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In March 2003, my daughter and son-in-law, Leah and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, traveled to Baghdad as members of a Christian Peacemaker Team. They were in the city for much of the "shock and awe" campaign before they were expelled by the Iraqis. (Their story is told in Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove's To Baghdad and Beyond, Wipf and Stock, 2004.) When Leah and Jonathan told me and my wife about their commitment to CPT and their call to Baghdad, I realized that I needed a more articulate account of the Christian pacifism that I had been teaching my students for several years.

More recently, we have prayed and held vigils for the CPT members who were taken hostage in Iraq. Many questions have been asked following the death of CPT member Tom Fox and the release of the three other CPTers. Didn't their presence in Iraq make matters worse? How can anyone think that they could contribute to making peace there? Aren't they and other pacifists naïve, idealistic, and deluded?

Such questions—and the complexities that CPT recognizes in its actions—remind us that we need constantly to wrestle with the claims of Jesus and the call to peacemaking as a practice of Christian discipleship.

As we wrestle with this call, we must not reduce peacemaking to a naïve, wimpy practice that draws more on liberal, optimistic views of reality than on the gospel of the Crucified One. There are many wrong ways to argue for and practice peacemaking. These have nothing to do with Christian discipleship. Some of the most vocal opponents and mockers of pacifism misconstrue the practice of peacemaking. But so do some of the representatives of Christian pacifism.

I do not speak for CPT, nor will I address directly many of the questions raised by their presence in Iraq. Rather, as I did when my daughter headed to Baghdad, I will return to the basic task of articulating a biblically grounded Christian pacifism.

In the gospel of Jesus Christ, his disciples find a powerful call to the practice of peacemaking by nonviolent means. This "logic of the gospel" calls for a pacifism that seeks always to bear witness to the way of peace taught by Jesus Christ. This way of peace is made possible only by his death and resurrection and through the life of the church that the Spirit empowers for faithful witness.

Gospel pacifism bears witness to the Messiah who was crucified. Jesus Christ could have called upon his Father to rescue him and destroy his enemies, but instead he died at our hands. His death and resurrection exposes the reign of sin for what it is—an alien power and enemy that rules over humankind by lies and deceit. The apostle Paul calls death "the last enemy" (1 Cor. 15). When we think that we can master this enemy to be our tool or even our friend to do our bidding, we have bought its lie. When we take up death as a weapon against others, we are in that very act defeated by our great enemy, death. The Good News of Jesus Christ is that his death (and only his death) has conquered death.

Gospel pacifism recognizes that when the gospel claims us, our identity as followers of Jesus Christ subordinates and transforms (but does not eradicate) all other sources of our identity—national, racial, linguistic, sexual, and so on. The apostle Paul practiced this. Although he enjoins obedience to the government in Rome (Rom. 13), he did not allow his identity as a Roman citizen to silence his witness to Jesus Christ—even to the point that he was jailed and almost certainly executed by Rome for his disobedience.

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April (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50