New Starting Points in Ecumenical Peace Dialogue: A Mennonite Perspective

********** My theme is the reconfiguration of the debate on the nature of the church's call to peacemaking. I want to identify several ecclesiological questions that, from a Mennonite perspective, bear on this reconfiguration. I begin with a description of the two rival understandings of the church as set forth by Roman Catholic ethicist Lisa Sowle Cahill. (1) Then I will sketch several twentieth-century theological and sociological changes in the understanding of the church by both just-war and pacifist denominations. Cahill has asserted that pacifism and the just-war theory emerge from different theologies of the Personal conversion and a gathered church are expressions of the former view, while a people's church or Volkskirche (alternatively known as territorial church, Landeskirche, or established church), which understands itself as providing ethical norms for the entire society, represents the latter. Cahill goes on to say that just-war thinking is an ethical theory, while pacifist thinking is the embodiment of a conversion experience. The question that I hope will be relevant to the work of the North American Academy of Ecumenists is: To what extent are these classical correlations true today in North America? Do changes in both types of church allow for the conclusion that the peace teaching is no longer a issue? In the Protestant domain, World War I became a turning point in the conciliar churches' understanding of peace. A pacifist critique of the church's social mission had emerged prior to the war on the margins of mainline churches. Much like the anti-war strain in international socialism, the peace impulse in the church was sidelined by fiery nationalism as the war progressed. In the end, members of the body of Christ in one country declared members of the body of Christ in other countries to be their enemies and thus legitimated their killing. P. T Forsyth's The Christian Ethic of War (2) was such a declaration. When the war was over, Christians were revolted at the rending of the body of Christ that had been part-and-parcel of the war's unprecedented carnage. The Stockholm Life and Work Conference of 1925 was an early attempt to address these issues. It held aloft a politically liberal internationalism of the sort that led to the formation of the League of Nations. A more explicitly pacifistic ethic was championed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the 1934 Fano Conference for Practical Christianity. Of such profound significance for the unity of the church and its mission did the organizers consider opposition to modem warfare that they followed Bonhoeffer's lead in making an appeal for an ecumenical council to outlaw warfare. This concern for peace, as an inseparable aspect of the church's unity and mission took a parallel turn at the Faith and Order Conference held in Oxford in 1937. Its motto was Let the church be the church. The essence of this slogan was a plea for the relativizing of the relationship between the people's church and the nation-state. The rising influence of Nazism added urgency to the reassertion of the universality of the body of Christ. In 1948, the first assembly of the World Council of Churches declared, Peace is the will of God. Yet, even after the carnage of another world war, pacifist and just-war churches in the conciliar movement were unable to agree on a peace ethic. In the early 1950's, an initial dialogue occurred in Europe between mainline churches and the historic peace churches. One of the most fruitful recent expressions of dialogue is the series of three U.S. Faith and Order conferences called to probe whether a reappraisal of their positions by both sides might show that the peace teaching was no longer a church-dividing issue. The breadth of denominational participation in these events is noteworthy--from Catholics to Quakers to Lutherans to Pentecostals to Orthodox. (3) My knowledge of developments in the Roman Catholic world is less sure, but here, too, there has been acknowledgement of the scandal of the church's becoming a lesser object of loyalty than is the nation during times of war. …