by The Faith and Life Movement
Originally published in 1976

Table of contents

Introduction

This book constitutes a New Call to Peacemaking. It calls for a new look at the problem of war, perhaps a total new set of approaches, particularly a positive approach. We hope it will attract new individuals and groups into productive peacemaking activity.

The Concern

For five years the Friends yearly meeting superintendents and secretaries from North America at their annual meetings have wrestled with a concern for a new, positive, practical, contemporary, and scripturally based call to peacemaking. They acknowledge that good and able Friends bodies have been discussing peace, issuing proclamations, and even initiating action on peace issues since George Fox. They are grateful for what has been done, but feel the peacemaking efforts of the past do not satisfy the present need. People everywhere are more and more convinced in these times that there must be a better solution to conflict than killing people. Many feel that war is not working. It leads up a dead-end street.

There never has been a time when war was less productive and less popular than now. There never has been a time when all-out war could be more destructive. It is untenable. If indeed Jesus offers a better solution to conflict than killing, and we believe He does, now is the time for the Church to say so. If it’s wrong to fight, what is right? If war is not the answer for solving desperate conflict, what is? Now is the time for us who believe that the Gospel speaks to society as well as to individuals to suggest some positive alternatives to fighting—especially so because now in the United States there is no major war to prejudice the issues. This is a strategic time for peace-loving people to speak out.

Friends have always believed God has help for strife-ridden society. We know the Bible says there will be wars and rumors of wars. But we urge any who are inclined to accept a fatalistic attitude about war based on that passage to examine the overwhelming scriptural basis for our call to peacemaking so ably presented by T. Canby Jones in the first chapter of this book. If by obedience to God we are able to move the world closer to peace, we will be thankful.

Our hope is that the New Call to Peacemaking may encourage the redirection of some unnecessary military spending to human development. E. Raymond Wilson has compiled some statistics in a paper titled “The Arms Race or the Human Race.” In it he points out that the world’s military spending in 1975 was approximately $300 billion. There were 25,740,000 men and women in military units worldwide. The average worldwide expenditure per soldier was $12,350. The average expenditure for education per school-age child was $219. President Ford’s budget request for the military for 1977 was $114.9 billion.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation says the nuclear stockpile in the U.S. now is equal to 615,000 Hiroshima bombs. We could destroy every U.S.S.R. city with a population of over one hundred thousand more than thirty-six times. The U.S.S.R. can destroy our cities eleven times. As Senator Eugene McCarthy said in a message to representatives of the historic peace churches recently, “It seems to me twice is enough, even if you believe in the second coming.”

The Fellowship of Reconciliation put out a paper saying that if you count the total cost of production and support systems for each B-l bomber, it comes to $325 million. That’s enough to build twenty 300-bed hospitals at $52,000 per bed. And as Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado points out, by the time this manned bomber reaches its target, the missiles will have gone back and forth four times.

The cost of the U.S. Defense Department budget for just five days would double the U.S. economic assistance to developing countries. The cost of just five F-15 fighter planes would more than double our present solar energy research program. So if we are right and there is a better way than fighting, there is a lot at stake just in money, to say nothing of lives.

To balance the picture a little bit, it should be noted that there is considerable concern in Washington about military spending. Additionally, we should be encouraged by the fact that a bill introduced by Senators Hartke of Indiana and Hatfield of Oregon to establish a George Washington Peace Academy in the tradition of the military academies has reached the hearings stage at this writing.

Development of the Concern

I was in Monrovia, Liberia, in 1969 when the Organization for African Unity under the leadership of Haile Selassie was trying to negotiate between the Nigerian government and the Biafra contingent. I had forty-five minutes with the Biafran delegation. I learned something of what it would take for them to settle peaceably. One gets the impression from such an experience that as in many smaller conflicts, one of the main problems in wars between tribes and nations is a breakdown in communications. That war ended, you will remember, when the Biafran General Ojukwu was deposed and it was learned that the Nigerian government, contrary to what Ojukwu had been saying, was not interested in killing all the Biafrans. Over a million people died in that war. One cannot help thinking that much of that heartbreak could have been prevented.

When I expressed my concern that something more in a positive alternative to fighting should be offered by the Church, the Friends superintendents and secretaries picked up the concern and would not let it die. With their encouragement, in 1973, I shared the concern with the representative of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association while on a visit in Paris, and with his strong support wrote to key people planning the 1974 Lausanne Congress on Evangelization. We received many fine responses. An editor of Christianity Today suggested we focus on what brings strife in the first place and direct our efforts toward trying to resolve misunderstandings. Evangelist Leighton Ford wondered whether “an all-Christian group would in fact be acceptable [as peacemakers] to parties concerned in conflicts which involve people from many different religions and cultural groups.” Waldron Scott of The Navigators thought a board might not be the most appropriate way to negotiate peace since persons of diverse background, culture, and nationality might find it difficult to reach unanimous and unified decisions. He suggested one negotiator supported by a reference committee.

Finally we received a reply from Bishop Arthur John Dain of Australia, who was in charge of planning the program for the Lausanne conference, that to consider a peacemaking proposal at the conference on evangelization might be too time-consuming, too controversial, and too far from the main theme for that conference. The response of the Friends superintendents and secretaries at the next meeting was, “Then we must do it ourselves.” That year we wrote to all the yearly meetings asking them to discuss the concern and respond. We received many excellent letters and saw the concern gain momentum.

At the next meeting in 1974 the superintendents and secretaries agreed that an issue this large should be carried by the widest and most representative movement among Friends, the Faith and Life Movement. They acknowledged that the 1974 Faith and Life Conference in Indianapolis had dealt well with some of the most important considerations of our faith and now it was appropriate that the movement seek ways to express our faith in life by sponsoring the New Call to Peacemaking. The Central Planning Committee of the movement accepted the challenge, and under the leadership of Robert Rumsey of the Friends World Committee for Consultation, a small task force met in Newberg, Oregon, in August of 1975 and planned this study book. The Central Planning Committee also proposed regional mini-conferences on peacemaking for two years, using this book as a resource, moving toward a national conference October 5-9. 1978.

At the National Conference on Pastoral Ministry held in Dallas in April 1976. superintendents and members of the Faith and Life Central Planning Committee felt strongly that such a significant peacemaking effort as we were proposing should come through the historic peace churches, not through Friends alone. The concept was shared with leaders of the Brethren and Mennonite churches, and a cooperative effort was discussed in Mav when members of the three churches met at William Penn House in Washington for a conference on “Alternatives to the Arms Race.” Then, in late Tune 1976, four representatives from each of the three denominations, forming a new Central Planning Committee, met at the Brethren headquarters in Elgin, Illinois, and set goals, plans, and policies.

We feel the enthusiastic support of these key denominational leaders is another indication we are being rightly led. As a result of the Elgin meeting the historic peace churches are developing plans for a series of regional conferences across the country which will consider various aspects of the New Call to Peacemaking. There will also be an exchange of study materials on peacemaking. Then we plan to come together for the national conference in 1978. It is hoped that out of that conference will come a summary statement in the tradition of the 1974 Lausanne conference, and a plan for action that will show all peace-loving people what we can do together to really make a difference.

This Book

This study book is designed to help us see where we have been and where we are now, in the hope that we may better see where to go. It begins appropriately, we think, with a chapter on “The Biblical Basis of Peacemaking” by T. Canby Jones, professor of religion at Wilmington College. If our effort is to be powerful and right, it must be scriptural. Who knows with certainty how to cope with our complex difficulties better than God does? Canby Jones demonstrates convincingly that God gives an answer.

“Can Wars Be Just?” by Arthur Roberts, professor of philosophy at George Fox College, seeks to settle the question: Isn’t it sometimes right to fight? If the answer is no, then we must give ourselves wholeheartedly to peacemaking and take a nonviolent position whatever the risks.

We asked Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon to do the chapter, “Christ and Caesar,” because of his sensitive Christian conscience and his intimate knowledge of government. The material in this chapter consists of selected excerpts from Between a Rock and a Hard Place, by Mark O. Hatfield, copyright 1976, and is used by permission of Word Books, Publisher, Waco, Texas.

“The Global Nuclear Threat and the Quaker Witness” is by Charles Wells, who until his recent untimely death was editor of Between the Lines. It demonstrates graphically that it is unthinkable to wage all-out war now. We must find a better alternative.

In the chapter, “World Organizations and Peace,” Barrett Hollister, Quaker United Nations Representative in New York, seeks to show us what is now being done. We hope not to duplicate current worthwhile effort, but to support it.

Duncan Wood, Quaker United Nations Representative in Geneva, in “A History of International Quaker Peacemaking Efforts,” shows what Friends have done in the past.

The final chapter on “Just International Distribution of Food and Resources” by Franklin Wallin, president of Earlham College, is included because of the firm conviction that unjust inequality will always foster conflict. As Adam Curle says in his book, Making Peace, violence or unpeacefulness exists whenever an individual’s potential development, mental or physical, is held back by the conditions of a relationship.

We are extremely grateful for the clear thinking and hard work of all the writers, the help of the co-editors, Robert Rumsey and Ralph Beebe, and the support of the members of the Faith and Life Central Planning Committee in furthering this peacemaking effort. As you study and discuss this book, remember our goal. We seek to conclude the national conference with findings so sound, so positive, so practical, so contemporary, and so scripturally based that they will attract peace-loving people everywhere to a common productive effort.