“Possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing,” wrote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Meaning: when you can’t see a way forward for yourself or for the world, what you need is a sense that something new can happen, and that another life is possible.
Welcome to Plough’s Possibilities.
The World Is at War
The wars that have dominated the first half of the 2020s show no sign of stopping.
War breaks out in the Middle East. US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran killed the country’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28. Since then, conflict has continued across the region.
The U.S. and Israeli militaries pounded Iran and its allies for a third day on Monday as the widening attacks across the Middle East drew in more players and risked spiraling into a full-blown regional war.
The Ukraine war has entered its fifth year. Ukrainian diplomat Dmytro Kuleba writes in a symposium for the New Statesman:
Like nature, war is a merciless teacher – not only of individuals, but of entire nations. The Ukrainian people have learned not to give up, even as hope wears thin.
“Open war” breaks out between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Pakistan bombed major cities in Afghanistan [on Friday, February 27], including the capital Kabul, with Islamabad's defense minister declaring the neighbors at “open war” following months of tit-for-tat clashes.
The war in Gaza drags on:
Progress in the Gaza peace plan has stalled over disagreements on how Hamas should be disarmed, with Israel threatening to go back to full-scale war if the condition is not carried out quickly.
Does War Even Work?
Recently, the Financial Times’ columnist Janan Ganesh argued that, under modern conditions, land wars are futile:
When did a major state last unambiguously win a land war on a significant scale? …
The world seems to be living through a trend that, if it holds, could scarcely be more profound: the increasing ineffectiveness of war. There is a pattern of military failure, or at least frustration, which covers democratic aggressors and autocratic ones, wars close to home and wars on distant continents, wars against other sovereign states and wars against irregular forces.
What About Pacifism?
Pacifism is a commitment to peace and opposition to war.
Christian pacifism is a tradition that goes back right to the first Christians, including the Church Father Justin Martyr.
We ourselves were well conversant with war, murder and everything evil, but all of us throughout the whole wide earth have traded in our weapons of war. We have exchanged our swords for plowshares, our spears for farm tools.… Now we cultivate the reverence of God, justice, kindness, faith, and the expectation of the future given us through the Crucified One. (Dialogue with Trypho, 110)
A contemporary advocate of Christian pacifism, Stanley Hauerwas, tells Plough that pacifism is a way of life that requires community:
As a Christian committed to nonviolence, I often say that I don’t have a foreign policy because I’m not a state. The very assumption that I have to know how to find a solution to the war in Ukraine is already a set of presumptions that misdescribe what it means to be nonviolent.… We need to be a people that witnesses to the God who gives us an alternative to war, and that alternative is us.
In our pages, William Fleeson writes about a pacifist army chaplain in Ukraine:
Mykola Korobtsov … signed up to serve as a military chaplain immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor in February 2022.… For four years, he has made deliveries, prayed prayers, preached sermons – in short, everything necessary to meet the needs of soldiers and civilians in the area.
Everything, that is, except bear arms himself.
For The Point, Plough editor Peter Mommsen points to Christ’s pacifism:
At the heart of Christian pacifism is imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ. To fulfill his mission, the New Testament suggests, Jesus chose a defenseless path that took him unresistingly to torture and execution; likewise, his disciples are to “deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Jesus’s words from the three synoptic Gospels). Those who claim to follow Jesus, says the First Letter of John, “ought to walk in the same way he walked.” We’re to imitate a God who, despite his omnipotence, chose to overcome evil not through force but through a radically vulnerable form of love.
Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold, argues that pacifism is more than just not killing:
If we really want peace, we must represent it in all areas of life. We cannot injure love in any way or for any reason. So we cannot kill anyone; we cannot harm anyone economically; we cannot take part in a system that establishes lower standards of living for manual workers than for academics. We must spurn anything that breeds hatred or oppression.
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Robert Johansen, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Peace Studies at Notre Dame University, responds to our interview with Hauerwas:
I feel renewed commitment to following Jesus’s nonviolence after reading this interview.… I agree that with Hauerwas Christians “cannot kill,” and that certainly following Jesus’ way of nonviolent love is more important for Christians than to follow the demands of any state’s foreign policy. However, could not Christians support a world policy if it aimed to do justice and love mercy? Indeed, if such a policy could be formulated – I believe it can – could not Christians endorse measures for doing justice and loving kindness as a way of walking humbly with God? Couldn’t they support a non-killing world policy even though they are not a state, and without diluting their commitment to nonviolence?...
If some Christians endorsed such a policy while simultaneously remaining true to Jesus’ way of loving and forgiving rather than killing at the request of Caesar, their policy endorsement need not interfere with faithfully following the Messiah. On the contrary, such Christians might more fully manifest that they “are the alternative to war.”
Do you have any comments or questions – or new possibilities? Send them our way:
Is there an avenue for giving money to help support Christian pacifist efforts in war zones?