The Foreign Policy of the Personality

God and Adam “The foreign policy of the personality.” The late John Peck, British theologian par excellence, used this fascinating play on words in a class he taught about the fruit of the Spirit. As far as I know, he originated it. But anyone who has heard him teach will not be surprised at his ability to turn a phrase to give us fresh ideas for thinking about old truths. So what’s with this strangely clever idea?

After talking about love and joy, John had come to the third fruit in the list, peace (Galatians 5:22). He reminded the class that the great Old Testament word for “peace” is shalom, adding that it was the special task of the king to establish shalom (peace; well being) in the forms of political and economic justice, including, and especially, for the poor, the needy, and the afflicted – as they often have no advocate. (For a fuller look at the word shalom in the OT, see this.)

“In the individual,” John then said, “the equivalent of justice in shalom is a balanced personality, one that doesn’t give undue weight to one thing over another. It is an ordered makeup in which priorities find their due place. The economy of the personality is neither inflated or deflated. In external relationships – the foreign policy of the personality, as it were – is secure.”

I heard that word play through the lens of someone who has written much about foreign policy over many years (on this blog and elsewhere), so my mind immediately began making all sorts of associations and analogies between what goes on in the field of international relations and the relationships that can, and do, exist between individuals.

For instance, as with bilateral international relations, relations between two individuals can be tense or relaxed, threatened or secure, unjust or just, adversarial or allied, broken or repaired, distrustful or trustful, unfriendly or friendly, uncooperative or cooperative, intolerant or respectful, and much more besides. But as everyone knows, human relationships are never that cut and dried. They always evidence some mixture of these features. And in some cases, for some periods, they may indeed be mostly friendly or trustful or cooperative, but it doesn’t take much to turn them unfriendly or untrustworthy or uncooperative.

For we are not only sinners privately in the sight of God. Like soil contaminated with sewage or water with lead, our relationships with one another are also befouled by our sinfulness. No bilateral (or multilateral) relationship is going to be perfectly secure, just, or respectful.

“If only it were all so simple!” Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago. “But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

But there is also this. No relationship need stay adversarial or broken or unjust if the redeeming and renewing grace of God is at work in it. So with all these associations and analogies rattling ‘round my brain, I challenged myself: What kind of shape is the foreign policy of my personality in these days? Am I increasingly walking in the redeeming, renewing grace of God with every passing year? I’ve been thinking about this. And there are so many contexts in which to think about it, and to do something about, or not. Husband – wife; parent – child; sibling – sibling; employer – employee; pastor – congregant; congregant – congregant; board member – CEO; neighbor – neighbor – the contexts seem endless.

Perhaps I am getting lazy about this transformative process, or making excuses, or unconcerned about it, or even going backward?

One unnoticed way of going backward is by subtly absorbing into our DNA the anti-graces that can be heard in the unbalanced and disordered personalities of any number of public voices, and over time picking up unredemptive attitudes and actions toward others as a result. Be careful what you hear, Jesus said.

In international relations, adversarial or broken or unjust relations are changed through negotiations, persistently pursued. Likewise, achieving the kind of “balanced” and “ordered” personalities of shalom in our relations with others is possible through “negotiations,” persistently pursued. Therefore, “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone” (Romans 12:18).

Of course, getting to shalom takes time, concerted effort, and skill. And it may entail, as in international relations, bringing in a mediator. And in this world, some relationships may never reach the heights of shalom that we might like them to achieve. But apart from working at it, what other option did the Prince of Peace, Sar Shalom, leave us?

Images permission of Creative Commons.

Note from Charles: For the next several weeks, I’ll be blogging somewhat less than my customary once/twice-a-week in order to concentrate on meeting a writing deadline for a large project I’m on and also to finish work on a very special Web project, which you will hear about in the near future. Meantime, you many want to catch up on any reading you’ve been wanting to do in one of the topic categories: see on the main page, left column. Thank you very much for your interest in this blog.

Faith Seeking Wisdom: A Prophetic Approach to Our Time

child reading a Bible The title of this post refers to a sermon I preached last December to the hospitable Evangelical congregation, but I was nervous in the pulpit because I knew it would not be the kind of Evangelical preaching that most Evangelicals would be accustomed to hearing on a Sunday morning. I would not be talking theology. Instead, I had felt compelled to share some biblical insights and personal experiences to indicate ways in which good citizens of all faiths, or no faith at all, have a responsibility to work toward ending “the logic of violence” in this country and replacing it with the peaceable wisdom of God.

As I say, I was nervous and misspoke a few times as a result, such as when I used the word “church” but meant “mosque,” though the congregation understood what was meant. I was also nervous because I was, in part, going to contrast the effect that two different kinds of preached messages can have on a crowd toward stirring up or defusing adversarial relations. The one message was from a Christian, the other from a Muslim. I wasn’t sure how this congregation would take to an illustration in which it was the Muslim who got the gold star. So it was a great relief when, right after my talk the pastor of the church took the mic and affirmed the message to his congregation.

This is the first time we’ve put a talk (by anyone) on this blog. It may be the only time! So this is something of an experiment. We don’t know if it will fly. We’ll leave that up to you.

I should also say that because I’m no great shakes as a preacher, I hemmed and hawed about whether to put this talk on the blog. The tipping point came in recent weeks, as I and countless others have with great sadness watched the already heated social and political climate of this country being kindled with inflammatory rhetoric that has now burst forth into physical violence at Trump rallies. My talk is not on that subject, but I think its message is directly related. If it helps even a few listeners just in that regard, it will have been a successful experiment.

To listen to the talk “Faith Seeking Wisdom: A Prophetic Approach to Our Time,” just click the little arrow and you’re away.

Image by Samantha Sophia, courtesy Unsplash

WHY DIPLOMACY?

Vietnam memorial wall Two years ago a national poll conducted jointly by NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, and Annenberg showed that 71 percent of Americans believed that the Iraq war was “not worth it.” That was up from 58 percent a year earlier, in an ABC News and Washington Post poll. Today, if the Republican presidential candidates are any indication, even the GOP, including establishment figure Jeb Bush, believe that invading Iraq was a mistake.

They, as well as a large number of Americans, regret the war because they have learned wisdom from the war history of the past 13 years. They see the unrestrained blowback that began with the insurgency in 2003-2004 and the rise of al Qaeda in Iraq. They see that the ISIS horror show emerged from al Qaeda in Iraq and the historic humanitarian crisis that is a result. They see the unprecedented, multi-aspected costs, and much more besides. In other words, this large group sees the bad fruit and now regrets the war.

But why has so much gone so wrong? Well, that depends whom you’re asking. Generals? Foreign policy analysts? Presidential candidates? Economists? Journalists? Other experts? Each will propose good and sufficient reasons that must be included for a credible picture of what went wrong. But there is a more fundamental answer. It comes from those ethicists, theologians, and religious leaders who deal with the moral problem of war. These are the “just war” theorists.

In 2002 and early 2003, many and diverse just war theorists, with the support of their constituencies, presciently argued that the George W. Bush administration’s rationale for going to war in Iraq did not meet the requirements of just war, therefore it was immoral and unjust and the United States could expect all sorts of unpredictable things to go wrong in the Middle East if the war was launched.

Unfortunately, little was made of this in the news media at the time, despite the fact that so many Christian denominations and other religious bodies were stating it formally in letters to the Bush administration, including denominations to which the President, Dick Cheney, Carl Rove, and Donald Rumsfeld belonged. An article by the theologian and political writer James W. Skillen, “Evaluating America’s Engagement in Iraq with Just-War Criteria,” shows very clearly why the U.S-led war about Iraq did not square with the five main principles of just war theory.

Just war theory brings a lot of gravitas to the question of “why diplomacy?”, which is the pressing political question of our time. Since President Obama took office in 2009, a very vocal, influential segment of American political commentators has been habitually critical of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. By and large, this is the same pack of pundits who supported launching the war about Iraq, and whose latent militarism today can be heard by anyone with ears to hear what their policy rhetoric about the Middle East implies.

Why diplomacy? Look at just the past two years, as Antony Blinken, Deputy Secretary of State, reminded Charlie Rose in a recent intervie Kerry & Zarif shake hands w. It was American diplomatic leadership that mobilized the world to fight ebola, that brought 66 countries together to fight ISIS, that led negotiations to the nuclear agreement with Iran, that brought Cuba in from the cold, and that led to the first peaceful democratic transition of power in Afghanistan. Of course none of this, Blinken added, “has happened as well as it should [or] as effectively as it should.” But, “You take the United States out of any of these pictures [and] it doesn’t happen. We are the single country that has the ability to mobilize and move others more than any other country.”

Why diplomacy? Diplomacy will not bring heaven on earth. Far from it. But diplomacy seeks solutions even to the most intractable international problems through means other than war. One of its indispensable purposes – dare I add, a purpose under God – is to prevent types of hell on earth such as the ISIS movement from materializing. Surely promoting the art of diplomacy is wiser than regretting the annals of war.

This editorial was first published in The Mountain Press, Sunday February 21, 2016. Charles Strohmer writes frequently on politics, religion, and international relations. He is the author of several books and many articles and is the founding director of The Wisdom Project.

Images courtesy of Creative Commons.

A note from Charles: If you want more of the perspectives that Waging Wisdom seeks to present, I want to invite you to follow this blog. Just click here and then find the “Follow” button in the right margin, enter your email address just above that button, and then click “Follow.” You will then receive a very short email notice when I publish a new post. And, hey, tell some friends! Thank you.

The Next U.S. President and the Iran Nuclear Deal

There are good and sufficient reasons for arguing for and against the nuclear agreement with Iran. Far too much ambiguity exists in human affairs, especially in international relations, to conclude in any absolute sense that either camp has nailed it. The optimists tend to applaud the deal. The pessimists tend to conclude that the deal has us stepping off the cliff. The former trust heavily in the good in human nature. The latter assume, to borrow a word from the field of theology, that human sin prevents reaching responsible compromises among adversaries.

And then there are the diplomats and negotiators. In the real world of international relations, with its perennial admixtures of the constructive and the destructive, they are tasked with finding ways wiser than war. The dilemma they face is called “the problem of peaceful change,” and they focus on finding responsible compromises to try to solve it. To put it in words from the New Testament, “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” Here, it is regrettably affirmed that in any given situation between individuals, peace may not be possible, yet one of the parties at least still must try. For peace may be possible.

If that is the predicament between individuals, and everyone knows that it is, then in predicaments between adversarial nations, efforts toward more peaceable agreements will be much more difficult. But finding wisdom for war prevention may be possible. This is what diplomats and negotiators are tasked to do. And so we now have, instead of war, the nuclear agreement with Iran.

There will be a new American president one year from now and a new Iranian president a year and a half later. Only God, and novelists, know the future. But the following “if … then” scenario seems a pretty sure bet. If the next U.S. president takes steps to pull us out of the nuclear agreement then the hardliners in Tehran will cry foul. They will say to Iran’s more moderate President Hassan Rouhani, whose team negotiated the nuclear deal with the P5+1 nations, “We told you so. You can’t trust the United States.” And then the regime will most likely manipulate into office in 2018 a nightmare Iranian president.

The regime employed this very strategy ten years ago. As Trita Parsi explains at length in his book Treacherous Alliance, Tehran formally reached out to Washington in the spring of 2003 with a comprehensive proposal to start high-level talks on points of contention between the two nations, including about Iran’s nuclear program. But the George W. Bush administration immediately and rudely snubbed the reach out, despite the fact that Iran had been a key actor with the United States in ousting the Taliban and al Qaeda from power in Afghanistan. “An opportunity for a major breakthrough had been willfully wasted,” Paris writes. In Tehran, “the American nonresponse was perceived as an insult.”

The hardliners played the snub skillfully. They undermined the peaceable foreign policy initiatives that Iran’s then president, the more moderate Mohammad Khatami, had in place toward America. They excluded nearly every moderate political candidate from seeking seats in the next parliamentary elections. And they stacked the presidential deck in favor of the sophomore mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in 2005.

Mark Twain is reputed to have said that history may not repeat itself but it sure does rhyme. Constitutionally, it would be possible through executive orders for the next America president to disrespect the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the nuclear agreement is formally known. New U.S. sanctions could be introduced and the U.S. could withdraw from key committees that oversee the accord.

Of course neither the U.S. nor the other signatory nations to the deal should not sit passively by if Iran makes a habit of violating terms of the agreement, but harsh penalties are in place for dealing with such deceit.

Mr., or Ms., Next President, give the deal a chance. But go even further. Task diplomats and negotiators to use the deal to seek to better U.S. – Iran relations. Wisdom is better than weapons of war.

Image by Neural, permission via Creative Commons.

This editorial was originally published in The Mountain Press, Sunday, November 1, 2015.

Charles Strohmer is a frequent writer on politics, religion, and international relations. He is the author of several books and many articles and is the founding director of The Wisdom Project.

A personal note from Charles: If you want more of the perspectives that Waging Wisdom seeks to present on important issues of the day, I want to invite you to follow the blog. Just click here and then find the “Follow” button in the right margin, enter your email address just above that button, and then click “Follow.” You will then receive a very short email notice whenever I publish a new article. And, hey, if you really like it here, tell some friends! Thank you.

Life Spun Out of Control

It’s invigorating, at least it is to me, when different things unexpectedly hit you inspirationally in a short space of time. But it can also be sobering. Recently Chris Seiple tweeted that Oskar Schindler spent all his money saving people of a faith not his own. Are we still capable, Chris mused, of such sacrificial love?

As I was challenging myself with that, aware that Chris was alluding to the severe need faced by countless refugee families in the Middle East, I happened to read a clever take on a summer blockbuster film, Fantastic Four. Written for Sojourners by Lindsay Kuntz, the article turns on the question of leadership. Here is my takeaway: we Americans can end our wistful hunger for Fantastic Four leadership against evil by becoming leaders fighting evil ourselves.

“Many American Christians say they are hungry for leadership,” Lindsay writes, “but what are we actually doing beyond indulging in fictional stories of Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch, and The Thing battling evil, or the barely less fictional ‘leadership’ on display in contemporary politics?

“We need to do more than complain from the comfort of our air-conditioned family rooms. The stakes could hardly be higher for Christians and other religious minorities in the greater Middle East – they are at risk of extinction or permanent exile. The international community has essentially given up, as it has little funding and even less vision and resolve. Hence there is a vacuum of leadership that needs to be filled. We need to identify practical ways of bringing people and resources together to combat evil – indeed to transform it with good. For American Christians one of the best places to start is with proactive engagement of the refugee crisis.”

I also happened to read Carmen Andres, who was blogging about news stories in the Telegraph and the Guardian, which reported on how 10,000 Icelanders responded to a Facebook campaign by author Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir to urge the government to take in more Syrian refugees. “The striking aspect of this story,” Carmen wrote, “is not only the number of Icelanders expressing their support but that they are also volunteering to personally help the refugees by donating services, time, clothes, money, furniture, children’s toys and even their homes.

“It makes me wonder what it might look like if churches, communities and cities around the U.S. started to talk about pooling our resources and offering to support groups of refugees in our own country. Perhaps some members could offer one of their rental homes for free for a year. Maybe others could offer jobs. Doctor offices could offer a list of pro-bono services. Churches and mosques could offer furniture, clothing and food. Teachers could offer language training. Local social agencies and organizations could link together and coordinate to provide services. The possibilities of ways we could come together to embrace refugees into our communities is endless.”

Chris, Lindsay, and Carmen are all friends of mine, but that’s not why I’m blogging about them here. They are engaged in remarkably worthy initiatives that bring urgent aid and relief to the increasing number of families in the Middle East who have fled from the murderous paths of ISIS and the vicious war in Syria. Their heartfelt cries, challenging to many of us, came together in my mind the other day.

They reminded me of just how crucial and vital “outside intervention” is toward people whose lives are suddenly out of control; people whose lives, even when they begin to get back under control, are best described as “life on hold.” There’s little, if anything, they can do end the chaos or get life moving again. As another friend aptly put it: “There is a sense of being frozen in time.” You’re wishing, praying, someone would intervene to make it all go away, or at least make marking time a little easier for you and your family.

It is difficult for many people to image what life is like for these families. But if your own life has ever suddenly spun out of control (I mean really out of control), or if it has ever shuddered trembling to a halt and got stuck on hold (you didn’t know for how long), then you may have a share in what it is like for these Middle East families (numbering in the millions), who wish for, long for, pray for intervention. And when that leadership arrives, no words can express one’s gratitude. Chris and Lindsay serve the Cradle of Christianity Fund, which I have previously blogged about. Carmen has been engaged in advocacy work for many years and raises awareness for Heart for Lebanon. Both are remarkable initiatives. Exercise some leadership. The Fantastic Four are never going to arrive. The possibilities for reaching out to the families is increasingly clear, limited only by the imagination of individuals, churches, and communities.

To find out more about the Cradle Fund, go here. To support it, go here. To read some short but informative articles of mine about the CF, go here. To read about the Cradle Fund’s three-fold strategy (rescue, restore, return), see this article in CT by Chris Seiple, President of the Institute for Global Engagement:

To find out more about Heart for Lebanon or support it, go here. To read Carmen’s moving blog posts, see For Such a Time Is Now.

Top image, Klaus Reisinger, via Creative Commons. Middle Image, courtesy of the Institute for Global Engagement. Bottom image, courtesy of Carmen Andres.

A personal note from Charles Strohmer: If you want more of the perspectives that wagingwisdom.com seeks to present, I want to invite you to follow the blog. Simply click here wagingwisdom.com, find the “Follow” button in the right margin, enter your email address just above that button, and then click “Follow.” You will then receive a very short email notice whenever I publish a new article. And, hey, if you really like it, tell some friends! Thank you.

Swords into Plowshares

A couple years ago I ran across a stunning work of art about peace that hit me powerfully. It was inspired from Isaiah chapter 2, verse 4, and I offer it here as a visual aid to invite you into a meditation about the incarnation and ministry of Jesus Christ as Prince of Peace. The source and date of the art may also surprise and please. Here’s it is.

An Imperfect Nuclear Deal with Iran: What Else?

You only have to glance at news headlines in recent days to see that the nuclear deal with Iran raised as many tough questions as it solved. Jubilant Iranians in Tehran danced in the streets after the April 2 announcement while Iranian hardliners criticized the deal. In America, Republican presidential hopefuls were everywhere in the media voicing their opposition while President Obama explained his support of the deal to Thomas Friedman at the White House. In Israel, some editorials cautiously favored the deal while Benjamin Netanyahu stated plainly that the deal threatened Israel’s survival. The mix of opinions and emotions ranged far and wide and the wrangling won’t go away anytime soon.

Now that a solid interim agreement on Iran’s nuclear program has been reached between Iran and the P5+1 nations (the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Germany), the parties will bump along toward the June 30 signing deadline. As they do, during the next twelve weeks you’re going to hear high-level critics and defenders of the deal abuzz in the media, locked in a fiercely pitched verbal battle arguing their cases and trying to increase public and political support for their side.

Behind all the pushing and shoving, of course, is the question of whether this is a good deal? We all want to know the answer to this. And the only way to know – let’s be honest – is to understand the nuts and bolts of the agreement. But let’s face it, most of us don’t have the specialized technical and scientific nuclear training required for that kind of knowing. Even if we did, it will only be after the signing, perhaps well into the future, before we will know whether this was a good deal. The unpredictability of domestic and international politics, if not the intentions of a signatory, can scuttle even a good deal after it has been implemented. And there are other possibilities. The signing deadline might be pushed into the future or it may never take place.

Meantime, before June 30, as the final very technical details are being resolved (that is the goal), you will be hearing from supporters and naysayers about issues such as the upsides and downsides of the inspections, the break-out time line, the sunset clause, sanctions relief, Iran’s ballistic missiles, and an array of other strengths and deficiencies of the agreement. We will also be hearing that the deal doesn’t do a thing stop Iran from bankrolling terrorism or from quashing human rights. But diplomats, negotiators, and deal signers know that you’ve got to start somewhere.

Who, then, are we to believe? What are we to think about this? It seems so murky. And what about trusting Iran? But the deal is not based on trust, President Obama said, but on an “unprecedented verification” inspections regime. Everyone will have to make up their own mind about the agreement. My advice during the coming weeks would be to listen chiefly and carefully to the hopeful but cautious supporters of the agreement who also admit to and discuss its weaknesses. Ignore the critics who have nothing good to say about the agreement.

No deal is going to cover all the bases, never mind being perfect. And if in the end, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who has the final say, does not accept it, the deal will not be signed by Iran. Despite all the uncertainties that remain, what we’re getting is far batter that what anyone anticipated when the current round of serious, high-level talks commenced in February 2013. (Diplomacy is often protracted, intense, and boring, with deals emerging after all-nighters and a lot of coffee. Iran and the P5+1 have been in various levels of talks about Iran’s nuclear program since June 2006.)

What we’re getting is basically an arms control agreement. Iran has agreed to scale back its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. If the agreement is in good measure successful, it will be historic, not only because it would help usher Iran back into the community of nations or because it would be a giant step toward ending the thirty-five-year-old cold war between the United States and Iran.

If successful, the framework of the pact could also be used to break the pattern of nuclear proliferation that has been taking place since World War Two (think India, Pakistan, North Korea). Thinking paradigmatically, the agreement with Iran could be a template for preventing nuclear proliferation. And that would be historic.

There are only two options to this deal. One option is increased and stricter sanctions, which would destabilize the region even more. The other is bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, which would certainly be the prelude to another U.S. war in the region. So there is the stark reality: the deal, stricter sanctions, or war. Given the likely ramifications of the latter two options, this agreement is a significant accomplishment and probably the best alternative.

There are good and sufficient reasons, therefore, for welcoming this arms control agreement, despite its imperfection. Differences remain on both sides and must be resolved for the June 30 signing, and both sides want to see the deal improved in their favor before its signing. So much wrangling will take place around the table also. Who knows what the outcome of this final stage of negotiations will be? Only novelists know the future.

It is not the done thing in foreign policy circles to ask for prayers. The secularism of the circle rules that out. But if you are a praying person, you might want to pray that the agreement will be successful. It seems like a reasonable deal. The space that the diplomats have worked tirelessly to create for the world on this crucial issue is so much better than an Iran with nukes.

Outcomes cannot be guaranteed and troubling concerns will remain unanswered on June 30. But wisdom has a vital interest in seeing international relations established on mutual ground for mutual good amid their diversity. Wisdom is better than weapons of war.

Here is the full text of the April 2 agreement.

Here is President Obama’s very forthright discussion with Thomas Friedman about the June 30 agreement.

Here is a series of in-depth posts – they start here – about what turns out to be the surprising history of U.S. – Iran relations since 1979.

Top photo courtesy of Press TV. Center photo courtesy of IIPA via Ghetty. Lower photo courtesy ICHR Iran.

Shalom: Conversation with Dr. Walter Brueggemann

In 1976, Dr. Walter Brueggemann, then a rising star in biblical interpretation, published Living Toward a Vision: Biblical Reflections on Shalom. That was also the year when, quite unexpectedly, I became a Christian. I don’t know if there was any divine synchronicity in the air between those two events that year, and it would be decades before I would be underlining sentences and scribbling margin notes in that book, but when I did I was surprised to see how much of the book’s reflections on shalom had been worked into my bloodstream by the Holy Spirit since 1976. Perhaps this is because a praxis that takes the vision of shalom seriously is not bound to any one time, place, or people, and Living Toward a Vision brings out that timelessness. Today, perhaps especially today, I think readers will find the book’s deeply biblical treatment of shalom – in the contexts of exodus, exile, rescue, return, and restoration – prophetically challenging to personal, national, and international peace agendas. The following conversation with Dr. Brueggemann about such matter and shalom took place by phone on March 19, 2015.

Charles Strohmer: You’ve been thinking about shalom for a long time. Do you have a working definition of shalom? (I won’t hold you to it!)

Walter Brueggemann: Well [laughing], I would say that it’s about the flourishing wholeness of creation into the purposes of God. Something like that.

CS: And what do you see as a vision for shalom, for Christians to participate in and work for today?

WB: I think it means peace and justice – peaceable life together among the nations and tribes and religious traditions, and economic justice so that everybody has enough resources to live a life of safety and dignity.

CS: So shalom is not just for some future time but something to actualize in the hear and now.

WB: Yes.

CS: Shalom, of course, is about peace. But in America, “peace” has come to mean things like “personal peace and affluence,” which was how Francis Schaeffer described a particular American idol. Living Toward a Vision interprets the text of Scripture to show that the Hebrew word “shalom” gives us a very different understanding of peace. Shalom is about social, economic, and political well-being, or flourishing. Sometimes I wish the English translators had left that word alone, not translated it as “peace.”

WB: That’s right, yeah. Although there are a lot of people now who just use the word shalom. But we need to do that more.

CS: In the book, you reference Ezekiel 34:25, to discuss what the prophet calls the covenant of shalom. And about that covenant, you write that “persons are bound not only to God but to one another in a caring, sharing community.” So shalom is very relational, isn’t it? It gets us involved in moving others along into places of well-being.

WB: Yes, that exactly right.

CS: So you write that our job is to put substance into the claims of shalom. It’s got to be done very concretely. Your text for that is the Exodus narrative.

WB: I think it’s useful to think of Pharaoh’s regime as being anti-shalom. In Egypt there was abuse, violence, and sharp social stratification. After the Exodus, I think that the covenant at Mount Sinai is an attempt to order social relationships in a shalom-like way, in contrast to the way social relations worked under Pharaoh. If you take Pharaoh’s narrative as the backdrop, then you can see that the covenant at Mount Sinai was aimed at creating communitarian well-being and protecting all the neighbors. And that’s carried more concretely into the book of Deuteronomy, with all of its economic regulations, which were designed so that the big ones could not eat the little ones.

CS: To many people, this communitarian shalom would mean that we’ve first got to get everyone on the same page with us, before reaching out. But I think you’re talking about shalom even for the outsider, the foreigner.

WB: That’s right. And I think that both in the ancient world and in our contemporary society you can see that you really have to regulate and restrain the most powerful actors in order to protect the vulnerable. That’s what much of the law in the Old Testament aimed to do. You can see this today with the attempt to pass regulations that will restrain the big banks who are essentially predatory. At a practical level, I think that kind of regulation is indispensable for arriving at anything like social shalom.

CS: A shalom way of reasoning, then, would not be a fan of the noxious social and political polemics that now seem entrenched as the organizing principle of our country, and which keep getting worse, incessantly dividing us. A house divided…

WB: That is exactly right, because the single components of shalom are always neighbors. So it’s always about neighbors and the neighborhood. Obviously, the way our society is organized now is against neighborliness, and it’s busy destroying neighborhoods. So shalom is a very subversive idea, when you think about the ordinary practices that we think we ought to do.

CS: Besides its relationality, I also see a relativity to shalom in this world. You don’t use that word in your book, but I think I see your argument supporting it. What I mean, for instance, is that the economic well-being of many of us in America might seem like heaven on earth to people in another country. So our gifts of shalom to them move them along to places of well-being that they might consider as shalom for them. So it seems there’s spectrum to shalom.

WB: I think that’s right. Shalom is a very dynamic notion. It’s always under way, always in process. So we never finalize it. We take incremental steps along the way to try to create safer space for the flourishing of more people.

CS: We really need to get our heads out of the clouds, don’t we? I think of the letter that Jeremiah sent to the Jews in exile in captivity in Babylonia. He has the audacity to tell them to work for the shalom of that place!

WB: Because he had figured out that if there was not a larger, stable kind of social order, that the Jews in Babylon were always going to be vulnerable. You can’t have a private shalom to address. You have to address large, sustained questions.

CS: That letter must have been a huge shock to them, because it would have meant working for a very different-looking kind of shalom than they were accustomed to back home, in Israel.

WB: Yes. It was a context for which they were not prepared.

CS: Have we Americans lost the shock of what that means for us today?

WB: I think that’s right. But you’ve got to remember that Jeremiah was a big renegade in his own society. We do have voices like that now, who are insisting that we have to think and act that way, even though the dominant value system wants to silence people like that.

CS: In the book, you use the words “coerced” and “coercion” as the antithesis to the freedom that God intends for human beings. The cruelest forms of coercion today are being perpetrated by those I call the “submit-or-idea ideologues,” such as the ISIS militants. Any thoughts on ISIS as a coercive power?

WB: Well, I don’t have any direct information, just want I read about them. But I think ISIS is a totally violent movement committed to disturbing tradition and norms. It is the antithesis of shalom. And how we can even have a conversation about shalom in that circumstance is exceedingly difficult to imagine.

CS: Too right. Yet even though working for big-picture shalom does not seem possible in the chaos of Iraq and Syria, we may be able to work in small ways to be gifts of shalom to the countless displaced individuals and families who have fled ISIS for refuge in makeshift shelters and camps. For instance, some friends and I have been raising awareness of and support for initiatives such as The Cradle of Christianity Fund and Heart for Lebanon, which are getting all sorts of immediate and longer-term aid to the most marginalized of these families, which number in the tens of thousands.

WB: What you’re suggesting to me is the mantra: Think globally, act locally. That is, you have to have a huge picture of shalom, but when you go to address it, it requires concrete, immediate, local actions.

CS: And this often means creating an imagination for Christians to be free to practice this kind of obedience.

WB: Yes. I’ve been spending energy thinking about Palestinian rights. I think that is a case in point. The threat is not as immediate as ISIS, but we will never have peace in the Middle East until the Palestinians have some guaranteed rights. And in that particular case, the shalom responsibility is to try to influence American policy, because the state of Israel could not get by with what it’s doing if it did not have the U.S. behind it. I think that needs to be rethought, certainly now in terms of the statements made recently by Netanyahu, which were violently war-mongering statements.

CS: Have you landed on strategies for shifting policy?

WB: I think it requires a political voice and political actions, and being out in front and loud and noticeable about Palestinian rights. The media monopoly that Israel has makes it very difficult for us to get any perspective from the Palestinian side. We have got to let people know, in every way we can, that this is an important issue, that different actions need to be taken or we will never have shalom in that part of the world.

CS: I think that one of our American Christian problems is that we know a lot about Israel but not about the plight of the Palestinians. We need a revelation of that. But many people don’t want an imagination for the Palestinian narrative. How might that be changed?

WB: I think the access point is probably concrete narratives about specific persons who have suffered or been done in by military power that is brutalizing. By telling stories of individuals we’ve got to make the point that these are real human lives that are at stake. We can’t reduce everything to an ideology about the security of Israel. These are real people. I think the only way you get real people out front is by specific narratives about people whose names we know. These narratives are never reported in our press.

CS: Too right. And there are many such stories. These days, it seems like ending the cycle of violence is going to take something even greater even than the wisdom of Solomon. So I know I speak for many people when I say Thank you for you’re ongoing contributions to this.

WB: Well we all have to do what we can. I think that the level of anxiety is so high everywhere that it’s so hard to think rationally about these things.

CS: Right. And even some who want to think more wisely about this seem to be locked into an irrational fear and they’ll hit you with the “But what if?” question.

WB: Sure. Worst case scenario.

CS: And when you say to them, “Okay, so you now know about the goals of the submit-or-die ideologues, what are you going to do about it?”, they have no answer.

WB: Exactly.

CS: Because if you follow that logic to the end and act on it, you’ll be picking up a gun.

WB: That’s right. That’s where it leads.

CS: And here’s where we come full circle back to the way of shalom.

WB: Yes. Shalom calls us to do something radically different. And I’m really glad that you’re staying at these hard issues. It’s hard, slow work isn’t it? And it’s so urgent.

Click here to see a series of short posts on “shalom and wisdom.”

Top image by Mohammad Usaid Abbasi (permission via Creative Commons). Middle image courtesy Heart for Lebanon.

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