Peace Messenger

Ryan Bell on "Announcing & Enacting Peace in an Age of Empire"

Hollywood Adventist Church Pastor Ryan Bell sets forth the biblical mandate for peacemaking at the newly-launched ReligiousLiberty.TV:

God’s shalom is perhaps the central theme of God’s creation restoring work; the central metaphor throughout scripture for the complete wholeness of creation, which God is restoring....

So, peacemaking – announcing and enacting peace in our world – is evangelism. It is bearing the good news to a world awash in violence, war, poverty, disease and every other injustice. The good news of God’s kingdom envisioned by the prophets (Isaiah most notably), incarnate in the person of Jesus and taught by him in passages like the Beatitudes, is a good news of God’s shalom gaining the upper hand in the world....

...[B]eing peacemakers in God’s kingdom today means speaking and acting for justice for the poor, the outcast, and the war-torn. It means speaking out again an unjust war and actively working to bring that war to an end. It means speaking truth to power and holding power to account for the righteousness that God envisions. In short, being peacemakers in God’s kingdom means being radically committed to overcoming evil with good.

Michael Peabody edits the new ReligiousLiberty.TV site, described as "a leading independent online resource for news, information, commentary, and insights on contemporary issues involving the free exercise and establishment clauses of the United States Constitution."

Adventist Protests Extra-Judicial Killings & Environmental Destruction in Marathon Walk

From "Pastor to walk for an end to killings," by Eldie Aguirre and Orlando Dinoy, Inquirer.net, June 14, 2008; forwarded by Monte Sahlin:

DIGOS CITY, Davao del Sur, Philippines -- A 58-year-old Seventh Day Adventist pastor has launched a walk from his hometown in Matanao, Davao del Sur to Aparri in Cagayan Valley to dramatize his call for an end to unabated extrajudicial killings of journalists, militants, and suspected criminals, plus the massive environment destruction.

Edervin Samson of Barangay (Village) Camanchiles set off alone on Thursday and has been in contact with his family through a mobile phone....

"I wanted to stop the practice of extra-judicial killings, which is against the law of God, and to encourage people to renew their faith in Him," Samson told reporters when he passed by here on Thursday.

The trek to Aparri and back is a new endeavor according to the pastor and is the most daring walk he made in his life as marathoner. But he said his past experience in marathons would surely help him in attaining his goal....

"Humans are only stewards of this planet and we don't have any right to kill people or destroy the environment that God has entrusted to us," he said.

Samson said he would be stopping by selected areas from time to time to preach the Gospel....

Shi'a Eschatology...and Ours

Thomas Finger's excellent explanation of Shi'a Islamic eschatology ("Waiting for the Mahdi"), also in the June 17 Christian Century, points out that both U.S. President Bush and Iranian President Ahmadinejad espouse faiths teaching that in the last days, Jesus Christ will return to earth.  The Shi'a branch of Islam, which dominates Iran and is the majority faith in Iraq, teach that in the last days, Jesus will reappear along with the Mahdi -- the last in a series of righteous imams who was taken by God into a hidden state of "occultation" several centuries ago. (Above: Shi'ite pilgrims in Karbala, Iraq, light candles in honor of the birthday of the Mahdi).

Beyond that very broad statement, it is difficult to be definite or precise about the details of Shi'a eschatology, says Finger, because there is such great diversity of understanding.  The same is true, of course, with Christianity.  Finger identifies a particularly salient issue that runs through the eschatological varieties in both world faiths:

A major question is whether the future is seen as discontinuous or continuous with the preceeding history.  When eschatologies stress discontinuity, they often legitimate efforts to bring about that future by violent means.  When eschatologies emphasize some measure of continuity, they usually inspire people to start living by the ideals of the future in the present, and to try to realize them in their societies.

Does Seventh-day Adventist eschatology place more emphasis on discontinuity or continuity?  Answers would likely be varied and complex, but serious discussion of the issue is needful.

The Prophetic Word

Excerpts from Pastor Trevor Kinlock's sermon, "I'm Sick of It!", preached at Calvary Seventh-day Adventist Church in Newport News, Virginia, May 10, 2008:

A fiery preacher named Jeremiah…criticized the nation and its smooth-talking pastors and they threw him in jail and burned his sermon notes (Jer. 36:37)….

Beloved, they cannot handle the message of the prophet, they cannot handle the message of truth, when it challenges the structures of power….

[The prophets'] message is universal, and its speaks to nations, social conditions, and religious institutions and orthodoxy.  “Woe,” and “repent” are the two consistent words of the prophet.

And so, church, if we have a prophetic message, we ought to speak out against the nation when the nation contravenes a “thus saith the Lord.”  Help us God!

And so I declare this afternoon, “Woe unto you, George Bush, for lying about weapons of mass destruction.  Woe unto you for invading and destroying a nation, and arrogantly trading the blood of thousands of American soldiers for oil and strategic dominance.  Woe unto you. Shame on you.  There’s a problem with that....

Repent, America, for exploiting the poor and enlarging the rich.  God is not pleased with that….

Woe unto you, America, for glorifying violence, perverting sexuality, debasing the institution of marriage, and worshipping the “almighty dollar.”  Woe! Woe! Woe!  God is not happy with you.  God is not pleased with you.  God is going to deal.  Judgment day is coming….There’s a God that sits in heaven and He deals with those who oppress His people.  So you better repent!

Last day church, don’t be afraid to preach the prophetic word. Remnant church, Seventh-day Adventist church, don’t be afraid to speak truth to power....

Listen to the sermon at PraizeVision.com.

Dialogue Discusses Adventism and Peacemaking

Peacemaking is the theme of the new issue of Dialogue, the journal published in five languages for Adventist college and university students throughout the world. In the lead article, Stefan Hoeschele (pictured below), theology professor at Friedensau Adventist University, Germany, discusses eight courses of action a believer guided by biblical principles might take when faced with the dilemma of war.  An excerpt:

As a faith community, we must speak peace.  Indeed, as Adventists we have done the right thing in issuing several statements on peace.  In one of them ("Peace," 1985), we affirm: "The Seventh-day Adventist Church urges every nation to beat its 'swords into plowshares' and its 'spears into pruning hooks' (Isaiah 2:4)....In a world filled with hate and struggle, a world of ideological strife and military conflicts, Seventh-day Adventists desire to be known as peacemakers and work for worldwide justice and peace under Christ as the head of a new humanity."

Such a stance for peace may involve speaking out whenever countries engage in wars.  We cannot support the use of violence, and we should make this clear.  There can be no compromise on this matter.  As responsible citizens of the state here and the Kingdom of God, our unequivocal position should be promotion of peace, rejection of military actions, and rebuking of those who advocate violence.  Of course, in pursuing such a course, we must be "wise as serpents, and harmless as doves" (Matthew 10:16, KJV).  But we should make it clear that the Seventh-day Adventist Church is a peace church.

The issue also includes an editorial on principles of peacemaking by Martin Feldbush, associate editor and director of Adventist Chaplaincy Ministries; an exploration of peacemaking in Adventist history by Doug Morgan, and Hee Jae Im's account of his refusal to bear arms, which led to his court martial and imprisonment in South Korea (see the previous post).

My Refusal to Bear Arms

In "Dreaming of a World Without War" (Dialogue, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2008) Hee Jae Im tells the story of his refusal to continue carrying a weapon in the South Korean military.  As a result of this stand, he was sentenced in 2003 to an eighteen-month prison term, with an additional 73 days of military imprisonment. He describes his struggle with the issue after reporting to the Nonsan Basic Training Center:

The very notion of conscientious objection to carrying a weapon had been a sensitive issue among Seventh-day Adventists.  In 2002, a significant number of conscientious objectors were found among our church members in South Korea.  One of my friends, Young Chul Yoon, was already serving a two-and-a-half year sentence for refusing to carry.  I began to ponder seriously about the social and personal consequences that I must face should I choose to take the same narrow path by refusing to carry arms.  I toiled and struggled with this decision because I lacked the confidence to carry out my conviction.  I kept reading the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy books that were available in the military training center.  I experienced greater mental agony as I held the Bible in one hand and a gun in the other....

After basic training, Hee Jae Im was assigned to the Wontong base in Gangwon Province, a place of tense encounters and occassional shooting between South and North Korean soldiers. Though not without difficulty, he was able to resolve the issue of Sabbath-keeping with his commanding officer:

As the Sabbath-keeping issue was resolved, there still remained the issue regarding my noncombatant army service.  As I opened the Bible and read one of the commandments, "Love you neighbor as yourself," I could not help but correlate that verse to our North Korean neighbor....I sincerely prayed that God would guide me in the right direction in this matter.  Soon thereafter, I came across a passage from The Great Controversy that helped my crystallize my decision. "When warned against going unarmed among savage and hostile tribes, he [Dr. Wolff] declared himself 'provided with arms' -- prayer, zeal for Christ, and confidence in His help.  'I am also,' he said, 'provided with the love of God, and my neighbor in my heart, and the Bible is in my hand'" (p. 361).  Upon reading this, my heart was pounding and I cried out: "God, is this what you want me to do?  Are you telling me to put down my gun?"  The phrase "love your neighbor,' the North Koreans, kept echoing in my mind.  After three days of much agony and prayer, I finally came to realize that in God's entire creation only human beings worry about their life.  I made a decision not to protect myself with any weapon any longer.  "God, I will surrender myself to you.  Please accept me and help me."

For a report on Hee Jae Im's subsequent court martial and imprisonment, see "Adventist Sentenced to 18 Months in Prison for Conscienctious Objection," Adventist News Network, 19 March 2003.  He is now a student at the Graduate School of Theology, Sahmyook University, Seoul, Korea.

Adventists at Envision 08

Adventist peace activists and bloggers Ryan Bell and Johnny Ramirez have both recently posted information about Envision 08, a major conference on Christian engagement in the public square, June 8-10 in Princeton, New Jersey.  The conference promises to bring together sixty leading scholars, artists, activists and pastors and offers twenty "learning tracks." One of these, "Religious Pluralism and Christian Faith," will be co-lead by Samir Selmanovic of Faith House Manhattan and the renowned Miroslav Volf of Yale Divinity School. (Johnny's post also includes video of a lecture by Volf on 'How Do You "Un-Do' the Culture of War?")

Shane Claiborne, Brian McLaren, John Perkins, Ron Sider, Jim Wallis and many, many more noteworthies will be among the speakers and learning track leaders.  This should be an exceptionally enriching experience for those dedicated to following Christ in the public square.

Paulsen Highlights Peacemaking

Lourdes Morales-Gudmundsson at Adventist Women for Peace, notes that in a recent article, Jan Paulsen, president of the Seventh-day Adventist church, highlights peacemaking as one of the five attributes for which he would like Adventists to be known.  In "Five Things the World Needs to Know About Us" (Adventist World, North American Edition, May 2008, 8-9), Paulsen states, “I want Seventh-day Adventists to be known as people who lift high their commitment to hope and peace. Let us speak from the pulpit and show through our actions that we oppose anthing that instills hatred or inflames violence.”

More of Dr. Morales-Gudmundsson's comments at the Adventist Women for Peace blog. She is professor and chair of the department of modern languages at La Sierra University and author of the recently-published book I Forgive You, But...

Was Jeremiah Wright -- Wrong?

That's the question Frederick Russell, pastor of the Miracle Temple Seventh-day Adventist church addressed in his Sabbath sermon on April 26.  More on that below.

As a result of his performance at the National Press Club on Monday, April 28, the condemnation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright has extended even more widely, with many former sympathizers now expressing dismay.  Yet, to a large extent, the controversy remains more about style than substance, about isolated overstatements than the predominant thrust of his message and ministry.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, for example, emphatically declares “I’ve had it with Wright” because the pastor’s response to his critics was so “egocentric” and overreaching in identifying his kind of church and ministry with so diverse a reality as the African American church.

Yet, says Robinson, Wright “made some good points yesterday when he entered the lion’s den of the National Press Club. I especially liked this one: ‘My goddaughter's unit just arrived in Iraq this week, while those who call me unpatriotic have used their positions of privilege to avoid military service while sending . . . over 4,000 American boys and girls of every race to die over a lie.’”

It would be to our own spiritual detriment if we were to use Wright’s rhetorical overkill and confrontational style as reason to avoid what he has to say about the “prophetic tradition” of the Bible and what that has to say about race relations, peace, and economic justice in our time and culture.  If anyone is truly interested in finding out who Jeremiah Wright is and what he stands for, the interview with him on Bill Moyers’ Journal is a good place to start.

And whatever we may think about Wright’s views, there are still more fundamental issues at stake for Seventh-day Adventists, as Pastor Frederick Russell brought out in his sermon last Sabbath at Miracle Temple in Baltimore, Maryland.  In his message, “Was Jeremiah Wright – Wrong?,” Dr. Russell addressed “the dangers of patriotism gone awry, so much so that it seeks to destroy anyone who speaks contrary to what it believes about itself.”

He noted that the political and religious culture of Jesus’ day joined together to “take him out, because he dared to speak something against what they perceived as loyalty to the temple, and loyalty to the culture.” This kind of patriotism “can become a religion in itself,” Russell warned, leading us to “unwittingly begin to worship the country itself.”

Will “the church of the living God” be silent while this kind of “dangerous patriotism” leads to the vilification and demonization of a religious community and its pastor based on distortions?  “As a Seventh-day Adventist Christian,” the pastor declared, “I must stand for religious liberty.”

Pastor Russell’s sermon can be view on PraizeVision or at the Miracle Temple blog

Ellen White, Slavery and Politics - III

Peacemaking Heritage - 17

Seventh-day Adventism did not enter the American South until after the Civil War, but during the war it did begin to attract a few Northerners sympathetic to the Confederate cause.  Would the anti-slavery convictions of the movement’s founders prove to be dispensable political baggage, easily separable from the religious tenets of Adventism?  Ellen White spoke to this question in 1863, during the midst of the war, in a testimony entitled “The Rebellion”:

There are a few in the ranks of Sabbathkeepers who sympathize with the slaveholder. When they embraced the truth, they did not leave behind them all the errors they should have left. They need a more thorough draft from the cleansing fountain of truth. Some have brought along with them their old political prejudices, which are not in harmony with the principles of the truth. They maintain that the slave is the property of the master, and should not be taken from him. They rank these slaves as cattle and say that it is wronging the owner just as much to deprive him of his slaves as to take away his cattle. I was shown that it mattered not how much the master had paid for human flesh and the souls of men; God gives him no title to human souls, and he has no right to hold them as his property. Christ died for the whole human family, whether white or black. God has made man a free moral agent, whether white or black. The institution of slavery does away with this and permits man to exercise over his fellow man a power which God has never granted him, and which belongs alone to God. The slave master has dared assume the responsibility of God over his slave, and accordingly he will be accountable for the sins, ignorance, and vice of the slave. He will be called to an account for the power which he exercises over the slave. The colored race are God's property. Their Maker alone is their master, and those who have dared chain down the body and the soul of the slave, to keep him in degradation like the brutes, will have their retribution. The wrath of God has slumbered, but it will awake and be poured out without mixture of mercy.

Some have been so indiscreet as to talk out their pro-slavery principles--principles which are not heaven-born, but proceed from the dominion of Satan. These restless spirits talk and act in a manner to bring a reproach upon the cause of God. I will here give a copy of a letter written to Brother A, of Oswego County, New York:

"I was shown some things in regard to you. I saw that you were deceived in regard to yourself. You have given occasion for the enemies of our faith to blaspheme, and to reproach Sabbathkeepers. By your indiscreet course, you have closed the ears of some who would have listened to the truth. I saw that we should be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves. You have manifested neither the wisdom of the serpent nor the harmlessness of the dove.

"Satan was the first great leader in rebellion. God is punishing the North, that they have so long suffered the accursed sin of slavery to exist; for in the sight of heaven it is a sin of the darkest dye. God is not with the South, and He will punish them dreadfully in the end. Satan is the instigator of all rebellion. I saw that you, Brother A, have permitted your political principles to destroy your judgment and your love for the truth. They are eating out true godliness from your heart. You have never looked upon slavery in the right light, and your views of this matter have thrown you on the side of the Rebellion, which was stirred up by Satan and his host. Your views of slavery cannot harmonize with the sacred, important truths for this time. You must yield your views or the truth. Both cannot be cherished in the same heart, for they are at war with each other….” (Testimonies for the Church, Vol. 1, 358-359).