A Personal Word
A PERSONAL WORD
Matthew 26:51-52; 2 Corinthians 10:3-5; Revelation 13:10
Then the period of disillusionment set in. I saw that the basis on which I could support war was flimsy and based on a fallacy: militarism protects the innocent and the weak. I saw that innocent and guilty alike were unprotected in war; it made no moral distinctions. Further, I saw that war did not protect the weak; it involved them and hit them especially. Whatever power militarism has had in the past to protect the innocent and the weak, it has lost all such power. More civilian casualties took place in this war from wounds, famine, and disease than military casualties. War protects no one anywhere. It does the opposite.
I saw that the whole thing was a vast waste of humanity and goods. . . . Economic waste! I saw that war was a vast illusion, a vast waste. It built nothing. It blasted everything. It built nothing beneficial that we could not have built without a war.
Then I saw that not only did life not approve it, but also Life. When I worked from Christ down to this business of war, it seemed so utterly incompatible with everything I knew about him that it just didn’t fit. So I repudiated it and determined I would give the balance of my days to finding a better way for myself and mankind.
The Way
(Week 47, Saturday)
World Government Means of Collective Security
Isaiah 2:1-4
We must help [foster] individual poise [composure] by taking away the nightmare of impending war from a defenseless humanity. As long as war is an imminent possibility, the poise of the individual is under a strain too great to bear. And when war comes, that poise cracks, except in very exceptional cases. War is our chief collective enemy, our chief collective sin. Our chief enemy is not [totalitarian ideologies]; it is war. Get rid of war, and these other problems can be solved. But how do we get rid of war? By world government. . . .
That is lacking in world affairs. We have no government over us to which we can all be loyal. Hence every nation has to go around armed and fearful, and ready to fight it out at the drop of a hat. We must have a world government over us under which we will all be secure. It will not be any more impossible than it was to make the contending, suspicious thirteen colonies come together in a union. The entire plan of federal union was considered “utopian,” “a visionary project,” “an indigestible panacea.” But they did it, and it worked.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 38, Thursday)
Revelation 21:24-26
People don’t want war. They hate it . . . —they want peace. But the political leaders of the nations don’t seem to be able to get together. Here is a world hating war, afraid of war, and yet drifting into war. Are we in the hands of a cruel fate, or is there something wrong with us and our attitudes? . . .
We can become mature only by saying and meaning one word: we. . . . If we said we, then we would be free, from war. The education of the human race is education in one word, and only one word, the word we. When we learn that one word, we shall be mature as a race.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 38, Monday)
The Means to Transformation
Galatians 5:6; 1 John 4:7
So God, being love, uses love in the means to bring in the transformation, individual and collective. That rules out the method of war. For war is a means out of harmony with the ends it proposes. When it gets to those ends, the ends are spoiled by the very means. War therefore is the vast illusion, the illusion that you can get to right ends by wrong means. It simply can’t be done. Twice in one generation we thought we were making a new world, through a world war. We succeeded, not in making a new world, but in making a new war. Like produced like. We cling to the illusion that though this has been true of war in the past, it will not be true of the next one. But each time we are let down. The only good that can possibly come out of war is something good rescued out of it in spite of war. And all these goods could have been had by other means. All human attempts at getting into a new world by wrong means have ended in dead ends. Only God’s method will get us there. And that method is love. That method works to the degree it is tried. History has rendered one verdict, and that verdict is, that only that which is founded on love lasts; everything else perishes.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 51, Sunday)
War Must Be Abolished
Micah 4:3-4
The conscience of humanity is slowly expanding to include war in its central repudiations. For we are being pushed into this position by the very weapons we use. If war comes again, it will be fought with atomic energy, and no one will win an atomic-energy war. Both sides will be ruined in perhaps twenty-four hours. No one will be victor. One side may crawl out as survivor, but no one as victor. God is almost certainly coercing our consciences into a repudiation of war. We have relied on force in human affairs, and now God has let us see into the heart of an atom. God points to it and says, “You have believed in force. There it is in an atom! But if you use it, both sides will be ruined. Now choose.” And we are in the hour of fateful choice. Have we attained sufficient moral maturity to choose wisely?
Growing Spiritually
(Week 44, Wednesday)
John 3:5-36; 5:22-24
Jesus, the man of love, stands up under every tempest and emerges stronger at the end. Love will wear down all hate. And because I believe in the power of love, I believe that war will be banished from the earth.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 51, Saturday)
We Cannot Kill a Man for Whom Christ Died
Isaiah 2:2-4
We have believed in force and leaned on it to settle our disputes, and now God has put us in a corner. With the discovery of atomic energy such force has been put into our hands that we are appalled. God is seemingly saying, “You put your faith in force; I’m going to let you see into the heart of an atom. You wanted force, and now I’m giving it to you. But—and this is the terrible point—if you use it again, you will destroy yourselves.” That is the terrible dilemma; we got what we wanted—force—but if we use it, we annihilate ourselves. For no one can win an atomic-energy war. Both sides will be ruined, probably in twenty-four hours. Some may crawl out of the ruins as survivors but nobody as victor. So after a long bloody march through the warring centuries we’re back again where the early Christians started. They started with the renunciation of war. We, too, have come out at the same place, the renunciation of war. They did it by their faith; we have to do it by our fate. But war must go, or we go.
Mastery
(Week 45, Monday)
Can Satan Cast out Satan?
1 Peter 3:8-9
We have been studying the immaturity of physical violence and force, and the maturity of soul force, the force of love.
Jesus put the matter thus: “Can Satan cast out Satan?” (Mark 3:23). Can you, by acting like the devil, get the devil out of people? War is an attempt to act like the devil and thus get the devil out of people. It won’t work. You cannot get rid of darkness by going out and fighting it with your fist; bring in a light and the darkness is gone. You can overcome evil only with good, hate with love, the world with a cross.
War is the most immature method imaginable of settling international disputes. But, someone asks, are you going to let another nation walk over you? Listen to a parable: Two goats met on a one-plank bridge over a chasm. If one tried to push or butt the other off, both would go overboard. So the more sensible goat lay down on the plank and let the other walk over him to safety. Then he, too, got up and went on to safety. Did the goat that lay down and let the other walk over him debase himself? Apparently, for the moment. But he got up with an inner sense of superiority; he was able to live with himself. The other goat wasn’t able to live with himself; he was a debate, trying to justify himself. We look on and choose the goat that lay down as the superior goat, superior in intelligence and in spirit. Soul force is maturity; mere physical force is immaturity. The war god Mars would have whispered to each of the goats: “Butt him off!” And both would have gone into the abyss. War is not only a brutal and costly way of settling disputes, it is stupid.
And now we have come to the end of Rake’s progress. We have discovered atomic energy, the ultimate in physical force, and God is saying: “You wanted force; I let you discover it in the atom. But remember, if you use it again both sides will be ruined, inevitably. So choose.” We got the force we were looking for and now we dare not use it.
Christian Maturity
(Week 29, Tuesday)
A New Man out of Both Parties
A very informative verse [on the topic of war is] “that he might create in himself one man in place of two, so making peace” (Eph 2:15). This verse arose out of the Scriptures during World War II and became my guiding star during the war, and has been since. How do we find peace? Paul lifts up out of reality a universal method of finding peace: Get each party to change and come to a third position, a “new man” out of both parties. There is no other way to peace, from the simplest relationship to the most complex.
In Christ
(Week 32, Friday)
What Jesus Christ Means to Me
Psalm 103:2-5
When the attack upon Pearl Harbor took place, I was in Urbana, Illinois, and was to speak that afternoon in a university convocation on “Peace.” . . . Here I was on the way to speak on peace and peace was gone. . . . I told that shocked audience that obviously I could not speak on peace, for peace was gone, but I would speak on “What Christ means to me.” When that world of peace we had tried to build up had crashed, did anything remain? Yes, all the values, the real values, of my life were intact, for “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8). When things crashed, he remained.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 52, Sunday)