It has always struck me as paradoxical that after teaching me to take scripture so seriously, the Lutheran Church leaders did not live up to this verse in regard to the Viet Nam War. I was a first year student at Smith College and I was becoming increasingly active in nonviolent witness against that atrocious war. I was so disappointed in the Lutherans over their lack of leadership in opposing the Viet Nam War that I sent a letter to my home church resigning my membership. (My parents were really furious with me for that!)

Every evening as I crossed the Smith campus on my way back from class, I would see people with candles standing on the street across from the campus in front of a UCC church. They were also holding signs that said things like “U.S. out of Viet Nam Now!” One evening I just crossed the street, picked up a candle and a sign and became a member of the UCC. Later, after I became a theologian, I helped draft the UCC peace statement A Just Peace Church and was the editor of the book explaining the concept of Just Peace (as an alternative to both Just War and Pacifism).

In 1937 Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued in his controversial little book The Cost of Discipleship that the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount were not abstract ideals, but a practical way to live your life as a Christian, as a disciple. Bonhoeffer was appalled by both the state and the church in his time, the rise of the Nazis to power and the Christian leaders who were willing to change the Christian faith to accommodate Nazi propaganda. “Blessed are the peacemakers” is part of the core teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and not to be bartered away for political gain. That was Bonhoeffer's belief and it is mine as well.

I am no Bonhoeffer, God knows, but I am certainly appalled by this administration and by many in the religious and even academic community in this time both for conducting a pre-emptive war that is probably the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history and for giving it moral cover, calling it a “Just War” such as Jean Bethke Elshtain or Michael Novak did in the run up to the war. I sometimes wonder if they still think the Iraq war is a “Just War,” or, as I have written before in these posts, “just a war.”

Over the decades that I have worked and prayed and witnessed in the peace movement, very often I have done so shoulder to shoulder with Evangelical Christians as well as Liberals who take the Sermon on the Mount with consummate seriousness. This gives me hope, as it did Bonhoeffer, that the church is capable of the tough work of discipleship. It is not only the environment that is opening doors to new dialogues between Liberals and Evangelicals, it is also the strength of witness against this terrible and unjust war in Iraq: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”