Fighting About Peace

The debate among Christians during the past few years over the war on terror has illustrated vividly the need for the admonition the Apostle Paul provided to the Philippians regarding maintaining their unity. Christians are no less prone to nastiness in our arguments with each other than are our secular counterparts; in fact, Christians may even possess a greater propensity toward hostile debate because we recognize the eternal significance of much that we discuss. Of course, sometimes we impose eternal significance on issues that are very much temporal and trivial.

The debate on war is neither temporal nor trivial. War is a deadly, horrible evil, the result of our Fall from grace, and the means by which far too many people enter eternity earlier than necessary. It has significant consequences for our own lives, the lives of our families and loved ones, and the lives of thousands that we do not know but for whom we bear some responsibility. It will carry tremendous political consequences that will affect, perhaps even determine, the fate of nations in the century to come. And it will, fairly or not, influence the way in which American Christians are perceived, primarily because of our (inaccurate) identification, particularly in the Middle East, as a Christian nation.

Therefore, we should not be surprised that the debate over war has grown shrill and heated, even or especially among believers. But we should be saddened. For issues such as this present not only an opportunity to model our virtues in terms of the positions that we hold, but especially an opportunity to display those virtues in terms of how we relate to one another in arriving at those positions. We are hypocritical if we oppose war in the name of peace and yet seemingly cannot disagree peacefully with those who hold another position. We do likewise if we support war in the name of justice yet cannot do justice to the motives and message of those with whom we disagree.