Difficult Texts: Matthew 5.43 ‘Love your enemies’: A theological reflection on the possibility of peace

At my New Zealand high school I was a keen military cadet. I grew up as the son of German, part-Jewish refugees from Hitler. By the time I was conscripted for military service at eighteen, I knew I would have to register as a conscientious objector. Shooting at cardboard human targets had been enough to convince me that soldiering was not for me. I could not, as I had learned from Jesus, both love my enemies and kill them. As simple as that.

Six years later I had, as a Master’s thesis, written the history of New Zealand’s COs during World War II. My supervisor was the Editor of New Zealand’s official war history, General Howard Kippenberger. He had lost both feet in the battle of Monte Casino. The ex-general and the young pacifist became good friends. It was not so simple.

My father had made the long journey from passionate German patriot, as a decorated officer in World War I, to Quaker pacifist. He had, as a young doctor, experienced a Pauline conversion. He carried with him at all times the prayer attributed to St Francis: ‘Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.’

I opted out of Quakerism to train as an Anglican priest. The university chaplain who prepared me for confirmation had interrupted his ministry in England to become a World War II fighter pilot and, as he told me, prayed for the German pilots as he shot them down. Not at all simple.

My first degree was in politics. Only then did my priesthood follow. While I trained in Lincoln, I spoke at a public meeting against the Suez War. Speaking for the war on the same platform was Jimmy, my college neighbour, a retired Air Vice-Marshall. By chance, I was on the right side of history. Yet I had freely chosen to join a church, which, like all of Christianity’s mainline churches, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant, was, as I knew, deeply embedded in the military system.

I realized clearly that the pacifism of the early Christians could not survive in the mainstream after the conversion of the Roman emperor. Caesar had embraced the Christian God. The Christians embraced Caesar – and most of them still do. My father’s World War I belt-buckle – I still have it – bears the words Gott Mit Uns. His British opponents believed with equal fervour that the same God was on their side. The high-jacked God.

The theologians would have to find a way of justifying the unjustifiable. The ‘just war’ doctrine has held sway ever since Constantine, so refined by medieval scholastics that hardly any real war fulfils its strictures. In practice every war, on every side, has been held by its rulers to be just, from the most bloody crusades to imperial conquests and even Hitler’s aggressions, backed by Catholic and Protestant bishops to a man. A chaplain was on hand to say prayers, sending the Anola Gay on her way to incinerate 100,000 people in Hiroshima. A little British war in the Falklands ensured the political survival of a Christian ‘empress’.

Knowing all that, the life and death of Jesus remains the anchor of my pacifism, not simple, but simply necessary. As a parish priest in Blackheath, a stone’s throw from the Royal Naval College, some of its officers were my parishioners. They were training the crews of our nuclear submarine fleet to be prepared, given the command, to commit mass murder. I was Vice-Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Of course, at my hands, these officers received the body and blood of Christ. Who was one sinner to judge another? Was it so simple? Or was this really what Bonhoeffer called ‘cheap grace’, fudging the truth? It was not simple at all.

While a South London vicar, with my bishop’s support, I rejoined the Society of Friends. I somehow needed to affirm Quaker spirituality’s uncompromising ‘no’ to armed violence, whether by state or non-state actors.

My Anglican complicity in the blasphemy of Cross and Sword in deadly embrace became most clear to me when I agreed to conduct an Anzac Day ceremony at the request of the Australian Ambassador to East Germany, honouring the Australian and New Zealand war dead at a Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery deep in Cold War East Germany. Close by were row upon row of Soviet tanks. The ‘worshippers’ were all diplomats of Commonwealth countries: Indians, Pakistanis and others. The ritual was prescribed. Row upon row too of crosses. And on the cenotaph, Cross and Sword united as one. Honouring the dead was fine. But where in all this was Jesus? Somewhere at the edge, I dare to hope, forgiving and suffering.

On Remembrance Sunday last year I took a German Lutheran pastor to the Cenotaph in Whitehall to see the parade of old veterans. I was moved. He was shocked. No such military ceremony is acceptable in Germany after two lost world wars, lost in disgrace. My heart went out to a fellow priest in a simple black cassock – no purple – standing between the heads of Navy, Army and Air Force, all in full dress uniform. Here on exhibit was the inherited marriage of Church and State, Cross and Sword, symbolized in the prescribed presence of my friend Justin Welby, wearing, as he always does, Coventry's Cross of Nails. I did not try to read his thoughts and feelings. I only know that he has been prepared to risk his life to make peace between bitter foes. That put the blasphemy of ritualized militarism into a context I could just about live with, the context of love.

With love comes faith and hope. ‘The principalities and powers’ with whom Jesus wrestles and of whom Walter Wink writes so powerfully in his theological works need not have the last word. The day when war is regarded with the same disdain as murder can come, must come – as Albert Einstein warned the world eighty years ago – if the human race is to survive our technical ability to kill all living things.

That hope comes not only from my faith but also from my study of politics. America’s top soldier and later its president, Dwight Eisenhower, warned the American people before his death of the dangerous power of the military-industrial complex which is the motor of modern war. When that is understood, then real change can come, must come: the day when armies are equipped as a world police force, no longer to destroy enemies but to be peacekeepers. Rudimentary models already exist. Peace studies, if given the resources, can trump war studies.

In the words of Pope Francis: ‘The spirit of war, which draws us away from God … comes from our own hearts.’ ¹ Hearts, and not only Christian hearts, can be changed. We are not hard wired to be violent.