Why Peace, Quaker?

By Colm McKeogh

Quakerism is not the peace testimony and the peace testimony is not pacifism but peace has a special place in Quakerism and here a Quaker gives four reasons why. The reasons are not uniquely Quaker and they can motivate the search for peace and also inform the use of force. First, the gospel of Matthew focuses on the full development of the individual. Second, Mark’s gospel calls on us to believe that a better way of doing things is in our power. Third, Luke’s gospel challenges us to see our common humanity as transcending borders of faith and nation. Fourth, the gospel of John reminds us that the truth about ourselves is something we seek still. How much peace can there be if we are creative and not conformist, if we believe change is possible, if we challenge borders rather than be contained by them, and if we see our love as of enduring significance? That remains to be discovered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9780473413606

Book preview

Why Peace Quaker? By Colm McKeogh.

Logo Express, 501 Victoria Street, Hamilton, New Zealand.

Second revised edition copyright © 2017 Colm McKeogh.

First published 2015.

All rights reserved. This work may be reproduced in whole or in part with acknowledgement.

ISBN: 978-0-47341-359-0 (paperback)

978-0-47341-360-6 (EPub)

978-0-47341-361-3 (iBook)

For my son

Dan Yang McKeogh

contents

acknowledgements

introduction

1. humanity

2. faith

3. community

4. truth

conclusion

This work was inspired by Colin McCahon’s Crucifixion According to St Mark (1947), sparked by my student Roger Lang’s study of the sermon on the mount, and written while employed at the University of Waikato, New Zealand.

Why is peace important to me as a Quaker? Quakerism is not the peace testimony and the peace testimony is not pacifism but peace is indeed a goal many Quakers pursue along with the dignity, equality and well-being of people, the sustainability of our societies and the health of our planet. Quakers often engage in politics and seek power and so the means they use are not pacifist but political as they seek to change law and policy to improve and safeguard human dignity and well-being. Many advances in human welfare have been secured in part through the coercive enforcement of law, rights and order although Quakers wish to emphasize the role that consensus, conscience, and cooperation play in social progress. Nonetheless peace continues to have a special place in Quakerism as a long-established social testimony.

Peace has a special place too in the Christianity from which Quakerism came. No religion has been there through the whole of the human story. Every religion has come into being at some point in history and many have already ceased to be. The Christian religion has at its center Jesus of Nazareth, who lived two thousand years ago in the Jewish provinces of their empire that the Romans called Palestine. The people he came from took a moral view of life. The book of Genesis tells a story of creation in which God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good.¹ The creation story sees the world as no accident but the creation of an intelligent and all-powerful force. There was no suggestion in other religions and philosophies of the era that space and time were created but the almighty God of the Jews calls them into being out of nothingness. The Jewish world-view was theocentric with God at the core. It was monotheist and saw God as one and only one. It saw the creation by God as an absolute creation. God was seen, not as an impersonal force or a great unknown or as a divine reason infusing the world, but as a being with a personal self-consciousness. That creation story also holds the world to be good. To be found among other peoples of the time were ideas of the world of matter and flesh as evil and the world of spirit as good but in the Jewish scriptures there is no such suggestion. The whole of the universe is good. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.² The faith of the Jews gave meaning and purpose to human life by connecting what goes on in this universe to what is outside it. People are not products of chance but creatures of that creator and that is the foundation of their human worth.

Bad is human disloyalty to that which caused them to be. In the Genesis story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, God creates human beings in his own image. He says to Adam, You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.³ The woman, Eve, eats the fruit and shares it with her husband, Adam. God sees this and says, The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.⁴ They are banished from the Garden of Eden and must join in the struggle to survive that ends in death.

The descendants of Adam and Eve work to live alongside all other creatures but they are unique among creation in knowing of good and evil and seeking guidance and meaning in life. Matthew’s gospel gives the genealogy of Jesus, son of Joseph, and lists forty-two generations of ancestors but, like everyone, he is a descendant of the survivors in the contest for life and all who hear his words are also the product of victory in violent and fierce competition. For Jesus to be, his forbears must succeed in life and battle. There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.⁵

God speaks often in the Jewish scripture and issues many commands. The ancestors of Jesus believed