Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16What I admire about Arnold is his Christ- centered vision. In some ways I think of ­ Eberhard Arnold as an early Barth. He ­ recovered the centrality of Jesus in a way that was extraordinarily impressive. I think that his stress on how you need one another to know who Christ is was one of the great gifts of the Anabaptists. In many ways, the left wing of the Reformation was the Catholic reformers, not Protestant reformers. So I find in Arnold a commitment to a view of the church that seems to me very Catholic, at least in the sense that he emphasizes that the church must take material form. He insists that there must be a living, visible body of believers. War, Peace, and Evangelism For Arnold, as for the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, faithfulness to Jesus meant non­ violence – going the way of the defenseless Christ. Should nonviolence be part of the church’s communal discipline? Well, it’s important first of all to distinguish between Christian-community nonviolence and nonviolence qua nonviolence. The problem with the word nonviolence is that people think they know what nonviolence is apart from Christ. Then nonviolence becomes a marker more determinative than Jesus – it conceives peace apart from the crucifixion. But in reality, discipleship is the defining characteristic of what it means for Christians to be nonviolent. It means always being open to having the violence of our lives exposed. Talking about nonviolence presupposes you’ve got to know what violence is in order to know the “non.” I don’t like the language of pacifism either because it’s so passive. What I like to talk about is peace, and peace is hard work in which oftentimes conflict is required. It involves acknowledging the violence we often misidentify as peace. What’s important is how a community becomes shaped by Christ in such a way that we are able to reject the false- hoods that lead us to use coercion. You’ve insisted that “it is not the task of the church to ensure a stable world” (The Work of Theology, 69). What then is the church’s response when confronted with the atrocities of ISIS, including the wholesale slaughter of fellow Christians? The Archbishop of Mosul, for one, has been calling for the international com- munity to defend the innocent, if necessary with military force. I don’t know how to answer those kinds of questions. One of the failures that such ques- tions elicit is our lack of any sense of Christian unity. What happened to Iraqi Christians is absolutely horrendous. The fact that Christians in America didn’t feel or didn’t care about what was going on there was a failure to acknowl- edge our Christian unity. What would unity have meant? Well, it might have meant sending missionaries to be present in Iraq. That might have offered some protection, because it’s easier to kill Iraqis with impunity than to kill Americans. Still, if you ask, “Stanley, what is your foreign policy toward ISIS?”, I don’t have one. But I do maintain that love to our persecuted brothers and sisters must mean facing the same dangers that they are undergoing. That’s why I’m a big fan of the Christian Peacemaker Teams. For instance, they’ll go to Hebron where Jewish soldiers and Palestinian activists are toe to toe, ready to kill one another. The Christian Peacemaker Team will come in and say, “Can we fix you guys a meal?” It doesn’t sound like much, but eating together is a big deal. It’s a start.