The Work of Peacemaking Isn't Nice

THE WORK OF peacemaking has been long beset by the stereotypes of it being “nice” work, polite to the point of being inoffensive. In her new book, Melissa Florer-Bixler wants to disabuse us of the idea that making peace means having no enemies. If anything, as she argues, Christians should have enemies well. Having enemies does not mean that the Christian who pursues justice incurs the resentment of others, but that their witness is direct, pointed, and takes sides.

The church, she writes, is “not to unify as a way to negate difference or to overcome political commitments,” but to sharpen those disagreements between the gospel and the world, particularly where reconciliation conceals power inequities. It does no one any favors, she suggests, to resolve moral disagreements within the church in a way that “disregards how coercion and force shape the lives of enemies.”

For churches to engage in political struggles, rather than pretending to be apolitical, they must begin by naming their enemies: those who participate in the oppression of those on the margins of society, both inside and outside the church. For the church to live into its vocation of exemplifying the reign of God in its practices, commitments, and advocacy, it cannot begin from the presumption of unity, but of honesty, recognizing and naming how the church’s call to the margins and the moral lives of its congregants (and of the world) diverge.

Florer-Bixler calls the church to have a shared anger that gives voice to the marginalized and calls the powerful to account through liturgy and through action. Only when we work for the tables of injustice within the church to be overturned—when we are willing to have enemies well—will Christians be able to clearly claim the mantle of Mary’s Magnificat, or sing the songs of the martyrs in Revelation.

In her provocative work, it remains unclear whether people can convert to the way of Jesus within the church she describes here or if they could only join after they convert to this vision. A strong (and right) emphasis is put on the priority of the weak within the congregation. But if the church is known by its moral commitments, its commitment to the gospel of God’s reign, what is to be made of those who, like Nicodemus at midnight, have not yet counted the cost? Does this vision, in articulating so strongly the need for the church to have a purified internal vision, become a new kind of sectarian peace church?

This is not an appeal for quietism or half-measures: Florer-Bixler is absolutely correct to call the church to name its commitments more clearly. But my question is whether this vision has the curiosity necessary to also ask the uncommitted, “how do you read this?” (Luke 10:26), so that they might see how to join in—or if more emboldened anger against injustice is all that is needed.