Quaker Theology - Issue #4 - Spring 2001
The North American Launch of the World Council of Churches’
Decade to Overcome Violence --Continued
Images, Themes and Concerns
The phrase "Lord, Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace" comes, as many Friends know well, from a prayer composed by St. Francis of Assisi:
Lord, Make me an instrument of your peace:
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.
Oh, Divine
Master,
grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we
receive;
it is in pardoning that we are
pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to
eternal life.
Our packets for the Nashville launch included among other materials a small card/bookmark, printed by the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, with Francis’s prayer and an image by Friend Fritz Eichenberg of the "Peaceable Kingdom"; a "Family Covenant of Nonviolence" and "Covenant Commitment Card" also from the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America; a "Vow of Nonviolence" from the national Catholic peace organization Pax Christi USA; and a small printed icon of St. George, depicted not killing a dragon, but overcoming its violence. Much of the meeting was engaged in seeing such diverse traditions, practices, and conceptual and communicative forms as mutually enriching dimensions of a shared heritage of faith and commitment to peace, justice and reconciliation.
The traditions, practices, conceptual and communicative forms offered by the Baptist Family Covenant of Nonviolence and the Catholic Vow of Nonviolence both contrast with and complement the Quaker Image of the Peaceable Kingdom. A consideration of differences and complementarity may serve to elucidate the kind of community building and promise that the Decade offers to us. When communities can engage together shared concerns and make that sharing an occasion to come to understand, respect and value one another more deeply, two ecumenical tasks - the building of a shared life of work in service to the world and the building of deeper unity among the communities involved - are being engaged at the same time.
The Family Covenant of Nonviolence
The Baptist Peace Fellowship asks that those signing the Family Covenant of Nonviolence nurture hopes and discuss the Covenant among themselves each month:
Family Covenant of Nonviolence
Making peace can start with our family. Each of us commit ourselves to the following covenant terms, in obedience to our Lord who named peacemakers as "the children of God."
To Communicate Better
To share my feelings honestly, to look for safe ways to express my anger, and to work at solving problems peacefully.
To Listen
To listen carefully to each other, especially those who disagree with me, and to consider others’ feelings and needs rather than insist on having my own way.
To Respect Others
To affirm one another and to avoid uncaring criticism, hateful words and physical attacks.
To Forgive
To apologize and make amends when I have hurt another, to forgive others and keep from holding grudges.
To Respect Nature
To treat the environment and all living things, especially our pets, with respect and care.
To Play Creatively
To select entertainment that supports our family’s values and to avoid entertainment and toys that makes violence look exciting, funny or acceptable.
To Be Courageous
To challenge violence in all its forms whenever I encounter it, whether at home, at school, at work, or in the community, and to support others who are treated unfairly.
The emphasis in the Covenant is on the very personal world of human interactions at home, school and work. Here the skills and attitudes that make nonviolence possible are identified with the kinds of interpersonal methods that make human persons experience themselves as respected, cared for, heard, valued.
The covenant concept of the Baptist statement has its roots in the Bible and in the history of British and American congregationally ordered Protestantism.
The term and concept berīt, covenant, pervades the Hebrew Bible and continues into the New Testament. Covenant is the relational concept that links God and all humanity or God and a specific human community in a binding tie, in a shared alliance. The covenant between God and Noah signified by the rainbow (Gen. 9:8-17), is called in Is. 54:9-10 a "covenant of peace." The Abrahamic covenant links God and Abraham and his descendants in an alliance of promise: God promises this human family fruitfulness in numerous posterity and the possession of a promised land (Gen. 15:1-20 and Gen 17:1-14).
At Sinai the community of Israel enter into a covenant with God: they will keep the commandments and they will be God’s people. (Ex 6:7, 34:27; Lev. 26:12, 15). The Davidic covenant promises a future in which the descendants of David, shepherd of God’s people, will rule forever (2 Sam. 7:5-16; Jer 23:5; Ez 34:23-24; 37:24). The Prophets speak of the covenant relationship between Israel and God in terms of marriage, of betrothal and of parent-child love. In the New Testament, Jesus is presented as the fulfillment of these covenants and as himself being the New Covenant.12
In the seventeenth century, in England and New England, congregationally oriented Christian communities, among them the ancestors of present-day Baptists, developed theologically the concept of covenant.13 In this tradition, covenant is a central theological category for understanding the relationship between the human community and God and for understanding rightly-ordered human relationships. The person and work of Jesus Christ are understood in this theology to open and make known to human beings a covenant of grace which makes it possible for humanity to choose to be faithful and obedient children of God. The church is understood to be a community of believers covenanting together under the headship of Christ to carry out faithful community life. We see the same concept at work in the Baptist Family Covenant of Nonviolence. Here the family appears as a small church community, committed in the covenant to be obedient to Jesus’s call to peacemaking.
The concept of covenant is not much used by contemporary Friends. But it is not absent from Quaker heritage. George Fox used the concept in one of the earliest and most familiar articulations of the Peace Testimony:
I told [the Commonwealth Commissioners] I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars and I knew from whence all wars did arise, from the lust, according to James’s doctrine . . . I told them I was come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strifes were. 14
The Vow of Nonviolence
Pax Christi’s Vow of Nonviolence includes the intimate, daily and family concerns of the Baptist Covenant and looks beyond them to broader arenas, noting and responding appropriately to the economic and resource use systems "that deprive others of the means to live" and to "the causes of war."
Vow of Nonviolence
Recognizing the violence in my own heart, yet trusting in the goodness and mercy of God, I vow for one year to practice the nonviolence of Jesus who taught us in the Sermon on the Mount:
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons and daughters of God . . . You have learned how it was said, "You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy"; but I say to you, "Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you. In this way, you will be daughters and sons of your Creator in heaven."
Before God the Creator and the Sanctifying Spirit, I vow to carry out in my life the love and example of Jesus
By striving for peace within myself and seeking to be a peacemaker in my daily life;
By accepting suffering rather than inflicting it;
By refusing to retaliate in the face of provocation and violence;
By persevering in nonviolence of tongue and heart;
By living conscientiously and simply so that I do not deprive others of the means to live;
By actively resisting evil and working nonviolently to abolish war
and the causes of war from my own heart and from the face of the earth.
God, I trust Your sustaining love and believe that just as You gave me the grace and desire to offer this, so You will also bestow abundant grace to fulfill it. 15
Like the concept of covenant, the concept of vow also has Biblical and traditional roots. In this context, a vow may be described as a solemn promise made to God to engage in a good work or other religious activity. In the period of the writing of the Pentateuch, the making of vows seems to have been so frequent and familiar that the Bible offers some regulation of their carrying out but does not explain or argue for them. (Num. 6:1-8; 30:2-16) Among the Psalms are songs for use in singing God’s praise at the completion and fulfillment of a vow (Psalms 65, 66, 116). "Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion; and to you shall vows be performed, O you who answer prayer!" (Psalm 65:1-2 NRSV) "What shall I return to the Lord for all his bounty to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord, I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of his people." (Psalm 116: 12-14)16
The life of the earliest Christians recorded in the book of Acts makes clear that Paul and others continued very ancient Jewish practices connected with the making of vows. (Acts 18:18; 21:22-26) In the extra-Biblical record of the early Christian centuries one finds references to pledges that may have been of similar structure to the Vow of Nonviolence. In the Middle Ages private vows to make a pilgrimage or engage in some other good work were common. Formal vows connected with the emergence of religious orders were slower to develop.17
In Catholic self-understanding, the language used to describe vows can be highly technical. A "vow ordains what is vowed to the worship and service of God (St. Thomas Aquinas, ST 2a2ae, 88.5). . . . A vow consecrates to God, in a sense, the human faculty by which the acts are produced. Moreover, other things being equal, an act performed under vow indicates a greater - because habitual - subjection to God than the same act performed without a vow."18
Such technical structures of thought are unfamiliar to many Friends and the notion of a vow may seem to some Friends uncomfortably close to contradicting the Epistle of James which admonishes against the taking of oaths and urges "let your ‘Yes’ be yes and you ‘No’ be no." (James 5:12) But the underlying commitment of the vow to nonviolence for those who take it to be "doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves" (James 1:22) is a commitment with which Friends would find the deepest familiarity and sympathy.
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