It encourages us to think that means are not necessarily directly or inherently related to ends; that we can create good by doing harm.

Our societies are held captive by the Myth of redemptive violence. The Judeo-Christian traditions question that. Jesus' teaching very strongly undermines it. Our faiths have been co-opted by the MRV and our imaginations colonised by it. We must stop sanctioning violence, full stop. Only then will we be able to stimulate imaginations to envisage solving problems peacefully. Only then will we be committed enough to begin to tear down the automatic justifications and misleading chains of reasoning fed by the relentless MRV-form narratives spilling out of the media. 

If we allow ourselves to think that violence could sometimes be justified, very soon we will find that we are defending horrors such as firebombing, dropping nuclear bombs, waterboarding, drones ... the list will grow and grow.