Wednesday, February 8, 2017
The Mennonite Catholic who puts pacifism in action
Instead
of thinking about how to justify war, theologian Gerald Schlabach says,
the church should do everything it can to ensure that violence is a
last resort.
Gerald
Schlabach first started thinking about peace and violence in the
mid-1980s. He and his wife worked for the Mennonite Central Committee in
Nicaragua during a time of ongoing civil revolution. A member of the
Mennonite church at the time, he was tasked with figuring out how the
historically pacifist church should respond to the violence.
"This
was a situation where a lot of Christians had said, 'Our backs are
against the wall. We need to resist the tyranny of the Somoza
dictatorship (known for their brutality and human rights violations)
through violent revolution,'" he explains. "And here I am, 27 years old
and tasked with speaking up for nonviolence."
The
experience convinced Schlabach that nonviolence is always a worthwhile
goal, even if violence seems neverending. There are always people
willing to respond with violence but never enough peacemakers.
When
asked if war is ever justified, Schlabach says, "I hate that question.
If you start asking if there's ever any exceptional cases where violence
is justified, then the exception starts to become the rule. We have to
do less work on justifying the violence and more work on making sure we
have the skills to make active nonviolence our first, second, and 15th
resort."
In 2004 Schlabach joined the Catholic Church and
became, as he describes it, a "Mennonite Catholic." Part of bridging
these two identities for an ethicist meant promoting dialogue between
the faiths' visions of peace and justice. The Roman Catholic tradition
holds the idea of a "just war"--the belief that under some circumstances
violence is justified. On the other hand, Mennonites are among a group
of "historic peace churches" that believe violence is immoral, no matter
the situation. Their ideas may seem opposed, but Schlabach hopes they
will find some common ground in their shared practices.
What are the origins of just war theory?
There's
a strong case to be made that the Christians in the first centuries
were pacifists--people with a strong opposition to bloodshed of any kind
and who were outside of the power structure. But that all changed in
the fourth century under Constantine, and Christians have been debating
the issue ever since.
One way to think about just war
theory is as a kind of pastoral counseling. Christians were now in the
room where the political decisions were being made, so they had to
decide how to react. And just war theory was the result. The charitable
interpretation is that Christians now had to determine how to give
counsel to political leaders.
These were people who had
some level of commitment to their faith, but they weren't ideal
Christians and, as government leaders, had a different set of moral
demands placed upon them. People who are very skeptical of the just war
theory would say that the church went to bed with the state and sold out
on Jesus.
People started asking questions: Is it ever OK
to use violence? Is it ever OK to kill? If so, under what circumstances?
But when you start asking those questions, it becomes almost a zero-sum
game. Any time you say, "Well, maybe under these exceptional
circumstances . . ." you're already justifying war rather than nurturing
the social conditions that cause peace.
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