In times of war and rumors of war

The Central Question of Christian Faith

When Christians struggle with deciding what to do, their first question should be, "How is God acting upon us?" Christians should ask this question because faith in God makes the claim that God is at the center of our lives, as the power and goodness that creates, governs, and redeems us. This claim, in turn, demands that we should act in all our actions so as to respond to God's action upon us.

The dual question of "What is God's action upon us?" and "What should be our response?" is a question that begins in Scripture, running through it from Genesis to Revelation, from the story of Adam and Eve to the question confronting the new Christian churches in persecution. And this is the question that continues to challenge Christians. Augustine writes The City of God in the midst of the fall of Rome and wrestles with how God has acted and so with how we should live as citizens of two cities, the human city and the city of God. From Augustine through Benedictines and Franciscans to Ana-baptist Menno Simons, in Thomas Aquinas and in Protestant reformers Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Richard Hooker, to contemporary Christian realists and pacifists, the dual question of Gods action and our response stands at the heart of Christian ethics.

In the second half of the twentieth century, H. Richard Niebuhr focused more than two generations of students and Protestant ethics in general-most notably in Christ and Culture (1951) and The Responsible Self (1963)-on the importance of beginning with the question of God's action and then, and only then, turning to the moral question of what should be done. This meant beginning in prayer, what Niebuhr once referred to as "the grace of doing nothing."1

In prayer Christians seek to stand in the presence of God. Beyond thanksgivings and petitions, prayer is a matter of silence. "For God alone my soul in silence waits" (Psalm 62:1). Especially in times of turmoil, we tend to react out of our preconceived notion of things and so cannot hear what is going on. As Rowan Williams reflects in his meditations on our response to terrorism in Writing in the Dust: After September 11, "Simone Weil said that the danger of imagination was that it filled up the void when what we need is to learn how to live in the presence of the void . . . [and not] bind God to our own purposes."2 In silence we may listen rather than see, feel rather than react to the events that threaten us. In silence we may hear the word of God.

Our prayers as Christians express our Trinitarian understanding of God. God acts upon us as creator, governor (sustainer, ruler, and judge), and redeemer. These are not three separate actions but are inseparable. The love that creates is the love that sustains, judges, and redeems. It may be that we know or recognize love most clearly when we are forgiven for what we have done and are simply accepted by someone else. But such love does not stand alone. The love given in forgiveness is the love for which we were born, while the fullness of that love cannot be conceived apart from love's negative image in the failures of our life together. Silence and prayer open our soul to this God so that prayer is not a frenetic praying for some kind of victory-whether that be success in bearing arms or in the pacifist renunciation of lethal force altogether. Rather, out of silence Christians pray in repentance for the failures that have led down the path towards war. They pray out of compassion for those who suffer and with hope born of faith that God will be present-that whatever judgment may come, there will be grace in that judgment. Christian prayer does nothing and yet transforms everything. In prayer Christians are converted into grace. Whatever comes, we pray in the declarative words of the Lord's Prayer, "God, your will be done."

It is the action of the world upon us-literally our suffering of both limitations and possibilities, of failures and blessings, of the terrible and the beautiful-that leads to prayer. Prayer in turn transforms us and our response to the world around us. Still, while for Christians prayer is the first and last act and every action in between, prayer is no substitute for action in the world. In turn, these reflections don't tell us what to do. Rather, they are theological reflections that describe the ultimate context of our lives, and spiritual reflections that describe how we should respond in silence and prayer. But our response also requires the interpretation of what is going on and the interpretation of possible responses and counter responses. Such reflections are a fundamental focus of Christian ethics, informed but not determined by prayer itself.

The Work of Faith as Repentance

The world confrontation with Iraq over disarmament of all nuclear and biological weapons followed upon the 1991 United Nations action against Iraq, led by the United States, in response to their military occupation of Kuwait. Following the Gulf War and the agreement to disarm, Iraq failed to cooperate with international arms inspectors to verify destruction of nuclear and biological weapons. In order to retain power, Saddam Hussein even used the biological weapons against the Kurdish resistance to his rule in northern Iraq. With the expulsion of the arms inspectors in 1998, the question was to what extent Saddam Hussein and Iraq posed a threat to the other nations of the Middle East and the world. In turn, the question of what the United Nations and the United States should do was understood in terms of containment and deterrence.