Nevertheless, Peace

It isn’t hard to doubt peace.

As I write, nations are firing missiles at their neighbors. Starvation, disease, and poverty continue unabated. Children are torn away from their parents. Division and vitriol flourish in public and private. None of this is new. And after centuries of violence and discord, I suspect it will remain the state of things for some time yet. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to treat its symptoms and wait for Jesus to come and fix all our problems.

At Christmastime, I find myself strangely pulled toward the writings of theologian Karl Barth—an excellent thinker whose historical materials are ill-suited to a cheery Christmas hearth. Writing in the wreckage of two world wars, Barth bore witness to a continent in a state of profound depravity, but responded to it over and over again in his writings with “nevertheless.” Humanity is in enmity with God, he observed. Man is hopelessly lost; nevertheless, God saves him.

Certainly, for the bulk of Barth’s career, man was lost. Cities destroyed. Churches, homes, children bombed and broken. Forty million bodies littered across the Eastern Front. A mushroom cloud hung over Japan. The stench of the Holocaust permeated the continent.

Nevertheless.

For me, peace is often an experience of Barth’s theologically-inflected “nevertheless.” Yes, the trajectory of humanity seems often to sink downwards into darkness; nevertheless, the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods. Yes, there is hate and destruction and envy and division; nevertheless, there is actually, really, unadulterated kindness and joy and hope and generosity, too. Peace is a response to a world that seeks to persuade us of its indifference and malice: Yes, I have seen your cruelty; but nevertheless.

So insisted Harold Good, a Methodist minister during the most violent period of The Troubles: Bombs and bullets rage in the street. Nevertheless, the lights at our church will stay on, and our doors will be open.1

So said Albie Sachs after a car bomb planted by the apartheid regime took his right arm and left eye: Yes, there is war and injustice and hate; nevertheless, the soft vengeance of equality and justice is rising in the belly of his country.2

So affirms the author of Hebrews: Generations have lived and died without seeing the actualization of promises made in stone and fire. Nevertheless, God will still “provide some better thing” (see Hebrews 11:39–40).

So