Peace

Whitley College School of Ministry: Peaceful People, Peaceful Church, Peaceful World

SOM 2015What does it mean to be agents of peace in a world of conflict?

Each year, my school, Whitley College, runs a School of Ministry. This year’s School – which is happening on 13–14 July – provides an opportunity to hear from two guest teachers who have worked in the area of peace making and peace building, and to reflect together on what it means ‘to become peaceful people, in peaceful churches, for a peaceful world’.

The two guests are Dr David R. Brubaker (Associate Professor of Organizational Studies, Eastern Mennonite University) and Dr Maung Maung Yin (The Vice Principal of Myanmar Institute of Theology and the inaugural Director of the Peace Studies Centre).

Program

Program

 

REGISTRATION FEE 

  • Full registration – $200 (Includes all meals and up to 2 nights accommodation* in the Residential College)
  • Non-residential registration – $135 (Includes all lunches and dinners)
  • Ordination Candidates – $85 (Includes all meals and up to 2 nights accommodation* in the Residential College)

* Monday and Tuesday night bed and breakfast accommodation

FURTHER INFORMATION

For further information, download the flyer here.

Please direct enquiries to Dorothy Morgan via email or phone 03 9340 8100

REGISTRATION

Please register before Monday, 6 July 2015.

Book online (requires credit card) or download the registration form.

Auckland’s 1960s to Cairo’s 2011

Otago University’s National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies is hosting a public seminar by theologian and activist George Armstrong on the theme Auckland’s 1960s to Cairo’s 2011: A Half Century in the Struggle of Peoples for Peace with Justice.

When: Wednesday 23 February 2011, 12.00-1.30pm

Where: Commerce 2.20

According to the blurb, the Rev Dr George Armstrong (PhD, Princeton) came from Dunedin to Auckland in the 1960s and found himself shuttled between the Anglican Church and the New Zealand State, between Christianity and secularity. He came as lecturer in Systematic Theology to St John’s College and has been there – off and on – ever since. He has worked as a controversial and occasionally high-profile theologian in Maori, Pakeha, and Pacific sectors of Church and Society from the parochial to the global. He became briefly a public figure through the 1970s as a founder of the Auckland and New Zealand “Peace Squadrons”, flotillas of small boats who eventually made nuclear warship visits to New Zealand impossible. (The government – and eventually politicians of all stripes – outlawed them.)

James Will on the practice and praxis of peace

Christology of peace‘If incomplete and ideologically distorted persons nevertheless have the dignity of participation with their Creator in the preservation and completion of the creation, then praxis is a necessary dimension of theology. But praxis must not be misunderstood as practice. Practice has come to mean the use of external means to attain a theoretically defined end. It suggests that finite and sinful persons may so understand the meaning of God’s peace as to be able to devise economic, political, diplomatic, and even military means to attain it. The end of peace is thought to be a transcendent value that appropriate external means may effect. Praxis, on the other hand, is a dialectical process of internally related events from which a result dynamically emerges. Given the finite and ideological character of our preconceptions of peace, they cannot be treated as sufficient definitions of an eternal value to guide our practice. Rather, we need a praxis; that is, peace must be allowed to emerge from a dialogical and dialectical process that may continuously correct our ideological tendencies. Praxis is thus a process of struggle, negotiation, and dialogue toward a genuinely voluntary consensus’. – James E. Will, A Christology of Peace (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989), 24–5.

Pacifism and War: Some Resources [Updated]

pacifismI’m trying to put together a list of responsible books/essays that explore theologically questions of Christian pacifism and Christian attitudes to war, and would be keen to hear of such that others have found helpful (and, if possible, why). Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

Wilma A. Bailey, “You shall not kill” or “You shall not murder”?: The Assault on a Biblical Text (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2005).

Roland H. Bainton, Christian Attitudes Towards War and Peace: A Historical Survey and Critical Re-evaluation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1960).

Oliver R. Barclay, ed., Pacifism and War (When Christians Disagree) (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1984).

Clive Barrett, ed., Peace Together: A Vision of Christian Pacifism (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1987).

Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Man of Vision, Man of Courage (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

Robert W. Brimlow, What About Hitler?: Wrestling with Jesus’s Call to Nonviolence in an Evil World (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006).

Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-45: Defining of a Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1980).

*David L. Clough and Brian Stiltner, Faith and Force: A Christian Debate About War (Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2007).

Robert G. Clouse, ed., War: Four Christian Views (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1981).

James Denney, War and the Fear of God (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916).

Kim Fabricius, Ten Propositions on Peace and War (with a postscript)

Kim Fabricius, Ten Stations on My Way to Christian Pacifism

Gabriella Fiori, Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography (trans. J.R. Berrigan; Athens/London: University of Georgia Press, 1989).

Peter T. Forsyth, The Christian Ethic of War (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1916).

Peter T. Forsyth, The Justification of God: Lectures for War-Time on a Christian Theodicy (London: Independent Press, 1957).

*Stanley Hauerwas, Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).

Stanley Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).

Stanley Hauerwas, September 11: A Pacifist Response. From remarks given at the University of Virginia, October 1, 2001.

Stanley Hauerwas, ‘No, This War Would Not Be Moral’, in Time (3 March, 2003).

Stanley Hauerwas and Paul Griffiths, ‘War, Peace & Jean Bethke Elshtain’, in First Things (October, 2003).

Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004).

Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness (Downers Grove: IVP, 2008).

Eberhard Jüngel, Christ, Justice and Peace: Toward a Theology of the State in Dialogue with the Barmen Declaration (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992).

Geoffrey A. Studdert Kennedy, Rough Rhymes of a Padre (Toronto: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918).

Geoffrey A. Studdert Kennedy, After War, Is Faith Possible?: The Life and Message of Geoffrey “Woodbine Willie” Studdert Kennedy (ed. Kerry Walters; Eugene: Cascade, 2008). [Reviewed here]

Jean Lasserre, War and the Gospel (London: James Clarke, 1962).

Philip Matthews and David Neville, ‘C.S. Lewis and Christian Pacifism’ in Faith and Freedom: Christian Ethics in a Pluralist Culture (Hindmarsh: ATF Press, 2004), 205-16.

Paul O’Donnell and Stanley Hauerwas, A Pacifist’s Look at Memorial Day: Duke University Divinity professor Stanley Hauerwas on nonviolence, Iraq and killing Hitler.

Oliver O’Donovan, In Pursuit of a Christian View of War (Bramcotte Notts: Grove Books, 1977).

*Oliver O’Donovan, The Just War Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

George Orwell, ‘Pacifism and the War’, Partisan Review August-September (1942).

Paul Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience (Durham: Duke University Press, 1968).

Paul Ramsey, The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility (Lanham/Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

Alan Ruston, ‘Protestant Nonconformist Attitudes towards the First World War’, in Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century (ed. Alan P. F. Sell and Anthony R. Cross; Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2003), 240-263. [The book is reviewed here]

*W. J. Sheils, ed., The Church and War: Papers read at the Twenty-first Summer Meeting and the Twenty-second Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983).

Ronald J. Sider, Christ and Violence (Kitchener: Herald Press, 1979).

*Glen H. Stassen, ed., Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2008).

John Stott, ed., The Year 2000AD (London: Marshalls, 1983), 27-71.

John Stott, Issues Facing Christians Today: New Perspectives on Social and Moral Dilemmas (London: William Collins Sons & Co., 1990), 82-112.

Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics Volume 2: Politics (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1979).

Miroslav Volf, ‘Christianity and Violence’ (A paper presented at the Boardman Lectureship in Christian Ethics, Boardman Lecture XXXVIII, University of Pennsylvania, 1 March, 2002).

Alan Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform? War, Peace and the English Churches, 1900-1945 (London: SCM Press, 1986).

*John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (Scottdale/Kitchener: Herald Press, 1971).

John Howard Yoder, When War is Unjust: Being Honest in Just-War Thinking (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984).

John Howard Yoder et al., What Would You Do?: A Serious Answer to a Standard Question (Scottsdale/Kitchener: Herald Press, 1983).

John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution (ed. Theodore J. Koontz and Andy Alexis-Baker; Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009).

Supplementary Readings

Terry Eagleton, ‘Isaiah Berlin and Richard Hoggart’ in Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others (London/New York: Verso, 2003), 104-8.

What Christ gives

There’s few things quite like a good dose of Luther to help one hear afresh that word which kills in order to make alive. Here’s two passages that I’ve been reflecting on today:

‘Christ gives grace and peace, not as the apostles did, by preaching the Gospel, but as its Author and Creator. The Father creates and gives life, grace, peace, etc.; the Son creates and gives the very same things. To give grace, peace, eternal life, the forgiveness of sins, justification, life, and deliverance from death and the devil—these are the works, not of any creature but only of the Divine Majesty. The angels can neither create these things nor grant them. Therefore these works belong only to the glory of the sovereign Majesty, the Maker of all things’. – Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 26: Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 1-4 (Edited by Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald and Helmut T. Lehmann; Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 31.

‘Christ, however, declares here: “Let it be your one concern to come to Me and to have the grace to hold, to believe, and to be sure in your heart that I was sent into the world for your sake, that I carried out the will of My Father and was sacrificed for your atonement, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, and bore all punishment for you. If you believe this, do not fear. I do not want to be your judge, executioner, or jailer, but your Savior and Mediator, yes, your kind, loving Brother and good Friend. But you must abandon your work-righteousness and remain with Me in firm faith.” – Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 23: Sermons on the Gospel of St. John: Chapters 6-8 (Edited by Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald and Helmut T. Lehmann; Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 58.

Ah! Good news!