Essay: An Offering of Slogans

What do we mean When we call for “peace” or “justice”?

As a pastor in good standing in the United Methodist Church, I recently received a packet of materials from the National Council of Churches, The packet was intended to help us celebrate “Peace With Justice Week.” Included was a poster, on which was pictured a globe: a world, held aloft by a half-dozen different-colored hands. It seemed to say that if we can just get white, brown, black hands together, we can uphold the world for peace with justice. The Greeks had Atlas, the Arabs had a turtle, we have the multicolored hands of the NCC. We’ve got the whole world in our hands.

A person who parks her car near mine, a person who speaks much of “justice issues,” and doing “justice ministry,” recently placarded her Volvo with IF YOU WANT PEACE, WORK FOR JUSTICE. Each day I ruminated upon her bumper sticker. Then, on the day I was thinking not about peace with justice, but rather about my next sermon, I read the lectionary text for that day, the song of that old daddy-to-be, Zechariah:

“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people, … that we, being delivered from our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness … the day shall dawn upon us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:68, 73–75, 78–79).

I realized that the NCC poster and the peace-with-justice bumper sticker were wrong, dead wrong. Zechariah believed that peace is something God makes—a gift of God, not of our enlightened social policy. What needed doing for those oppressed first-century Jews was so great, so utterly beyond these bounds of human imagination or initiative, that only a visit by God could do it.

According to Luke 1:67–79, peace is not the fruit of our work for justice. Ironically, violence is usually the result of our efforts to make peace. Much violence, and more than a little war, occurs precisely at that moment when we tire of waiting for God to come and at last set out to put things right.

The Supreme Moral Action

Liberation theologians taught me this. Gustavo Gutiérrez notes how conciliatory work is often palliative. What we need, he says, is struggle, confrontation, and partisan engagement. We should take sides for justice. Gutiérrez calls upon his fellow Christians to inseminate liberation movements with a biblical view of peacemaking. But, of course, once one takes sides, once the enemy is clearly identified and injustice is named, it becomes difficult to tell the peacemakers from the war-makers.

Words like “peace,” “justice,” “liberation,” words used with equal dexterity by the established to maintain their power or by the disestablished to get power, are beloved because we can make them mean whatever we want. One reason why contemporary Christians must attach “justice” to “peace” is that we discovered that the mere pronouncement of “peace” was inadequate. Impassioned calls for peace, we learned, can be another means of the powerful protecting the status quo to their own advantage. So by joining “justice” to peace, we are preserved from the charge that we Christians want peace at any cost, peace at the expense of someone else’s justice.

This helps explain why pacifists are accused of being immoral. Pacifists talk about wanting peace, but they don’t seem to be working for justice (i.e., they refuse to be violent or to support those who are). They sit back on the high moral ground and refuse to roll up their sleeves and work for justice. Long before the liberation theologians, Paul Ramsey argued that war can be justice because it has as its ultimate end the creation of that order that will help the state fulfill its sacred obligation to protect the weak and the innocent.

If peace is the fruit of justice and if justice has become the result of violence, we are right to be uneasy about our use of language. “Peace with Justice” has become a popular slogan for us, not because Christians have at last become aware that Jesus really means for us to embody his vision through specific political actions. Rather, IF You WANT PEACE, WORK FOR JUSTICEreflects Christian accommodation to the agenda of ideologies that are not Christian.

It enables us to join in struggles for justice, wherever and whenever we label them as such, without having to qualify our actions by specifically Christian criteria. Our slogan enables us to avoid the worst of all possible contemporary political fates: having Christians relegated to the fringes of society, losing our influence upon the formation of social policy and national strategy, being deemed politically irrelevant by the powers that be.

Long ago, the Hebrew prophets noted that it was not enough to cry, “Peace, peace.” New prophets must tell our generation that it is also inadequate to cry, “Justice, justice.” Contrary to notions prevalent in today’s heavily politicized church, our task is not to be useful within the present scheme of things, but to be faithful. Modern people value power above all else, power to change the world, joining our hands to set things right. But setting things right, in itself, is not the supreme moral action. The supreme moral action, from a peculiarly Christian perspective, is to live and die as Christ.

We are to find our definitions of big words like “peace” and “justice,” not within the boundaries of what is deemed “effective,” nor even from the mouths of those whom we privilege with the name “oppressed.” Our words, our lives, are best defined by the life and death of Jesus. His peculiar story defines the content of “peace” and “justice,” not the other way around.

The Centrality Of The Church

All moral motivations are secondary to the motivation to act the way God acts. In refusing to define peace by current definitions of order or justice by the power arrangements of the majority, followers of Jesus are not being romantic or idealistic, but hard-headedly realistic: This is the way God is, the way God’s world is. We have no idea whether the world will regard our behavior as effective, nor whether our efforts will satisfy the aspirations of the oppressed, nor whether Caesar will approve.

The moral imperatives only make sense within the context of the story of a God who forgives, a God who suffers, a God who blurs our distinctions between friend and foe, oppressed and oppressor; a God who cares for and comes to poor, helpless people like young Mary and old Zechariah. In discussions with liberators, conversations with the establishment, and with the disestablished who would be established, Christians can be expected to see rather peculiar meanings in popular words to which everyone else has definitions. The people who killed both the son of Zechariah and the son of Mary did so for the cause of peace with justice in Judea.

To the extent that we allow secular ideologies, Marxist or any other, to determine the content of our convictions and the shape of our political vision, we forfeit our ability to see the world as it really is—namely, a place where the principalities and powers insist on the freedom to define people, where Caesar co-opts movements for his own purposes, and where Satan masquerades as an angel of light. What if Gutiérrez’s notion of human history as a process of human se/f-liberation is in opposition to the Christian claim that we become free, not by ourselves and our earnest efforts, but only by dealing with the world as Christ dealt with us?

It all sounds well and good that Christians should work with others, even those who do not share our Christian convictions, in the struggle for justice. But “justice” awaits definition. It is no universally understood or defined word. We do the story of Jesus an injustice when we act as if it were nothing peculiar, as if the vision and witness of Jesus could be encapsulated as a struggle for justice. What do we mean when we call for “peace” or “justice”? There is no way to know what Christians mean without reference to a particular Scripture.

To the extent that God’s church allows its imagination to be captured by conventional accounts of peace and justice, we have forfeited our ability to help the oppressed. In our efforts to be politically relevant we have lost our ability to stand against the limits of the present order. We offer the oppressed not justice, but the palliative of utopian dreams, violence, class struggle; and we doom them to the continued resentment of not being as ruthlessly savvy as Caesar in getting what he wants. In lieu of salvation, feed them slogans.

The place to begin a Christian struggle for justice is in telling our stories and singing our songs. These question whether the world even knows what it is talking about when it talks of peace and justice. Rather than get our foot in Caesar’s door by speaking enough like the powerful to be invited to sit on the cabinet, our energies might be better used in the creation of a visible alternative to Caesar’s community. That visible alternative is the church—God’s attempt to create a place of peace and justice where we might be saved from the disasters of our efforts to take matters into our hands.

Here is the advent of that peace “which passeth all understanding”; now is the time for singing of the one who came to us because we could not get together and come to him, the one who comes, “through the tender mercy of our God, … to give light to those who sit in darkness … to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

William H. Willimon is chaplain at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. His many books include The Service of God: How Worship and Ethics Are Related (Abingdon, 1983) and Preaching About Conflict in the Local Church (Westminster, 1987).

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