Lesson 3: Repentance and War
I found this so important, I decided to send it on in this lesson.
An outlandish hope
by Roy Howard
In our Sunday School class, we are exploring the work of theologian Stanley Hauerwas, through a small collection of his writings with the title Jesus Changes Everything. It’s a bracing book, as Hauerwas himself is known to be. Unflinching in his assertions, he invites a conversation, even an argument, to clarify one’s own convictions and the reasons for them. Though I don’t mimic his style, I have learned a great deal from him over the years and continue to do so through our class discussions. The reading for this week, “God’s Imagination,” is a commentary on this passage in the letter to the Ephesians:
For Christ is our peace; in his flesh he was made both into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. … He came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near, for through Christ both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. (Ephesians 2:14; 17-18)
Hauerwas writes, “the history of nations is the history of godlessness. The world is too broken to know the reality and futility of war. For what is war but the desire to be rid of God, to claim for ourselves the power to determine our meaning and destiny? Our desire to protect ourselves from our enemies, to eliminate our enemies in the name of protecting the common history we share with friends, is but the manifestation of our hatred of God.” He continues, “ the peace we believe we have been offered in Christ is not just for us but for all, just as we believe our God is the God of all people. Thus, we do not preclude the possibility of a state that could exist for which war is not a possibility. To deny such a possibility would be the ultimate act of unbelief. Who are we to determine the power of God’s providential care of the world?”
Where Christians find such outlandish hope, that seems foolish in the face of the relentless desire for war? We find it in the Eucharist, the means that proclaims the unity of differences. Again, Hauerwas: “Nothing is more important for the church’s imagination than the meal we share together in the presence of our crucified and resurrected Lord. For in that meal, that set of habits and relations, that the world is offered an alternative to the habits of disunity on which war breeds.”
I confess: what makes that claim so outrageous (and difficult to swallow without gulping) is the real brokenness of the church that is failing in its primary purpose: to share a way of life that is an alternative to war. To the contrary there are those in power who claim to be Christian while promoting the way of war. On the one hand, that makes the witness of God’s alternative community all the more weak. On the other hand, it makes the witness of local congregations all the more important.
Hauerwas: “The deep difficulty with war for the Christian is not just that it is so terrible, but that it destroys the unity of the Body of Christ. War is the enemy of Christians because war urges us to sacrifice our children to the wrong gods, because it brings people together around the wrong symbols, because it deceives us into thinking that nations, not God, rule the world. War is in incredible moral competition with the gospel of peace.”
© 2026 Roy Howard
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Agreed Fritz and the Rightwing Christian Nationalists have the ear of the President and consider the war is hastening the apocalypse and thus bringing the second coming closer. So here and now social justice considerations about US Aid feeding the hungry, homelessness, gun crime are all irrelevant.
Clearly this is not what Jesus preached or practiced. ciao paul