Peace—And the Everlasting Arms

EDITORIALS

During the 1966 Church and Society conference in Geneva an enterprising local newspaper sought out six prominent participants and asked, “What is the major obstacle to world peace?” The specially chosen churchmen and scholars, who represented four continents and five religious denominations, offered a variety of answers with an average length of about one hundred words. The major obstacles the six cited were: the division between rich and poor nations; national pride leading to selfishness; the economic bondage of emergent nations; deficient realization of human brotherhood; lack of concern for the total welfare of mankind; difference in understanding between the current ideologies.

There is a great deal of truth in these points, for the Christian who is not actively concerned about the world’s disparities has an imperfect grasp of the Gospel. But that these were the answers given to this particular question is depressing, for it shows how curiously circumscribed is the modern interpretation of peace. One of the six conferees mentioned the name of God—as a sort of wispy auxiliary force—but otherwise the responses would have received the enthusiastic imprimatur of any assembly of decent godless folk.

Peace is a word that seems to have been largely appropriated by the world, and given the world’s own stamp, so that it is taken largely to describe an absence of conflict. In the process its image has been somewhat tarnished, for it has been pressed into service to boost dubious causes: the kind of unruly anti-war demonstration to which we have become accustomed has no necessary connection with the things that belong unto our peace. Unless, that is, militant pacifism is accompanied not only by individual repentance for each marcher’s part in the collective guilt for war, but also by an acknowledgment that basically the heart of man is desperately wicked. War, after all, is merely one manifestation of man’s attempt to live out his life without the God who can give us that true peace which is a precondition of peace between man and man. We know all too well that the absence of war does not mean the presence of peace.

Even the Prague-based Christian Peace Conference shows a deficient understanding of peace. Although to its credit the organization does not wait till hostilities come before protesting against war but has the pursuit of peace as its very reason for being, its contribution is diminished by a certain lack of political disinterestedness. In addition to that, however, anyone who has listened to the CPC’s acrimonious sessions or has followed its bitter domestic squabbles is likely to be conscious of a ludicrously delimited approach to “peace.”

The Christian ought not to settle for an inadequate conception of peace. “A mental or spiritual state in which there is freedom from that which is disquieting …”—this definition leaves a negative and unsatisfying impression. Moreover, peace as the world knows it is a relative term. We can be free of war but have our cities disrupted by industrial strife and our streets and parks made dangerous by lurking violence. Our lives are assailed by pressures and anxieties, and Matthew Arnold’s world-weary character is familiar to us:

Her life was turning, turning,

In mazes of heat and sound,

But for peace her soul was yearning …

The believer, like David, has need of a strong refuge from “the pride of man and the strife of tongues” (Ps. 31:20). This does not mean a retreat into the cloisters in an attempt to keep ourselves unspotted from the world till the coming crowning day. It means being active in the market place, yet with the quiet heart that comes from “seeing Him who is invisible.”

Such peace is positive and many-sided. The Old Testament shalom (“completeness,” “soundness,” “wholeness,”) is still common usage among Semitic peoples. The word can denote the ideal condition of neighborliness (Ps. 28:3) and the mark of wellbeing and security (Eccles. 3:8). Isaiah points it out as the reward of a God-stayed mind (26:3), and the opposite of what the wicked can expect (48:22). It is commended by Zechariah (8:16) in association with honest dealing and true justice, and it figures prominently in the description of the coming Messiah (Isa. 9:6).

The New Testament continues and adds to these views of peace. The Greek word eirene is used of the result of God’s forgiveness (Phil. 4:7); of the ideal relation with one’s brother (2 Cor. 13:11), to bring which was part of Christ’s reconciling mission; and of Christ himself (Eph. 2:14 ff.).

The bringing of peace summarizes the gospel message (Acts 10:36). Peace is a mark of serenity (John 14:27) to be sought after (Heb. 12:14). It is one of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22); will give benefit to those who practice it both now (Ja. 3:18) and at the Parousia (Rom. 2:10); and is the opposite of disorder or confusion (1 Cor. 14:33).

The question asked by the Swiss newspaper cited earlier ought to have elicited another: “What is world peace?” Humanly speaking it is an unrealistic concept when what many would settle for would be “to increase the probability of a world that minimizes the incentives for armed, violent solutions to conflict situations.” The Bible, on the other hand, has made it clear that the world will know no peace until the return of the Prince of Peace.

Until that time, peace properly understood does not come other than individually. Last century a Russian youth was summoned before a czarist court for his refusal to be drafted. Pleading his own case, he defended himself by quoting passages from the Gospels. The judge intervened: “But, my son, that is the Kingdom of Heaven, and it has not come yet.” “Your honor,” replied the young man, “it may not have come for you, but it has come for me.”

Come to the word peace on the world’s terms and we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp: not only is it a shadowy truncated goal, but it is in any case unattainable. Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of God. The world, which cannot give or understand it, cannot take it away. The Christian who knows that true peace has come for him is charged to tell others that it may come for them too, through Christ, who alone is our Peace.

The Scrutiny Of Dissent

The following prayer by Alexander Solzhenitsyn appeared in 1966 in Vestnik, a publication of the Russian Student Movement, and was reprinted in the April, 1971, issue of Religion in Communist Dominated Areas:

How easy it is for me to live with You, Lord! How easy it is for me to believe in you! When my thoughts get stuck or my mind collapses, when the cleverest people see no further than this evening and do not know what must be done tomorrow, You send down to me clear confidence that You exist and that You will ensure that not all the ways of goodness are blocked.

From the summit of earthly fame I look round with wonder at that road through hopelessness to this point, from which even I have been able to shed abroad among men the refulgence of Your glory.

And You will grant me to express this as much as is necessary. And insofar as I am not able to do it, that means You have allotted this to others.

An incident last month gave Solzhenitsyn even more reason to be thankful that he can turn to God. The Nobel prize-winning novelist, whose works have set him at odds with Soviet authorities, said that secret police raided his country residence and assaulted a friend who discovered them. The charges were contained in a letter of complaint Solzhenitsyn wrote to the chief of Soviet security police. Copies were circulated in Moscow and made available to Western newsmen.

This was but the latest of a long series of harassments, according to Solzhenitsyn. The letter declared, “For many years I have borne in silence the lawlessness of your employees, the inspection of all my correspondence, the confiscation of half of it.” He cited “the search of the homes and the official and administrative persecution of my correspondents, the spying around my house, the shadowing of visitors, the tapping of telephone conversations, the drilling of holes in ceilings, the placing of recording apparatus in my city apartment and at my cottage, and a persistent slander campaign against me from speakers’ platforms when they are offered to employees of your ministry.”

Such surveillance is not, of course, peculiar to the Soviet Union or to Communist countries. But in a democratic society, these allegations from a respected citizen would—at the very least—be reason enough to initiate a public court battle, which in turn could muster enough public sentiment to topple an elected government. In his courageous letter, Solzhenitsyn challenged the Soviet police chief to allow a similar resolution of the case: “I demand from you, Citizen Minister, the public identification of the robbers, their punishment as criminals, and an explanation of this incident.” We shall see.

In A Black Hole

The Community Sex Information and Education Service Inc. operates a Manhattan answering service for people who haven’t read—or haven’t wanted to buy—Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex—But Were Afraid to Ask. Founded by nurse-psychologist Ann Welbourne, the service is staffed by ten paid, trained personnel in sociology and psychology, with twenty-five trained volunteers answering the telephones from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The purpose, says nurse Welbourne, is to “dispel myths with facts.” “Our basic philosophy is to be non-judgmental; it’s usually a matter of just giving information.” Since its inception two months ago, the number of calls has doubled to more than 160 a day.

This exemplifies the twentieth century’s obsession with “fact”; this label is used for those things regarded as truth and reality because they are more or less directly perceived. Man analyzes and categorizes himself into organs and complexes, and disregards the spiritual, transcendent aspect of his nature. C. S. Lewis in The Pilgrim’s Regress graphically describes this phenomenon. John, in intellectual and spiritual prison, looks around in terror at his fellow prisoners. “A woman was seated near but he did not know it was a woman, because, through the face, he saw the skull and through that the brains and the passages of the nose, and the larynx, and the saliva moving in the glands and the blood in the veins: and lower down the lungs panting like sponges, and the liver and the intestines like a coil of snakes. And when he averted his eyes from her they fell on an old man, and this was worse for the old man had a cancer. And when John sat down and drooped his head, not to see the horrors, he saw only the working of his own inwards.”

Preoccupation with sensory data leads to blindness; no longer can man see man as anything but a physiological animal. Even the wonder at man’s biological intricacies is gone. In trying to free himself through “fact” man has thrown himself into a black hole: “Hence all their thinking has ended in futility, and their misguided minds are plunged in darkness.”

Bernadette Devlin: Mother And Maverick

Bernadette Devlin is passionately concerned for humanity, particularly that section of it to be found in her own parliamentary constituency of Mid-Ulster. “My public,” she calls them, “for whom I haven’t done miracles, freed the people, produced civil rights, or lived up to the image of St. Bernadette.” That image was in the eyes of some further tarnished last month when the unmarried twenty-four-year-old gave birth to a daughter. The inevitable correspondence in the Times of London disclosed a fair amount of sympathy for her, with one eminent Englishman dryly remarking that while she might be the first unmarried mother in the House, that venerable building may have seen some unmarried fathers.

That Miss Devlin is a very independent young lady indeed is seen in more than her refusal to consider abortion, name the father of her child, or have it adopted. On Northern Ireland she has very definite views, and not always those we might expect, as can be seen in her autobiography, The Price of My Soul (Vintage Books, $1.95). Brought up a Roman Catholic of humble origin, she is convinced that “there are very few Christians in Northern Ireland,” the place where people hate each other in the name of Jesus Christ. “Among the best traitors Ireland has ever had,” she declares, “Mother Church ranks at the very top, a massive obstacle in the path to equality and freedom.” Similar barbed shafts are sent winging toward “the Reverend Ian.” Miss Devlin is convinced that Dr. Paisley dislikes socialism more than popery, and loves power best of all. She holds, not without justification, that both Catholic and Protestant churches should long ago have been campaigning for the dignity of the people and the breakdown of sectarianism in the province. And they did nothing.

About herself she explodes some fallacies. In 1968 she grew out of Republicanism, with its dream of an unpartitioned Ireland, and took to “concern for nonpolitical social justice.” She shrewdly refuses to think of Ulster’s troubles as Catholic versus Protestant when unemployment in places seldom falls below 10 per cent and half the houses lack at least one basic amenity.

But neither, Miss Devlin protests, is she a Communist; she and her colleagues, in fact, pushed the Communists out of the civil-rights movement because they were “as reactionary as the Unionists.” Life, she insists, has made them socialists: “what’s so frightening about being left—if it’s the only way to get justice?” It is to some a cogent argument. She tells of a taxi driver’s comment as he took her one day to the British legislature: that only two honest people had ever entered the building—herself and Guy Fawkes.

Miss Devlin may have a certain capacity for selectivity and self-deception, and may too have made maximum mileage out of the uncouth-urchin-takes-Westminster-by-storm image. But repudiation of Republicanism and Communism, and championing of social justice for its own sake, might suggest an honesty and singlemindedness one finds sometimes in political mavericks who owe nothing to a city hall that deals in prices but not souls. Bernadette Devlin is spectacularly in rebellion against the Church because the Church was conspicuously not in rebellion against the status quo in Ulster. In that fact is indictment of an immorality with far wider implications than that leveled against Miss Devlin. It might throw up an uncomfortable thought for Christians everywhere to ponder.

Missionaries And The Devalued Dollar

One result of the President’s economic policy that all Christians should keep in mind is its effect upon missionaries. These men and women serve as our representatives, and we send them dollars to enable them to live and to minister. But now in many countries their dollars will be exchanged into a smaller amount of the local currency than before. Americans in government and commercial employment abroad are generally paid high enough salaries that the dollar devaluation will cause them little hardship. This is not the case with many missionaries.

In Japan, for example, where many Americans are representing Christ on behalf of us, a dollar income that bought just enough yen to pay for necessities now won’t buy as many yen. Since Japanese rents and prices haven’t gone down, a missionary may suffer hardship if his income remains the same.

Christians and congregations should begin sending more funds to the mission societies with which they deal for transmittal, whenever officially permitted, to those overseas who have been adversely affected by the de facto devaluation of the dollar. Instead of indulging in self-pity over the supposed long-range hardships that some of us may think are imposed upon us by the new policies, let us consider the immediate and obvious effect upon those who represent us on minimal incomes in the spreading of the Good News abroad.

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