Craig Uffman - Toward A Greater Peace

A reader at Covenant, noting my strong opposition to the GAFCON movement, asked if I believe the GAFCON organizers are “a cause of the division we are seeing in the church, as opposed to a symptom of the division.” His question is, I think, the wrong question to ask. The right question is, ‘what is the path of faithfulness?’ In what follows, I suggest that the counsel of many of the GAFCON organizers echoes that of another group who called for battle in Jerusalem, the princes of Judah whom Jeremiah opposed.

I think of Judah, as we find her in Jeremiah 38, just before the fall of Jerusalem. The geopolitical situation is important in that part of the story. Josiah cleansed the land of idols and reclaimed the old lands of the northern tribe during the waning days of the Assyrian-Egyptian empire. In other words, good king Josiah was against Assyria-Egypt in the old Empire’s battles against the rising new Empire, Babylon. Josiah was “for” Babylon. But when he died, his sons switched sides, and allied with Egypt. As a result, in Jeremiah’s time, there was a constant political battle within Judah between those who favored alliance with Egypt and those who favored alliance with Babylon. Like us today, those who shared a common life as Jews were divided over what to do.

We ought to be clear here in saying that once again Judah had a choice to make, just like Moses gave them on the banks of the Jordan. But the choice before Judah was not to be “for” or “against” Empire. Just as it for us, Empire was simply the reality of their times. It was the water they swam in. They could not avoid living in Empire because Empire was the dominant geopolitical fact of their existence. What was Empire in those days? Empire was a predatory, exploitive ordering of the world by a particular nation who was able to project its military and economic power throughout a region in order to impose its will on others in the region.

And so the choice before Judah was not whether to be “for” or “against” Empire. It was not that Judah had a choice at all to choose between being affected by the power politics of Egypt and Babylon.

Rather, the choice before them was to be “for” or “against” a particular way of living within Empire - a particular way of being God’s people given the fact of Empire. The new princes urged that they go back to Egypt - that is, trust in an alliance with Egyptian power and ways of being. Warfare was their only hope for survival. An urgent necessity, they said. Of course, that meant that the proud princes adopted fully the main tenet of those who besieged them that the basic fact of existence is violence. The world consists of chaos that one only survives with power, by becoming more powerful than the ‘other.’ We need to pause here and think about this claim. The basic fact of human existence is violence.

Is that true? Personally, I think many in Western pews today would squirm at this suggestion that the priority of violence undergirds the structures of society. Especially all us Christians, because we know that Jesus says “blessed are the peacemakers” and other things about turning our cheeks and loving our neighbor. But I want to press us on this point. I think few would deny the truths they learned on the playgrounds and on the playing fields: that “the universe rewards action,” “life is a competitive struggle,” “survival means learning to swim with the sharks,” “only the strong survive,” and “winners never quit, quitters never win.” Yet, at the heart of these, perhaps concealed, is the claim that “life is a field of warfare.” There’s an assumption that humans are driven by a will to power - the will to affirm ourselves by differentiating ourselves in the encounter with others. But difference, according to Empire, is oppositional difference, a difference by which we compete, displace, or even expel another from power. Whether in the schoolhouse, on the playing fields, at home, or in the public square, the primary reality of existence, according to Empire, is violence.

In this worldview, virtue consists of the heroic exemplification of strength and conquest. Heroic virtue - and thus heroic honor - is all about the ability to project power. And to heroic virtue the would-be leaders of Judah rallied the people.

Yet, here comes the prophet. Jeremiah said, you’ve got it all wrong, princes. That’s not God’s way. That’s not what God intends for us. For the fundamental reality to which Israel is to witness is God’s peace.

Now this was not self-evident to the princes, and it apparently is not self-evident to many of us today, even though we celebrate in daily prayer that Christ has been given “to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:79), and even though we practice sharing Christ’s gift of peace with one another before sharing the feast Christ sets for us at his table.

This fundamental ontology of peace was not unknown to Israel. The story of Israel begins with the Creator’s gift of order, manifest especially by light that vanquished darkness, for “when God began to create heaven and earth — the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water — God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light“ (Gen 1:1-3). This ordering light of God shone upon ”the garden in Eden,“ where ”God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food“ (Gen 2:8-9). From the beginning, God gave us everything necessary to know and acknowledge our utter dependence on him and to be blessed by the peace and joy of fellowship with him. Israel’s story also told of humankind’s rebellion against God at Babel, where prideful humanity sought to exchange their dependence on God for a manmade stairway to heaven (Gen 11). Yet Israel also knew Isaiah’s good news that God would restore them to the peace that fellowship with him brings, that hope in things unseen when:

“The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.” (Is 11: 6-9)

The fundamental reality of peace has its basis in the character of the God of Abraham, a character revealed in the story of Israel, a story in which, in spite of her rebellion, God had chosen never to be without humankind, and never to redeem creation without Israel. Because God is Lord, it is God, and not Egypt and Babylon, who establishes the meaning of history. It is because we know God’s character that we hope in things unseen. It is because we know God’s character that we are empowered to trust in God’s triumph over evil; and it is because of God’s promise of a redeemed Jerusalem - the very symbol of peace - that we are able to obey God’s Word to us and order our common life today as our witness to God’s ultimate triumph. God’s gift of peace makes possible a different way of being - the way of charity, a way we were called and sent to show the world.

And so Jeremiah spoke against any alliance with Egypt. He called Judah back to the alternative way of being found in God’s Word, to her vocation of telling the world what it did not know and does not know about itself: the basic fact of existence is God’s peace. Judah was not to adopt the ways of Empire, he insisted. Instead, Judah was to surrender. She was to live within Empire as a resident alien of Babylon, serving her Babylonian masters loyally, while refusing to adopt their gods or ways of being - she was to fulfill her destiny as the people of Abraham by loving God with all her heart and living truthfully. Only by living as a resident alien, Jeremiah said, would Judah survive.

In response to Jeremiah’s oracle, the king destroyed Jeremiah’s scroll. Judah did not listen to the Word of God. As a result, the Babylonians were literally at the gates. The walls of Jerusalem began to crumble, and there was no bread in the city. This was the king’s and princes’ worst nightmare. Jeremiah’s call for Judah to surrender to Babylon was hardly the way to win friends and influence people. His call for the people to submit to God’s judgment – to resist the temptation of horses and chariots – was aiding and abetting the enemy, the princes claimed. As a result, Jeremiah was humiliated, beaten, and imprisoned. In the midnight hours of the kingdom, Judah’s princes entrapped the prophet of God in a cistern where he would surely die.

But those who seek to live under Scriptural authority know well that God’s Word will not return empty. The stories of our heritage teach us that somewhere, somehow, the Spirit will give the gift of prophetic imagination, perhaps to the least likely among us, and those persons will find the courage to stand firm in God’s Word, to speak truth to power, to choose faithfulness to God’s Word rather than the princes’ path of worldly ways.

Such a person was Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, the true servant of the King, who resisted the princes’ call to the ways of Egypt and Babylon. It was Ebed-melech the Ethiopian who, taking “old rags and worn-out clothes, which he let down to Jeremiah in the cistern by ropes,” “drew Jeremiah up by the ropes and pulled him out of the cistern (Jer 38:12-13).And it was Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, a midnight voice, calm in the midst of nightmare, to whom the Lord said, “I will save you on that day, says the LORD, and you shall not be handed over to those whom you dread. For I will surely save you, and you shall not fall by the sword; but you shall have your life as a prize of war, because you have trusted in me, says the LORD” (Jer 39:17-18).

It is Ebed-melech the Ethiopian whom we seek in our midst today.

Are the GAFCON organizers the “cause of the division we are seeing in the church, as opposed to a symptom of the division?” I think the question is the same as asking if the princes of Judah were the cause of the aggression by Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. It’s the wrong question. The choice before us in this moment is not to be “for” or “against” the playful nihilism and autonomous materialism that so infects Western society that we feel the apostolic faith is under siege. Rather, the choice before us is to be “for” or “against” a particular way of living within a culture that is anti-Christian - a particular way of being God’s people given the fact of our profound differences.

The principal leaders of the GAFCON movement, it seems to me, are like Judah’s princes who would have us go back to Egypt - to adopt the main tenet of our nihilistic culture that the basic fact of existence is violence. For, impatient with the Covenant process, they sound the battle cry and rally us to the walls to fight for Judah against that which besieges us. We must do now what is necessary to compete, to displace, or even to expel the liberals from our fellowship, they claim. In so doing, they would have us adopt the ways of Babylon and Egypt - the ways of worldly power and autonomy - rather than remaining true to our identity in Christ.

Those of us who are committed to life under scriptural authority and to the fellowship that bears in its common life the apostolic faith must respond with an emphatic, “No!” That’s not God’s way. That’s not what God intends for us. For the primary reality of existence is peace. God’s gift of peace makes possible a different way of being - the way of charity, a way we were called to show the world. And so we can and must take the risk of subjecting ourselves to one another in Communion, trusting that Father, Son, and Spirit will continue to sustain our fellowship in and through Christ.