Richard Chartres
Anglican Bishop of London
  

Conflict inflamed and not moderated by religious passion � that was the experience of Ireland in the early 18th century which prompted Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver�s travels and Dean of St Patrick�s Cathedral in Dublin to ask, �How is it that we commonly have enough religion to hate one another but not enough to love one another?�

Any European Christian ought to approach the subject of Unity among Christians and Peace in the World with a large dose of humility. The European Civil Wars of the 16th and 17th centuries in which religious tribalism played a significant role were the prelude to our Continent�s version of Enlightenment which developed with a decidedly anti-Christian and even anti-spiritual bias. Warring versions of Christian truth inspired the search for a way to truth about the world which was less controversially subjective, more rationally demonstrable and peacefully persuasive.

Now the philosophical and social context has changed. Exact science has come to accept that rather than describing things as they are in themselves, science can only describe how they seem to us. At the same time the experience of the 20th century in which secular messianic states in Russia and Germany and other places attempted to build a heaven on earth on the basis of a brutally edited version of what constituted a fully human life has demonstrated the truth in the paradox that the mad man is the one who has lost everything human except his reason. The architects of these human utopias created little more than a vast European graveyard.

So we Christians have another chance. Hope has migrated from politics and it is still to be seen where she will alight. Repentance, however helps us to see more clearly where we went wrong in the days of our power as Churches, realising at the same time how fatally easy it is to fall into the persuasive logic of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky�s �Brothers Karamazov� and use coercive power to exclude risk and save people from the consequences of their freedom and their folly.

True peace as envisioned in the Bible for example in the prophecies of Isaiah transcends the absence of lethal conflict and is a gift of God. The first step towards becoming a human being capable of living in peace is to refuse to regard oneself as a god. This is the basis for a true humanism.

In our contemporary world, the nature of conflict has changed. Now it is not so much inter state conflicts which are the threat but intra state conflicts. One has only to look at the recent history of the Balkans and at the Continent of Africa to see a pattern of conflict which arises from competition for finite resources and threats to the identity of ethnic groups in states which have failed or are fragile. In these conflicts the main casualties are not so much in the warring militias but among women and children.

Facile rhetoric on the part of people who live in places which have done well out of history is of very little use. Peace talk without a care for justice is offensive. The demands of justice are always decisive in securing an enduring peace and one place where European Christian should be exerting themselves is in influencing the progress of the current round of international trade talks while acknowledging that prophetic fire is no substitute for a thorough understanding of the complex economic issues involved.

Sometimes, however, force is needed as it was recently in Sierra Leone to give a breathing space in which a less lethal culture can develop. Coercion only promises a temporary respite and at this point Christian communities again have a huge responsibility.

If conflict arises from fear or envy of the other and a threat to our own group identity then a faith which flows from God�s embrace of the world and a Trinitarian faith in which we realise our own deepest identity by loving and serving the other should have a crucial role to play in building the civilization of love which God intends. We fall alone but are saved in our neighbour. �God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son to the end that all that believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life.� Jesus Christ the human face of God taught us that we are saved in our neighbour after the likeness of the God we worship who, according to the creed ascribed to St Athanasius, is Trinity in Unity �neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance�. Persons grow to their full stature in Christ by embracing and not excluding the other. It is in the embrace that we discover our own deepest and truest selves.

Life in the God who has vanquished death also liberates the believer from the fear which is inseparable from being totally identified with this finite world of things that are passing away. If our identity is a gift of the Eternal God then his love can release us from bondage to our fears.

This is beautiful but sometimes very far from the reality of Church life which can be pedestrian and risk averse. The alternative is, in reality, the way of the cross and anyone who has not been tempted to fee from the cross has probably never understood its meaning. To enter into the Trinitarian way of life means inescapably the way of the cross and profound conversion of life.

We have many contemporaries who subscribe to fraternity, bypassing the cross without feeling the need for any relationship with the living God. We can respect and work with such allies but I must confess to scepticism about any appeal to fraternity disconnected from some ultimate ground of meaning and value in God. From experience of the mere exhortation involved in citizenship courses it seems to me that rhetoric about fraternity does not in fact generate the energy required to overcome the gravitational pull of fear and egotism.

I am here because I have seen the reality that people who have �put on the Lord Jesus�, as St Paul says, can be used by God as powerful instruments for peace. I honour the work for reconciliation done and being done by the St Egidio community and the way in which this work has helped to liberate the community from a diminished bourgeois version of our common faith.

It is instructive that while recognised and supported by the hierarchy, the St Egidio community is not a creature of the institutional Church. Church leaders come in various forms and there should be an economy of leadership rather than a monopoly on the part of ecclesiastical hierarchy. This diversity makes for creativity and it is one of the reasons why the centre for preventing and transforming conflict which I established in London under the patronage of a saint who may be unfamiliar to you, St Ethelburga, is firmly under inspired lay leadership. One of the associates of the centre is the imam who looks after the Muslim students in the university and is a vital participant in our principal concern at present which is relations between Muslims and other parts of British society. It is more possible for the imam to operate in such a para-Church context than it would be for him to be more formally linked with the public face of the Church. But all this requires a great deal of patient dialogue and trust between different kinds of Christian leadership. This is itself a God-given miracle, hard to nurture, easy to destroy.

Hierarchs very often are right to be cautious as they seek to guide the whole community in a gospel direction. It is difficult for them to be too much ahead of the constituency but it is essential for the health of the Christian body that there are communities within the body which are experimental and challenging. Uncompromising and radical commitment on the part of small groups of believers, a life nourished by prayer, scriptures and sacraments, that is how the Church is renewed and liberated to make its crucial contribution to building deep peace. My prayer is for the increase of such communities in the contemporary church.

There is another point that in our contemporary West European societies, those who suffer are often accorded greater authority than those who preach. We have to face the fact that in my church and country the bishops were remarkably unanimous in their opposition to the war in Iraq in the months leading up to the invasion. We were heard politely but not heeded but that does not of course exempt us from the attempt to articulate the Christian conscience in particular instances where moral decisions are required and not just to take refuge in generalities.

Meanwhile in obedience to Our Lord�s command that we should be one the work of professional ecumenists continues. Unity always is a gift of God but for our part and not least in these precious days together there is much to celebrate in our common inheritance of faith and much to learn of how we are perceived by fellow Christians. A recent history of the Reformation Era in Europe by Professor Dairmaid McCulloch remarks that more Roman Catholics were judicially murdered in England between 1535 and 1700 than in any other country. What Protestants remember is a different history in which the fires of Smithfield and the burning of the Bishop of London are much more prominent. We cannot change the past but it does matter extremely how we remember it. Acknowledging the stories of sister communities and the bitter memories of violence inflicted by Christians upon Christians can open up a point of entry through which God�s future can flow into our present. We ought to honour one another�s martyrs from the era of Europe�s divisions and this would itself be a modest contribution to peace building. The remarkable work in reconciliation undertaken by Irish Christians is evidence of the fruitfulness of this approach.

God has given us the means to build civilization of love without destroying the huge achievements of Western led technology and economic developments but a world dominated by a project of growth without limit with no end in view outside the process itself is evidently unsustainable. We are called to be true humanists in these circumstances beginning with a refusal to be gods and instead to follow the way of the one, Jesus Christ, the human face of God who died to love his enemies into loving and so bring the fullness of peace to the world.