Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

Foreword

Introduction and acknowledgments

1 War in the twenty-first century

2 The Christian and war

3 Just War on Terror?

4 Intervening in conflict – the military way

5 Power and weakness

6 Intervening in armed conflict – the non-military way

7 Relational peace-building

8 Be reconciled

9 Effective Christian engagement in twenty-first-century conflict

Foreword

The first decade of the twenty-first century has stubbornly refused to live up to the hope and promise that we humans wishfully invest in the future. One could be forgiven for caricaturing the decade as a final tour of some colonial rock band, where our wayward past comes back to haunt us. Previous tours of the Helmand River Valley in the late nineteenth century are re-enacted by the descendants of the same British regiments and tribal warriors with the same tragic consequences. Mesopotamia circa 1920s is revisited in all its complexity as a new generation adds its blood to the sands of Basra.

This generation is as burdened by the wounds of history and as haunted by its ancestral voices as any that has gone before. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ongoing drama of picking up the pieces of the collapse of the European and Ottoman Empires, which dominates the geopolitics of the twentieth century.

Ninety years after the beginning of the end of this imperial age in the fields of the Somme and the cliff s of Gallipoli, the conflicts of today are still shaped by its terrible legacy: arbitrary boundaries, ethnic divisions manipulated to maintain power, the plundering of a region’s natural resources and the lingering humiliation of whole peoples. Such an inheritance continues to enrage those who wage war from the ethnic strife of the Great Lakes of Africa to the terror visited on the streets of London.

War is the constant background noise we confront only when this ‘binge’ violence is forced on us through its worst atrocities. Yet its effect in shaping our culture and the role of faith in our society is huge. The religiously sanctioned horror experienced by the Great War generation, the war to end all wars, is the death knell of any lingering pretence of a ‘Christian’ Europe, which has now worked itself out through every aspect of life in Britain.

Growing up and living in a community at war with itself in Northern Ireland, I am deeply conscious of the urgency of Christian faith in the context of war. Responding to the brutality and random suffering of violence and discerning the practical outworking of our Christian identity as peacemakers was core to the church’s witness. Yet it was those outside the evangelical tradition in which I was raised who often provided the radical biblical solutions.

Within our tradition, reconciliation was too often presented as one-dimensional. Its focus was what happened in church, not what one did on the streets. In this, we were not unique in the evangelical world. What we did have was the glaring contradiction that some of those who claimed to follow Jesus best appeared to foster hate the most.

The perennial evangelical debates about the relationship between evangelism and social action, the exclusive stress on gospel and not kingdom, as much as any failure to develop a mature political and peace theology, represent an abandonment of fundamental human angst. What does faith say and what should people of faith do in the face of unspeakable terror and brutality? We are not good at addressing the affront to humanity of war, the dynamics of political power, the complexity of conflict, or the long-term process of social and cultural change over against instant conversion, which are the real challenges of our time.

Therefore, the invitation to Peter Dixon to address the theme of war and peace by those who organize the London Lectures and now this book by IVP are to be warmly welcomed.

In this series of reflections, Peter does not shirk from war as a brutal episode in human relations. Protecting the weak and upholding justice appears to remain an impossible task in this violent world, without resort to violence. Peter sets out a thoughtful case, informed by experience, and then helps explore a Christian mind on conflict that highlights the practical processes of what it means to be peacemakers on the ground and amongst those who make things happen in societies.

The goal of Christian peacemaking is reconciliation. It is a word that needs rescuing, both from those who ignore the spiritual dimension and from those who see nothing else. The fundamental alienation of human beings from God, themselves, each other and the earth is brought into sharp and brutal focus by war. In Christ, all things are reconciled, all dimensions of our alienation are addressed. This book helps us better to understand what it means for us in a world at war, if we are truly to find our share with Christ in the ministry of reconciliation.

Canon David W. Porter

Coventry Cathedral, August 2009

(Extract from the) Introduction

… This is a subject matter in which much is at stake. I listened recently to a radio dramatization of a classic Nevil Shute novel of 1957: On the Beach. A nuclear war has wiped out all animal life in the northern hemisphere, as a result of nuclear proliferation in smaller nations. Progressively, the nuclear fallout spreads southward, eventually leaving only those in southern Australia alive. And then even they die. It is a reminder, and one that is easily forgotten by those of us who have lived through decades of peace, of the importance of the subject. We all know this, but where we may differ is on how we should deal with these issues.

On the Beach is also a reminder to me of aspects of warfare that I am not covering in depth in this book. I will be leaving out whole swathes of territory that some might think I should try to capture. I think it best to work towards answering one basic question: what does it mean to be a peacemaker? So I deliberately concentrate on how Christians can involve themselves in working towards peace and stability, focusing quite tightly on the role of outsiders in twenty-first-century violent conflict. Some may therefore reach the end of the book with a feeling that it has not covered as much of the broader subject as they would have wanted, that there are depths they wished I had plumbed. However, the book is founded on the experience and learning that I have gained. I would not have the temerity to step outside that zone.

This is not an academic book. One of my favourite Peanuts cartoons shows Charlie Brown and his friends lying on their backs watching clouds drift across a sunny sky. When Lucy asks what shapes they can see in the clouds, Linus sees a map of British Honduras, then the profile of a famous painter, then the stoning of Stephen, with the apostle Paul looking on. Charlie Brown has his turn. ‘I was going to say I saw a duckie and a horsie,’ he says, ‘but I changed my mind.’ Like Charlie Brown, I tend towards the practical and down-to-earth rather than the academic heights. Readers who are experts in conflict resolution or international relations will find the level of theory that I will bring into the discussion quite basic, since one of my aims is to help non-specialist Christians better understand how they can apply their faith to these complex matters.

There is a further caveat. This is not intended to be a biblical analysis, but rather an attempt to help Christians make some sense of modern conflict. I wish to avoid the rather pompous suggestion that only Christians have the answers in this field, but instead consciously to take into account the best wisdom available from other traditions. Nevertheless, I am sure that we can shed some of the light of our faith on the complexities of violent conflict. As the book progresses, I will suggest that there is no single or simple answer to these problems. Indeed, I cannot guarantee that any answers I may come up with will be significantly different from those given to us by secular commentators. However, I think it right to try to bring Christian values to bear on these questions. I hope I will show that there are genuine options for Christians to choose, and that although we may feel powerless, God is not.

Peter Dixon

Cambridge

June 2009