Rain and the Rhinoceros

One common misunderstanding of Christian pacifism is that it is essentially an idealist position to hold. Perhaps more than anyone else of twentieth century theology, the “Christian realist,” Reinhold Niebuhr, emphasized this point. Another common misunderstanding of Christian pacifism is that it is primarily committed to the absence of conflict and war for the sake of some sort of harmonious state of universal brotherhood. Both of these views fundamentally misunderstand the peace of which Christian pacifists speak. The peace of Christ does not mark the cessation of violence, but in fact exposes the violent character of our lives and the violence embedded in the heart of the society we have built here in the United States. In the gospel of John, Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you, not as the world gives do I give to you” (John 14:27). Rowan Williams observes that this passage suggests that “what is offered and the way it is offered are alike a challenge to the world’s peace” (The Truce of God 67). Contrary to popular interpretation, the Jesus of the gospel narratives is not a particularly “peaceful” figure, at least not in any ordinary sense of the word. In fact, his very presence often stirs up conflict and confrontation, not social harmony and universal brotherhood. The disciples don’t gather around the campfire to sing “Kumbaya,”and they certainly aren’t busy writing up worship songs that talk about how Jesus gives me a peace that makes me feel good inside. The story of Jesus is one of conflict, confrontation, judgment, betrayal, tears, torture, violence, and death. It is an utterly gruesome story and unpeaceful character of Jesus is at the center of it.

The peace of Christ exposes our vision of reality as a falsity, a hoax, an invention of our imagination. Thus, the mistake of Niebuhr is not his “realism,” but his inability to be called into question, to be judged by the real itself: the presence of the risen Christ. The peace of Christ is judgment on the world’s understanding of peace. As Williams puts it, “the price of our sitting down in harmony is the echoing discord of the crucifixion, the memory of the unpeaceful end of an unpeaceful life. Our peace is only authentic, it seems, when the world’s peace has been broken, exposed as false; when the passive consensus favoured by Caiaphas has been so upset that it brings out its latent violence against whatever disturbs it. Jesus’ peace can only happen when such a crisis has been provoked. His own uneasiness, unpeacefulness, is a kind of persistent questioning: just how much of the truth can the world bear without arming itself?” (The Truce of God 71).